Presented in collaboration with Congregation Beth Elohim Early Childhood Center
Magali Duzant’s workshop focused on sun prints, or cyanotypes, which feature heavily in her existing practice. Each child had their own pretreated photo sheet, along with a large pretreated canvas on which all of the students collaborated. Simple objects such as yogurt lids, sticks, cut-out shapes, and even the children’s hands were used to create images on the prints.
ECC x Artists Alliance is a series of collaborative projects initiated by Artists Alliance Inc with Congregation Beth Elohim Early Childhood Center. Designed and led by guest artists, in collaboration with ECC educator Tom Pnini, students work in the classroom on pre-designed projects that both parallel the school’s current art curriculum and extend from the individual artist’s existing practice. Collectively, the projects urge students to experience art-making through unexpected visual relationships, using professional artists’ practices as a means to create engaging and interactive learning activities.
As accomplished by ECC’s impressive programming, ECC x Artists Alliance aims to amplify the school’s ongoing success in providing children with a generative and hands-on approach to education. This project series extends ECC’s mission by designing classes that create new opportunities for students to develop cognitive skills within the framework of peer collaboration, discovery, imaginative sharing and the revelation of hidden narratives. But, perhaps most importantly, the projects are intended to be playful.
Magali Duzant is a Queens-based interdisciplinary artist. Her work combines the poetics of perception matched with a scientific approach in collecting data to examine the subjectivity of seeing and the roles of technology and translation as mediators of lived experience. Her work has been exhibited internationally most recently at the Queens Museum, Spring Break Art Fair, and Fridman Gallery in NY, Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, Sydney College of Art and Parramatta Artist Studios in Australia. She has created several public commissions for BRIC and Memorial Sloan Kettering amongst others. In 2015 her book, I Looked & Looked, a collection of 20 views of the moon on the night of Hurricane Sandy, inspired by the synchronicity of a romantic letter exchange between Stieglitz and O’Keeffe, was published by Conveyor Editions. She was awarded a 2015 Queens Council on The Arts Grant for her public work, Live Streaming Sunset, a 2016 SU-CASA grant from the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs and has held residencies in Berlin, Italy, Sydney, and New York. She holds an MFA in Photography from Parsons The New School for Design and a BHA in Fine Arts and Visual Culture from Carnegie Mellon University.
