“I Want to Teach the Whole World to
Draw….moss.”
I Want to Teach the
Whole World to Draw is a mobile drawing project created by artist, Marion
Wilson, using a renovated RV (known as MLAB) as her drawing studio and botany
lab starting at Art Basel, Miami 2016 and ending in Portland, Oregon. The
Mobile Literacy Art Bus (MLAB) will be re-fashioned as a combined moss
lab/drawing studio/looking station as it travels from site to site creating an
artistic archive and knowledge bank of native moss. This project celebrates
attentiveness to place, smallness, and indigenous ways knowing which Wilson believes
is both ecological and spiritual; scientific and artistic.
The Stops and what
they tell us:
MLAB/MossLab will follow an exquisite and diverse moss trail
that Dr. Robin Kimmerer, expert bryologist, and professor at SUNY-ESF has
helped to determine. As the local and native moss species are collected and
archived Wilson and participants will use microscopes to draw in three scales;
real size, dissection and cellular. At each stop Wilson will hold public
drawing sessions that include an innovative art lesson. Drawings created
and collected will then be sent to a 3-d printer to create a sculptural
archive, which Wilson views as a contemporary technological version of Leopold
and Rudolf Blaschka glass models.
I Want to Teach the
Whole World to Draw is founded on the belief and conviction that arts and
arts education should be distributed equally and not allocated according to
race and class as currently displayed in the American school system. MLAB will
work in partnership with the National Headquarters of the I Have a Dream
Foundation whose mission "Is for all children to have an opportunity to earn a
college degree and fully capitalize on their talents, aspirations, and dreams
of fulfilling careers and productive global citizenship.”
MLAB/MossLab functions as mobile signage that points
directly to the discrepancy of access by traveling to the poorest districts along the
route – all the way MLAB will provide a rich and interdisciplinary arts curriculum that links art and design
to science and technology.
MLAB to Moss/Lab
In 2008, with a group of nine student collaborators from
Syracuse University, Wilson purchased, re-designed and renovated a 1984
American Eagle RV. The RV interior was gutted and re-furbished with Stickley
scrap wood, porcelain coated steel walls, and cushions that serve as dual
purpose drawing boards. MLAB travelled locally in CNY for three years
providing art and creative writing enrichment to 13 local schools; was curated
as an Open Institute for participatory art at Stefan Stoyanov gallery in NYC;
and was a collecting site for Mel Chin's Fundred Dollar Bill project.
Why Moss and Drawing?
The transformation of MLAB to a botany lab and drawing
studio, specifically for the artistic study of bryophytes is significant
environmentally, scientifically and metaphorically. Wilson links art, science
and technology and uses science to talk about human activities. Mosses are the
first form of plant life; they live in the boundary layer of the Earth and in
microenvironments. As non-vascular plants they teach us about hydration, reproduction,
photosynthesis. Equally important; moss is about looking. Wilson uses the
study of moss to increase our ability to see. The study and observation of moss
is the perfect compliment to observational drawing and to drawing exercises
that Wilson has used in many public formats to increase individual and public
perception. Studying moss is about paying attention to what is small, omnipresent
and profoundly overlooked.
Drawing is a universal language. Drawing was the first
language humans used to communicate and it is still used widely as a form of
communication despite and within new technologies. Drawing is a language used
across disciplines to understand form in space - including art and design, the
sciences through classification, engineering, mathematics (longitude and
latitude in the form of a line) and the humanities (timelines and poetry).
Drawing increases our ability to see and enlarges our perceptions of the
universe.
Creating the Archive:
In 2010 Wilson inherited the entire painting collection of
art slides from Syracuse University’s slide library (approximately 10,000
slides). Since that time through painting and drawing she has been recycling
the artifacts of the collection (glass, slide dividers, photographic images) with
her own images of post-industrial landscapes
and indigenous or endangered plants.
STE(A)M
This project emphasizes a STE(A)M approach to learning
- in that art operates at the
intersection of science, technology and math and includes classification,
divergent thinking skills, communicating ideas and problem solving – through
drawing and sketching; model making, species collecting and identification.
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