In 4th grade my best friend Marta and I loved making up games together. She lived around the block from me and we would walk home together every day after school. As we walked home, we would jump from shadow to shadow, trying to catch a renegade leaf that kept being blown further away by the wind. If we stepped in the sunlight we would be ‘dead’ because it was ‘lava.’ This game was called Leaf Hunter.

We also played a who-dun-it game called something like “Psycho Pool Barbie” where we filled up the only bathtub in my railroad apartment with water, turning it into a “pool.” We would turn off the lights, and when we turned them back on, one of our characters be dead (marked by fake blood in the tub and all over the bathroom), despite my grandmas wishes.

My actual Barbie dolls were always decrepit, had weird hair-cuts, were naked and limbless because we’d run them ragged. We made home made clothes for them and also used VHS tape boxes as homes for the dolls and we used marbles as currency.

Marta and I got pet hermit crabs, and we made obstacle courses out of Scrabble pieces for them to climb on.

I’d always been interested in art, so for high school I went to LaGuardia. In terms of Art History, the closest we had come to covering contemporary art was Rococo, which is probably better than most public schools. Even so, Art classes in public school had a way of putting you to sleep and relying too much on History.

The Cooper Union Outreach program was the first art program I was in that introduced me to the idea of Conceptual art, or any kind of art past 1930. Hearing these ideas at the Outreach Program validated that I had been thinking conceptually for a long time. I wouldn’t have realized that art was something worth pursuing without Outreach. My family didn’t have money to put me in an extra curricular art class, and especially if it was something where they were unsure if it’d be beneficial to my future.

Martha Friedman, my freshman 3DD teacher at Cooper Union told us she believed that as an artist you’re always working towards the same idea. Every time you make a new piece, you get closer to that idea. I believe this too; but it starts way before you are conscious of what you’re doing.

Learning about conceptual art showed me that all along, through creative play, we'd been making work.

Kyle Richardson

I’ve been a student at The Cooper Union School of Art since 2012, and this past fall was my first semester as a teacher assistant in the Outreach Pre-College Program. I TA’d the critical thinking and creative writing class, Contemporary Art Issues, that accompanies the program’s intensive portfolio preparation curriculum. In this class the students develop an ability to discuss art with confidence.

What's really exciting about being a T.A. for the Contemporary Art Issues class is that we not only work alongside the professors but we’re also invited to propose curricula and lead the class discussions. Our team of four would meet weekly to reflect and develop that Saturday’s class. By making sure the curriculum was open and in conversation we were able to take into account the student's interests and which methods of reflection suited the group best.

This collaborative approach to teaching critical thinking received my proposed curriculum with open arms, and it was so exciting to see it grow in conversations and responses. We based each class around an artwork that addressed issues of performing labor and producing labor. We also considered the conflictive relationship towards authorship and who gets to claim it when it comes to identity.

We began by looking at Mika Rottenberg’s imaginative supply chain landscapes and considered the relationship its workers had to the workers in the films of the Lumiere brothers. We then reflected on the factories that build the smartphones we carry around in our pockets every day, through the poetry of Xu Lizhi, in relation to the factories producing the internet’s software and content through the work of Andrew Norman Wilson. Considering our role as front end users of the Internet, we read Laurel Ptak’s Wages for Facebook manifesto and had riveting discussions about content ownership within web 2.0 corporate environments like Facebook. Through the poetry and digital images of Juliana Huxtable we opened up a conversation about the ways in which visibility is a primary capital within emerging social markets. Her involvement in New York City’s art world and nightlife, and her unabashed use of her Internet presence as part and parcel of her artistic practice, framed a final writing assignment in which we asked the students to imagine a city. This led to incredible musings on an urban and social landscape that would treat us with respect and celebrate our differences.

The focus of the class is to grow confidence in dialoguing about artworks and thinking critically about them. It was truly inspiring to witness the growth our students had and the exciting discussions they produced! Being in the position of a TA in the Outreach program has shown me how much my own critical thinking around art practices has grown at Cooper and how the community we have at the school offers an intense and invigorating space for sharing ideas.

Emilio Martínez

Gordon Matta-Clark’s “Splitting” was the first image I saw as a student in Outreach. The black-and-white photograph of the suburban model home cut directly in half was so jarring to my 14-year-old mind that it remains the only memory I have of that first class. It was not that the other images being shown that day were any less interesting or challenging,. Rather it was the fact that seeing Matta–Clark’s work for the first time, was also the first time that I had been so squarely confronted with an artwork that, to me, didn’t look like “art.”

But in that first Outreach class any sense of confinement and preconceived expectation immediately dissipated. It was in this image of a divided house that I first saw the incredible landscape of choices and possibilities that one has as an artist today. The most blatant of these possibilities was the option to work outside of a room, a revelation that I clung to throughout my time at Outreach and during my time as a student at The Cooper Union. Through the introduction of that image I felt as though I was given permission to make art in any manner that made sense to me as an individual rather than as an “artist.” It introduced me to a new way of being in the world that was not about creating contextual blinders but using what was in my immediate reality as a means to make work. What “Splitting” taught me along with many of the other works that I saw while I was a student at Outreach is how work can be funny, absurd, straightforward and exist in a world that is recognizable to someone’s own lived experience while also being vigorous and critical.

David Johnson

When I was little, my grandmother used to tell me to draw flowers. Walking around her garden, I knew the thing to do was to pick an ‘easy flower’ as the subject for my drawing: the fewer petals and leaves the better. I avoided strange angles or stems that knotted together. Picking a single flower was effective - I could return after a few minutes with a fairly realistic drawing that my grandmother would admire and praise.

One day she asked me to draw the dahlias. This plant fell completely out of my usual criteria: it was a huge bush thick with leaves and tangling branches and flowers that had a hundred petals. As I sat in front of it with my sketch pad and pencil, I knew this was not going to be so easy.

What I was looking at was so complicated and full of detail that whenever I decided to begin my drawing, I had to stop myself. I couldn’t simplify this to make it easier on myself. In order to translate the complicated arrangement of leaves, flowers and branches onto my page, I had to look much harder than I had before. This drawing took much longer than the others and I am not sure if it was very good, but it is the only drawing I remember making in my grandmother’s garden because I was being forced to learn how to look.

By age sixteen, I had forgotten this moment of learning. I sought out the Outreach program, wanting to know how to improve my artistic skills. I came to Outreach with a sense that the ways I had been making art had become a little too easy.

On the first day of class, our drawing teacher, Adriana Farmiga, gave us a deceivingly simple task: using only pencil we had to draw a crumpled piece of tinfoil on a large sheet of paper. We had more than two hours to do this.

I found it difficult to decide how to make the first mark on the paper. It was such a complicated arrangement of tiny angles and different shades of gray. Like that dahlia bush, the object in front of me felt too complicated to simplify. Depicting it meant paying attention to every one of its details with a rigor that I had known before but had forgotten. I realized our teacher had presented us students with that same challenge: we had to learn how to look.

That sense of suspicion I mentioned before was there because I was making things too easy for myself. Before coming to the Outreach program, I had a way of drawing that was effective: though I didn’t have to look very hard, I could produce good, finished drawings I could put in my portfolio. The faculty at Outreach helped me immensely by challenging my complacency with my “good enough” drawings.

Looking is harder. The first drawings that come from looking are imperfect, unfinished, off. But they are closer to the truth.