Valley high school students are participating in Imagining Dance, an exhibition organized by the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art’s young@art gallery.
Gretta Wallace
Untitled, 2010
archival ink jet print
11" x 16"
The visual-art students from the Metropolitan Arts Institute, 1700 N. 7th Ave., in Phoenix, worked with the school’s dance students to create artworks celebrating the elegance of modern dance. The show takes place, through May 1, at the Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts, adjacent to SMoCA on the Scottsdale Mall.
Metropolitan Arts Institute is a college prep performing and visual arts charter high school. Its teachers are also working artists and collaborated with the students and SMoCA staff to produce the exhibition.
The young artists’ exhibition, which opened Feb. 3, coordinates with a variety of ongoing programs at SMoCA and SCPA, including Dance with Camera, through May 1 at SMoCA, the final appearance of the legendary Merce Cunningham Dance Company and other events and presentations at both Scottsdale Civic Center Mall venues.
Opened Jan. 15, Dance with Camera is an exhibition and screening program exploring the relationship between artists and dancers who make choreography for the camera and illuminating how video and still cameras changed our experience of dance.
Screenings range from Busby Berkeley’s Hollywood musicals to Maya Deren’s avant-garde films, featuring works by artists such as Bruce Conner, Bruce Nauman, Eleanor Antin as well as Charles Atlas’ collaborations with Merce Cunningham. Initiated by the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, the traveling exhibition is curated by Jenelle Porter, with Claire Carter the implementing SMoCA curator.
"Imagining Dance is thematically related to both Dance with Camera and our other programs at the museum and the arts center,”’ says Laura Hales, associate curator of education at SMoCA who also curates all young@art gallery exhibitions. In an award-winning building designed by the Phoenix architect Will Bruder, SMoCA showcases the work of significant contemporary artists, local, national and international.
“The students’ work in Imagining Dance suggest to me that they were very comfortable working with this theme,” Hales adds. “Much of it shows humor. It is easy to see when teens are grappling to make sense of something: The work looks angst-y, dark, emotional. This work looks light, humorous and inventive. I think working with dance as a subject was a good fit, met their interests and really did inspire them.”
