My Art in a time of a Pandemic
Memories of teaching coding and embroidery at a New York City High School
This year I was invited by Eleanor Roosevelt High School on the upper Eastside of Manhattan to teach art and design in several of their computer classes. These STEM classes were taught by an innovative computer educator named Susan Ettenheim.
Susan Ettenheim has been working on several projects. One of them aims to extend the computer coding skills of high schoolers in a very creative way.
When working with textiles, the first thing I encourage all students to do is paint their own fabrics. Start projects with blank canvases and create their own marks and images from the beginning. We began our project with three basic colors, blue, yellow and red.
The students were very happy with their first layer - painted textures. After the paints dried, the students printed their computer coded designs, using an embroidery machine, onto the fabrics. This created their second layer.
The final layer was hand embroidery and stitching.
Teaching the students traditional hand embroidery techniques that they had only seen on computer screens was very enlightening. Many students commented that stitching, when coded and printed by the machine, seemed very easy and fast. When the same stitches were done by hand, students noticed the complexity of the process and the amount of fine-tuning it took to achieve various styles and designs.
It is always magical to compare the embroidery to the design and the code. The embroidery becomes a type of haptic pseudocode.
The final project was going to be a large quilt with 108 panels created by the students. This quilt was due to be auctioned for scholarships. Schools in NYC were closed on March 15 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Coronavirus Disease 2019: Update in Maryland- 4/3/2020
2,758 confirmed cases
42 deaths
Update in New York State - 4/3/2020
102,870 confirmed cases
2,935 deaths
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