My first art teacher, Ms. Rapoport, knowingly set us up for failure. Before we had even entered the classroom, she assigned several homework assignments which I spent much of my summer agonizing over. I was generally unhappy with the results of this effort, none of it was work I was proud of. With a pit in my stomach I went to the first day of class and presented my work, sure that all of my peers' art was better than mine. Ms. Rapoport quickly dismissed my negative outlook with one simple explanation: ‘Oh, the summer homework is never any good, it’s there to show you how hard it is to create art in a vacuum.’
I felt deceived. What do you mean you knew it was never going to be good? How could you send us off for the entire summer without making your expectations clear? I wondered: why would she do this to us, her trusty class of AP artists. At the same time I considered the meaning behind her assignment. Each project we were assigned in the class were all independent, not in groups, so in what way was the summer homework different from anything else we would be doing?
Over the course of that school year I began to understand what she meant. Despite working independently on assignments, the simple act of showing up to a shared studio space helped me discover what it meant to be an artist. In between goofing off with my classmates, I saw my peers experimenting with new mediums from across the room and was able to question my comfort zone. We bounced ideas and methods off of each other as we started to build pieces for our individual artistic inquiries. That year of AP Art taught me more about the value of collaboration than any group project ever did.
Collaboration is a messy, intimate, confusing, and often vulnerable process. Despite this, it generates the growth and exploration needed to make great work; the kind of work that can only exist outside of your comfort zone and very rarely in a vacuum.
Today, many years after Ms. Rapoport’s class, I continue to seek outside opinions when I notice myself creating in a vacuum. I am deeply grateful to have many amazing people in my life excited to collaborate with me creatively. I find myself bouncing ideas off of my mom, my best friends, my coworkers; really anyone who will listen. Thank you ARCADE for inviting me to collaborate on this issue, and thank you to all the authors and contributors for the stories you chose to share. In my experience, the best thing that can be done for a creative process to thrive is exposing what you’re making to diverse audiences that force you to question your own perspectives.
For this cover, I chose Cat’s Cradle as the iconography due to my fond memories learning the patterns with my mom and my friends on the playground; this being one of my earliest memories of creative collaboration. The game itself is best learnt from more experienced hands, making this collaboration a necessity. Your partner in the game needs to know which strings to pull or drop from the mess that you are holding taut between your fingers. In elementary school, when teaching someone how to play, we would have the student, the teacher, and one additional person there to perfect any stray strings just in case the other two had their hands full. Reflecting on how to visually represent collaboration for the first entry point into this issue, I could not help but notice the parallels between this playground game and everything I have learned about being creative since.
