(Describer) Sarah Urist Green:

Today we're outside the Indianapolis Museum of Art where we're going to meet up with Michelle Grabner. She's based in Milwaukee and Chicago, but she currently has a show up here at the museum that features a wide range of her work, including paintings, works on paper, video, and sculpture. Along with her studio practice, Michelle is also an art critic, a professor, and a curator who's run exhibition spaces including The Suburban, in Oak Park, Illinois, as well as the Poor Farm in central Wisconsin. It becomes quickly evident when looking at Michelle's work that she's preoccupied with pattern, be it those she find and uses as source material for her paintings and prints or the ones she devises herself through the paper weavings she's made for 20 years. The space of the home and domestic life is a focus of Michelle's work, not only evident in her abstract paintings that reproduce the patterns of gingham, cotton blankets, and paper towels, but also through the labor-intensive repetitive processes required to create them. She creates a kind of abstraction that is firmly rooted in the materials and actions of our daily life but that also transcends them. Hi, I'm Michelle Grabner, and this is your "Art Assignment."

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(Describer) Title: The Art Assignment. Michelle Grabner.

I'm drawn to all patterns, and a lot of it has to do with repetition and order. So you have information that's ordered, sometimes in a very simplistic way and sometimes in a more complicated, baroque way. So you think of William Morris' wallpapers--

(Describer) ...with patterns of flowers.

gorgeous, baroque, and complex; or a simple weave, like a gingham weave, a kind of check pattern. It's all ordered; it's all information that takes a kind of order. And when one thinks about contemporary life and how information moves through our lives on a regular basis, that order is becoming more and more important. We have to do it; we have to order the information in our lives, so to see that represented in our visual world is very compelling, has always been very compelling to me. As an early artist in an emerging studio, I would say, thinking about pattern, thinking about indexing, my son came home from kindergarten at that time presenting me with a little project he did in school. It was a blue and red paper weaving. And I think the exercise was based on fine motor activity-- how to use a scissors, how to slip paper in and out. It was crude, it was basic. Maybe there were four slits within the paper itself. And then I started to think about that as a way of making pattern, the simplicity of weaving being playing out in paper.

(Describer) The Art Assignment.

So your assignment is to make a paper weaving. You'll want to have on hand some paper-- one paper, one sheet, that you will then make cuts into-- even cuts, in this case. Then you'll also want some paper, which can be colored, that you'll want to make strips. The strips can be various, but I'm going to give you examples in which the strips and the cuts in the paper are the same. And then what you're going to do is simply weave those strips into that paper, into that base paper, what I'm calling the warp. And it's really quite that simple, and you'll have a lot of options in terms of building pattern. I would probably encourage multiple colors, and then you can see, again, what the array of the patterns are available to you, in terms of different kinds of patterns.

(Describer) Sarah:

John, I thought you'd really like this one because it's an obsessive, repetitive action. Yeah, I do enjoy my obsessive, repetitive actions. I like signing my name over and over again. I like print-making in very repetitive ways. So I am very excited about this. I'm also a huge fan of Michelle Grabner's work, so I think it's really cool that she gave us an art assignment, and this one is awesome-- I'm psyched to do it. And I can do it! Yeah. It's deceivingly simple. Yes, even a kindergartener could do it, but I think there's a lot of hidden resonance here. And you can think a lot about pattern and color. When I'm looking at these and thinking about this assignment, I think about Josef Albers' color studies. Yeah, but it's not just color studies. These weavings also make me think about physical objects in the world. They're abstractions that lead me to thinking about representational things. Yeah, and I also think we should go back and think about the foundations of early childhood education, and why Friedrich Froebel, who founded kindergarten, sort of came up with this exercise in the first place.

(Describer) In an animation...

