teaching-Mentoring lectures/presentations

Megan Wilson has over 20 years experience as an educator/mentor. Her approach to education includes:

1. Educational Philosophy:  The classroom is ideally a democratic environment to which we all bring something, and in which we all have a stake. Wilson believes we all come from a specific place, and exist on a continuum.  We make sense of ourselves and our world within the context of our individual and collective lives; learning, then, is not separate from, but an integral part of everyday experience.

2.  Accessibility:  Wilson is committed to both personal and community empowerment through a hands-on, multifaceted, and community-based approach to learning. She works with students/mentees to become advocates and mentors within their communities and the world at large, and continually promotes the notion that the key to learning and understanding the subject at hand, lies in large part to being a responsible, conscious and critical thinker.

3. The Intersection between Arts/Media, Education, and Community: Wilson aims to bridge the gaps among communities, arts/media, and education in a manner that is intellectually and technically rigorous, yet remains grassroots. She believes it is critical to actively maintain our connections to the people we work with in and outside of institutional settings, and believes that the traditional separation between education, arts/media, and communities hinders understanding between disparate groups. It is her goal that students learn or bring social and personal consciousness to their work, and that consideration and context is at the core of all of they create.

Mentor for the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Immigrant Artist Program (IAP)

The Immigrant Artist Mentoring Program pairs immigrant artists from all disciplines with artist mentors who provide their mentees with one-on-one support.

ABOUT

NYFA's Immigrant Artist Mentoring Program is the only known program of its kind in the United States, and has provided close to 200 NYC-based immigrants with mentorship, community, and exposure for their work since it was founded in 2007. The New York program includes sessions in Visual/Multidisciplinary Art, Performing and Literary Arts, and Social Practice. In 2017, NYFA received a 2-year grant from Ford Foundation to support the expansion of the program to Detroit, MI; Newark, NJ; Oakland, CA; and San Antonio, TX.

This is a competitive program open to artists from all disciplines (performing, literary, and visual) and provided free of charge to accepted participants. 

PROGRAM

The Program fosters a community, providing opportunities to connect with other immigrant artists through group meetings, peer learning, and informal gatherings with program alumni. Through access to other artists, arts professionals, and organizations, the program offers immigrant artists the opportunity to focus on their creative practice, gain support and exposure for their work, while upholding their distinct identities. Many of the mentors are immigrant artists themselves, and understand the challenges of sustaining one’s art practice while navigating different cultural perspectives in the art world. Each cycle has proven to be an invaluable experience for mentees and mentors alike, and artists often remain connected well beyond the program.

Wilson worked with artist Keyvan Shovir, an immigrant artist from Tehran, Iran in 2019.

Classroom Presentations / Artists’ Talks / Clarion Alley Mural Project (CAMP) Tours

Wilson is frequently asked to present her work or the work of Clarion Alley Mural Project to students and/or the general public through classroom presentations, artist talks, panel discussions, or tours of CAMP. Recent presentations have included: three artist talks/workshop at CSUEB in 2018/19; Presentations and Panel Discussions at the Asian Art Museum, Berkeley University, Shaping San Francisco and Berkeley Art Center; Classroom presentations at Stanford University, California College of the Arts (CCA), San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI), and San Francisco State University; and Tours of CAMP for students at San Francisco State University and Stanford University.

Public Presentations

Wilson is often asked to give public presentations and/or be a part of panel discussions on her work, the work of CAMP, or discussions addressing public art, social practice, and/or the role of art in the gentrification and development of communities. Recent presentations have included: 1) a presentation and discussion with Barbara Mumby-Huerta and Kim Shuck on “Public Art and Murals: Controversy, Neglect, Restoration” as part of Shaping San Francisco; 2) Presentations on the international exchange & residency Bangkit/Arise that Wilson co-curated and co-organized with Nano Warsono and Christopher Statton at the Asian Art Museum, UC Berkeley, Desa Panggungharjo in Indonesia; 3) Presentations of her personal work at the Asian Art Museum as part of her Flower Interruption project presented at the Museum in 2017; 4) a panel discussion with artists in Bantul Indonesia on street art as part of the project Geneng Street Art Project #3; and 5) a presentation and conversation with Christian from and Aimee Le Duc on the changing landscape of the arts and greater communities in the Bay Area at the Berkeley Art Center. Wilson has also given presentations at the deYoung Museum; Intersection for the Arts, the Penny Stamps Distinguished Visitors Program at University of Michigan, and the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco.

