MARFA — My sixth-graders and I turned a hallway at school into a total installation of the ocean. The work was inspired by both Samara Golden’s show “if earth is the brain where is the body” at the Nasher Sculpture Center, and also the idea of total installations, something that I thought about a lot when I worked at Chinati, as I’m a big fan of work by Ilya Kabakov.
We started the paintings for the installation in January and it has been up for a few weeks. The pieces were drawn and painted by students and then outlined in India ink and cut out. On a Monday, when there was no school, and with some of my high school yearbook students the next day, I cut and hung blue butcher paper to be the background. Over the next few days, sixth-graders added their creations to the wall with staplers and filled in any empty spaces by making more paintings: a pirate ship, a submarine, a scuba diver, a mermaid, lots of jellyfish, a kelp forest, a puffer fish and many different kinds of sharks are just some of the things in our ocean.
To finish the piece off, we added blue twinkle lights and blue cellophane, and covered the fluorescent lights with more blue paper to make the viewer feel truly underwater. To celebrate the opening of the piece, we watched Finding Nemo.
The students involved are: Azul, Landyn, Aubrey, Devante, Ranger, Nyla, Eduardo, Liam, Matthew, Allan, Jade, Mia, Landin Rey, Matt, Dania, Fatima, Lyla, Aubrianna, Aiden S., Jonathan, and Adiel.