“Before Broad museum opens for business, L.A. students have it to themselves, and the poetry flows”
Los Angeles Times
By Steve Lopez
June 12, 2016
It’s early in the morning in the house where Jean-Michel Basquiat lives down the hall from Marlene Dumas and not far from Ed Ruscha.
And now some visitors are at the door.
One group of students is from Belmont High’s Multimedia Academy. Almost three dozen ninth-graders.
Another group has bused in from Animo Leadership High in Inglewood. More than 60 11th-graders.
What a deal they’ve got.
Before the Broad Museum opens for business, this coliseum of creativity is theirs. No crowds, no lines, no noise but the echoes of their own voices.
But the free pass has a few strings attached. The students can’t just wander off on their own. They have to take seats in front of provocative paintings, learn something about them, discuss.
And then write.
Since the program began in January, 3,200 students have ogled the art and Picassoed the images into words. The Broad Museum teams with local schools and 826LA, a nonprofit writing and tutoring center, to tap creativity that is too often idled by lack of exposure.
These students have never been to the Broad.
Many have never been to a museum.
“I’ve actually been wanting to come here for so long, but I know tickets are overbooked,” says Juleny Duenez of Animo. “Once I knew we were having a field trip here, I was ecstatic.”
When elementary school kids visit, they study Jeff Koons’ “Balloon Dog,” Robert Therrien’s “Under the Table,” or Ruscha’s “Norm’s La Cienega on Fire.”
Then they write a story.
The older students study works including Roy Lichtenstein’s “Mirror #1,” Barbara Kruger’s “(Untitled) Your Body is a Battleground,” Glenn Ligon’s “Double America 2,” and Basquiat’s “Obnoxious Liberals.”
Then they write a poem.
The range in quality is vast; the bar is high.
On an earlier visit, a student named Astrid took a hard look at Basquiat and wrote:
Obnoxious liberals
You stand in the middle
Of racial suffrage and rich
Insufferable men
Holding hands high
While Samson is chained
Against his will as time
Passes by
Scrawled in the lower center of “Obnoxious Liberals” are the words “Not For Sale.” Kristin Lorey, an 826LA director who helped design the program, says one student keyed on that phrase in an earlier visit.
“It was someone well-versed in art history who knew what it was like for Basquiat to sell his own artwork, and [the student] talked about obnoxious liberals as people who might buy artwork and turn it from something special into something commonplace,” Lorey says.
“That’s not my take, but what I love about this program is that … there are no wrong answers. They respond to what they see, their interpretation of it, and that’s what we want.”