Independent Studies

Wilson has worked with MFA students at the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) and the California College of the Arts (CCA) through Guided Study and Directed Study Mentorship programs. These exchanges includes critiques, professional guidance, and direct hands-on experience. It's been an honor to work with such talented and dedicated students/artists.

San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI), Adjunct Professor, Co-Taught Solid/Fluid with Aaron Noble, Painting Department, 2004

SOLID / FLUID

Course Description: 

The option of public art practice has enjoyed an explosive surge in the past decade, particularly in the Bay Area. Thanks in part to the lingering critical disrepute of community mural projects and the criminality and communal aesthetics of spraycan art, public painting remains an arena in which practice is ahead of theory. Following the first day of class, this intensive will be held off campus. Each day will begin with a breakfast discussion at Intersection for the Arts (446 Valencia Street in the Mission District), followed by on-site study, guest presentations and project work. The discussion portion of the course will analyze the formal openings created by the decision to move outside of the gallery system and review strategies running the gamut from the autonomy of illegal or quasi-legal postering, stickering or stenciling to the complex social negotiation of permissioned projects operating with public funding. Following introductory readings and discussion the class will choose a topic of common concern to respond to in two parts. Solid group will create a semi-permanent public mural while Fluid group creates a linked project utilizing ephemeral strategies.

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Fluid group created two ephemeral projects that culminated in a day of actions at various locations in downtown SF. In addition to dispersal, the group wanted the project to suggest generosity and an element of surprise. The group decided to create several silkscreen images using a combination of an altered priority mail design ( Priority Mail became Change Your Priority), a drawing of the Sycamore seed, and a diagram of how to make a paper helicopter. The images were then printed onto shirts collected from Community Thrift's reject pile and pages of clean newsprint from the print room. Red tags were printed with the word "free" and attached to the clothing. The group also made thousands of the paper helicopters out of small maps to the mural site on Sycamore. Throughout the silkscreen process students also made drawings on priority mail stickers from the post office. On Thursday, March 25, 2004 at 11:00 am the group arrived at Union Square. The first action was an outdoor launch of the helicopters from the balcony of the Cheesecake Factory in Macy's. Students released several hundred helicopters into the air above Geary Street. From Macy's the group made its way to Levis, Nike, Gap, and Old Navy where they surreptitiously distributed the gifts of free shirts into the stores existing stock. The next stop was Nordstrom and the San Francisco Shopping Center. Students again released over a thousand helicopters into the courtyard from the top floor, while one of them documented with video from the third floor and two others took stills from the ground floor. The final event took place at 3:00 pm at SFMoMA. Two of the students dropped the remaining helicopters from the 5th floor bridge onto the lobby while the rest of the group observed and documented from the entryway.

Solid group developed a mural design that emphasized the social as opposed to the currency value of objects, settling on a clothesline motif to represent the borderland between public and private. It also represented a subtle inversion of Alicia McCarthy's mural on the opposite side of the building, which has words strung out atop a series of rainbow curves. Many discussions revolved around purely formal questions. The group voted to limit the parameters of design and color scheme to ensure a consistency in the final product. However, individual style will always assert itself, as reflected in the variety of rendering approaches used in the different objects.

Assigned Readings:

In our choice of readings for the class we wanted to avoid the standard mural/ public art histories, especially since the class would have the opportunity to get some of that material directly from guests like Ray Patlan, and instead followed some supplementary tracks. Several readings evoked versions of the larger situation of the class itself: that of a group of talented individuals embarked on a collective adventure in consciousness. X-men, Situationists, Merry Pranksters, and finally groups of Gnostics of the early Christian era all provided analogies and strategies for our group practice. The archetype of the trickster emerges to suggest a necessary function of the artist in our image intensive culture in the persons of Simon Magus, Ken Kesey, Yayoi Kusama, Tibor Kalman, and others, while the nature of that culture is discussed (with Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle as a baseline definition) by Nicholas Bourriaud, Eric Schlosser, Kalle Lasn and Vandana Shiva.

