Friday, October 2, 2020

Residency Report: Pamela Hart




I’ve always loved museums. And so it has been a joy and honor to be writer in residence at the Katonah Museum of Art (KMA) for more than a decade. And hard to believe that so much time has zipped by since the Museum invited me to help pilot an arts-in-education project. The KMA is a prestigious, small non-collecting museum north of New York City. Around the time I was finishing my MFA, the Museum was looking to partner with schools in the area in an ongoing way. I’d gotten keen about ekphrasis – poetry responding to visual works of art. It offered a way schools a methodology to practice a constellation of skills via the Museum’s varied exhibitions.
So with the Museum as a kind of learning lab, we kicked off our first project. Students toured an exhibition of artworks that focused on life in the suburbs. Then I worked with them on writing ekphrastic poems. Additionally they created their own artworks about growing up in suburban communities.

The success of that pilot meant the Museum was able to develop an ongoing program. So I created the role of writer in residence at the KMA and have served in this capacity for more than 10 years. I teach and manage the museum’s Thinking Through the Arts (TTA) program, which has been recognized by the New York State Council on the Arts. This program has become foundational to the museum’s ongoing relationships with schools.
 
We have a diverse exhibition schedule that ranges across cultures and history. I helped design the TTA curriculum to fit our exhibitions’ content. I supervise and maintain the program’s  partnerships with schools and visiting artists. I’ve personally taught thousands of students. Using concepts, materials and themes from the exhibitions, students in elementary through high school learn to observe, analyze, think critically and create in response to artworks at the museum. Recently we’ve started to expand the TTA program into a nearby maximum-security prison for women, though the pandemic has delayed things.
 
But what about my writing? This long residency is uncommon! It has offered me an artistic home, with space to grow as a poet. I am lucky to always be learning about artists and their habits and styles. This invigorates my writing. I work with a team of incredible museum educators who challenge and motivate my pedagogical practice. Plus I really love visual art. I love how artists play with materials. I am inspired, for instance, by the way the painter Joan Mitchell uses colors and thick daubs of paint on her canvas. Several of her paintings were in the KMA galleries last year. For me words, sentences, syntax and so forth are like materials. The many artists whose work has been installed in the Museum’s galleries over the years urge me to take up my palette of words when writing. Eventually I even wrote a book. My poetry collection Mothers Over Nangarhar was published last year. And my book launch took place at the Katonah Museum. Hopefully I’ll be here another decade. And hopefully I can continue to create among the paintings, photographs, sculptures and multi-media works that come to live, as I have, at the Museum.






Pamela Hart is writer in residence at the Katonah Museum of Art where she teaches and manages a visual literacy arts in education program. Her book, Mothers Over Nangarhar, was published in 2019 by Sarabande Books after winning the Kathryn A. Morton prize. She received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in poetry in 2013. In addition, she’s an editor for Afghan Voices, the Afghan Women's Writing Project and As You Were: The Military Review. Her poems have been published in various online and print journals.