Wednesday, November 6, 2013

Creating public art through intergenerational collaboration



Reading the article, “Creating public art through intergenerational collaboration" by Mel
Alexenberg and Miriam Benjamin, the article talks about participatory art, public art, facilitating the collaboration of young and old, and intercultural art experiences that they encounter from making collaborative art work called the “Legacy Thrones”. The project was out of twenty women between the age of 70-85 from three different ethnic groups, and 40 art students, which created a team of one elder and two art students. During the project, the participants learned about each other’s cultures, as well as how much experiences and values they shared in experiences and in values.


This article gave me a big impression of senior citizen educations and artist as teachers. When I was reading this article, I had a connection with the video we watched in Art Ed 211, “Young at heart”. I never realized the importance of senior citizen education, but this article gave me an impression of how meaningful it is to work with the senor citizens. For senior citizens, making art would not only keep them from getting dementia or other memory-type of diseases, but it would give chance for them to make great art from the history of life that they came from.
Through this article, I was able to think about what community art is, and how it could affect the community and what it means to work together with others. When the article explained they are working with senior citizens, I thought they wouldn’t be able to make such great artwork, but having such expand of life history, I one again realized art is not only about making from what they are capable of, but master piece comes from each individual identity and beliefs.
From this article, I realized there are endless things to learn from teaching, and art is not only about working alone, but also creating with others and learning from one another.

  • This video gives impression of what community art is, how people engage with another in creating art.
  • This video shows education with senior citizen, what it is like to be working with senior citizens and what everyone learns from making art.


Alexenberg M. & Benjamin M. (2004). Creating Public Art Through Intergenerational Collaboration. Art Education. 13- 18.


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