• X-men #59 by Neal Adams & Roy Thomas

• Long Walk of the Situationist International by Greil Marcus; selections from the Situationist International Anthology, ed. Ken Knabb

• From Relational Aesthetics by Nicholas Bourriaud

• Interview with Yayoi Kusama

• From The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe

• From Trickster Makes this World by Lewis Hyde

• From Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser

• Poverty & Globalism by Vandana Shiva (presented on the BBC in 2000)

• Interview with Tibor Kalman

• From Culture Jamming by Kalle Lasn

• From The Gnostics by Jacques LaCarriere

Guest Presenters and Field Trips: 

As instructors, one of our goals was to provide students with an educational experience outside of the school/institution setting and introduce the class to resources in the greater San Francisco arts community. The class met for breakfast every morning at Intersection for the Arts. Most days we had a guest presenter(s). Amy Berk from TWCDC (Together We Can Defeat Capitalism) shared examples and stories from the group's efforts to defeat capitalism around the world and have fun while doing it; David Goldberg discussed the fields and streams of information that are engaged by the retina as one moves through the urban terrain; the class visited Andrew Schoultz at Culture Cache Gallery as he, Alvin Gregorio, Jeff Roysdon, and Mats?! installed their exhibition Emergency ; Ray Patlan shared his stories and images from the twenty-year history of Balmy Alley; Frances Phillips presented the fundamentals of foundations and raising grant funds for public projects; and Trisha Lagaso and Kevin Chen shared their experiences as artists, curators, and arts administrators. In addition, the class was introduced to Elliot Lessing, director of Build art space (we met at Build for two afternoons to work) and Courtney Fink, director of Southern Exposure (we visited Southern Exposure). 

Youth In Action - Southern Exposure’s Art In Education Program

In 1999 Wilson taught middle-school students through Southern Exposure's Art In Education program and the San Francisco Conservation Corps' Youth In Action program. She worked with the students to create colorful, information-filled murals on the recycling bin in the Alice Griffith residential community, encouraging residents to take a closer look at the merits of recycling.

Youth in Action (YIA) , a San Francisco Conservation Corps program is a non-profit community-based organization located in the Mission District. YIA serves middle school students from the Bayview/Hunters Point, Potrero and Mission districts.

Southern Exposure's Artists in Education Program (AIE) works collaboratively with youth organizations and schools that have little access and limited resources for arts education. AIE stresses that art is a relevant forum to address issues of cultural identity, community awareness and the environment.

Southern Exposure, a non-profit artists' organization located in the Mission District, presents dynamic and creative exhibitions, performances, artists talks, panels, symposia and educational programs that are vital to he Bay Area's cultural health.

EXCEL at Amherst College

In the summers of 1996 and 1997 I was a resident instructor of painting and sculpture at EXCEL at Amherst College in Western Massachusetts. EXCEL is a summer enrichment program that prepares high school students for college life, including academic and creative courses that emphasize active engagement and hands-on learning. In addition, students participate in an extensive extracurricular program that includes instructional sports clinics and community service. Students also take part in weekend excursions to destinations in New England and Canada directed by the resident staff and instructors.

EXCEL courses provide students with opportunities to expand academic horizons -- to explore entirely new areas of interest or to consider more familiar topics in new ways. In the classroom, collaborative, hands-on learning is emphasized, since courses should be as fun as they are educational. The curriculum includes courses in the arts, the humanities, the social, computer, and natural sciences, and SAT Preparation. EXCEL's college-style seminars incorporate guest lectures, field trips, and group projects. Examples of student projects have included: the creation and implementation of a small business, video production, A Midsummer Night's Dream performed by moonlight in a forest, the development and production of Spanish-language commercials, work on cooperative farms, and the production of several literary magazines

I taught four intensive classes each summer -- two painting courses and two sculpture courses. The 1996 Painting students painted the portraits of all 150 participants in the EXCEL program -- half in color, half in black and white. Each student painted 15 portraits within a 4-week session. Daily Classes included discussions about the portrait from a historical point of view, as well a contemporary context. The 1997 Painting students explored self-portraiture through representation, symbolism and text by dividing their image into nine sections and devoting three sections to each respectively. The 1996 and 1997 Sculpture students worked with the idea of space - public and private.

Meridian Interns Program (MIP)

In 1996 I co-founded the Meridian Interns Program (MIP) at Meridian Gallery in San Francisco with Amy Berk and Meridian Founders/Directors Anne Brodsky, and Tony Williams. Together we developed all components of the curriculum and program design. In addition, I produced the grant proposals and fund development plan to raise the money to launch the program. The program began in the fall of 1996. I co-directed and co-taught the program until fall of 1997. MIP continued very successfully under the direction of Amy Berk over the next 15 years.

The Meridian Interns Program was an eight-month program that provided high school students with a comprehensive educational experience in the arts and a unique introduction to non-profit management and community service. Students created their own work, as well as gained considerable exposure to galleries, museums and individual artists in the Bay Area. Student projects included the production of a 'zine, several mural projects, and an annual gallery exhibition.