In 1814, Friedrich Froebel began working at a mineralogical museum in Berlin, organizing and classifying its collection. He was fascinated by the various shapes of crystals and became convinced that investigating the natural laws that caused their growth was the key to unlocking the mysteries of a higher power. Froebel was guided by this belief when he founded a school for young children in Blankenburg, Germany in 1837. He called it kindergarten and formulated a system of activities that would teach kids to recognize and appreciate natural harmony. He designed a set of 20 tools, referred to as "gifts," to help with the process, including building blocks. colored paper, mosaic tiles, and gridded tables. The 14th gift was paper weaving, and it was a version of this activity that Michelle's son would encounter many years later, and that she would take up as well. By weaving together strips of paper, kindergarteners explore color, pattern, counting, and simple math, and come to know forms that can be found out in the world. We're asking you to do the same, to tap into the seemingly inexhaustible potential of this activity and discover how abstract forms can point to countless processes and structures in the world around us.

(Describer) Grabner:

We were saying that this is a Froebel exercise that happens in kindergarten; it's also a two-dimensional design activity that happens when one enters into an art program as a freshman, and these foundations. And I always like to flip it. I think these are exercises that we're privileged to do and we should continue to do them, if not maybe taught in our senior year, as opposed to our freshman year.

(Describer) She sits at a table with the paper.

So we're going to make a paper weaving. So what you're going to want to do is get yourself a sheet of paper, a straightedge, and an X-Acto knife, and you're going to want to cut these slats in a paper. So these are one-inch slats. I'm leaving an edge all the way around. Then you're going to want to mark it with a pencil so you're even with your cuts. Then flip it over; work on the side that you have your graphic notations on. You'll want to have your strips. And, again, I'm working with one-inch strips today. They can be various sizes. That's not a problem. What I'm going to develop is a pattern that will be a negative when I flip it over. So very simply, start thinking about the patterns.

(Describer) She gets a red strip.

Start thinking about that math, in terms of over and under and how many. So I'm going to go under three, over one, under three, over one.

(Describer) She weaves.

And then you're going to have, again depending on numbers-- in this case, I only went under two at the very end

(Describer) She pulls it through.

'cause I ran out of cuts. Then you want to tightly pull the paper in, making sure it stays flat and doesn't buckle. In this case, I'm going to go through a spectrum of warm colors, red to yellow.

(Describer) She gets a lighter red.

And then you want to not use the same number pattern but a different number pattern. So I'm going to, in this case, over two, under three.

(Describer) Again going across, she weaves the strip over two slits then under three, and repeats to the end.

And then I line all the strips up on one side, just so it's easy; I only have to cut one side when I'm finished. And then you're going to want to slip the next band down so it's pushed right up against the previous strip. To linger in systems of order, repetition, is hugely important. To think about ordering information, to think about patterns-- when they break, when they pull, when there is this funny tension between what is being indexed and the geometry of the support, to be able to see that-- that's important. But there's also the condition of boredom, which is really important for me, not in, necessarily, a place of meditation or a place of just pure discomfort, but I think within that space and time, one gets to play with time, think about those qualities, think about values. I've been referring to it as a state of boredom, which is a human condition, and I think we all need to embrace that. Okay, so once you've finished weaving the field of slats, you're going to want to finish it off. So I've been using-- you can use this acid-free tape.

(Describer) She unrolls it onto where each strip begins.

You're gonna want to flip it...

(Describer) She turns it to reach the other end.

and trim any extras.

(Describer) She trims the strips to line up with the paper's edge. She's used the reds with orange and yellow.

All right. And then you're gonna want to tape this end down as well.

(Describer) Once she tapes down that end, she turns the whole thing over.

And then flip it over and see what the result is. So you can see here, I've actually given you two patterns, right? So you see this column here. So if you divide it vertically, instead of being continuously even throughout the field, you have a pattern on, in this case, would be the left side or the right side, and then you have another pattern going on here. And then you can also see the pattern developed by the color.

(Describer) Title: The Art Assignment. PBS Digital Studios. Grabner:

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No, I'll continue making these weavings until they put me in the grave. I have been thinking, though, about weaving with other materials.

(Describer) Titles: Now it's your turn. One: Gather a sheet of paper to make cuts into. Two: Gather other sheets of colored paper to cut into strips. Three: Weave the strips into the base paper. Four: Document your work and/or your process. Upload using hashtag The Art Assignment. Fame and Glory! Your work might be in a future episode.

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