Blog – Art in Odd Places

By Matthew Morowitz

“Kite Collective logo”, photo courtesy of The Kite Collective.

To say The Kite Collective goes wherever the wind may take them may seem like a bad pun but the statement is entirely apropos to their activities at this particular time. While members Lee and Paolo are in New York handling activities in the city and continuing the Kite Relief efforts, Zebediah and Whitney have been in contact mainly through email, as Whitney is currently in Chicago working on getting a kite machine set up there this summer. Through Kickstarter donations and running different workshops, The Kite Collective has been able to bring the world of kite flying to the general public and, as mentioned above, are expanding their efforts to other cities and places outside of the East Coast.

Although the collective was kind enough to answer some questions via email, after having had a chance to speak with Whitney, I was surprised to learn about the greater kite community, which she described as “bigger than I anticipated initially, not one you come across on a daily basis unless you are seeking it out.” While Whitney has found the kite community to be an aging one, she was surprised to find that the collective has taken on an accidental role in getting younger people interested in making and flying kites. From this niche community, the American Kitefliers Association and the Drachen Foundation have been the most helpful to the Kite Collective, even though both are based out of the West Coast (Portland and Seattle respectively). Whitney was shocked to find such a large kite community in Chicago, admitting that the NY presence has not been as “vibrant” as what she has found on the West Coast and in the Midwest, but the collective has been working on getting more East Coast fliers involved and has found them to be very receptive to their overtures. Yet, despite a larger community existing out west, the collective has no definite plans of relocating and foresee themselves staying in the east as “that’s where our roots are,” but as each of the members have been moving in different directions (although Paolo has no plans to leave NY, Whitney is currently working on a move out west and Lee has been undertaking her own projects in South America, documenting the process of kite making in other parts of the world) they can’t definitely say whether or not it will remain there over time.

“Trade School Kite Class,” photo courtesy of The Kite Collective.

Whitney is excited to see where the next 5 years will take The Kite Collective, as it has already gone a lot further than any of the members expected when they first started making kites.

“It’s just really nice to have the opportunity to share a passion like kite flying with others. It’s easy to get lost in our own daily activities and to let go by flying kites with others. It’s a really nice way of building friendships that you would not normally anticipate.”

The collective is made up of very passionate people and their efforts, along with their supporters, are only growing and with their commitment to promoting kite making and flying, hopefully the skies of NYC will become a lot more colorful. Below are the questions the whole collective had answered via email, as well as some information regarding their current appearance in the Hester Street Fair.

AiOP: How did The Kite Collective come together?

Whitney: We are all very curious by nature. The seed was planted one summer’s day on Coney Island while flying store-bought, factory-made kites that required us to assemble the kites blindly. Mine was the only kite that survived assembly. I was being unusually patient after seeing the havoc reeked on the others due to sheer frustration and confusion. Lee took this experience home and began making kites. The rest is history.

Lee: I rediscovered my love for kites while backpacking in Argentina. Kids made kites out of plastic bags and flew them on the mountain-side for hours. They used the resources around them to amuse themselves. Inspired, and with a ton of discarded windbreakers that I acquired while at fashion school, I started playing around with different kite designs. After months of testing and lots of help from my friends, the mysteries of the kite were solved. This is how the collective formed.

Zebadiah: I met Lee after teaching a screen printing workshop held by the Gowanus Print Lab and Etsy. At the time, the Kite Collective was a vision Lee was passionate about; I recognized her sincerity. When I was approached about helping test kites, the kinship felt between creatives compelled me to lend a hand.

Paolo: I arrived a little later after the founding of the Kite Collective by Lee and Whitney.

Whitney: Paolo became involved at the beginning of this year when I introduced him to Lee. They had an immediate connection and started making kites together in Paolo’s apartment in Greenpoint. Paolo was the one that got the microkites staying up in the air, which is a big deal!

Paolo: When I met Lee, I had never actually made or flown a kite successfully. Within a week from our second meeting, we successfully fixed the prototype of the microkites and went into production, making more than 600 of them in the following 3 months.

“Kite Collective at Green Oasis and Gilbert’s,” photo courtesy of Shani Patel.

AiOP: What drew you all to kite making?

Whitney: The rhythm and sensory experience. When I make a kite, I feel like I’m breathing into a familiar but forgotten set of lungs. Also, I love to play and tinker, and it’s a wonderful gateway to creating a reality of magic, beauty and dreaming. Numerous traditions have interpreted kites as externalized extensions of the soul, which I find deliciously comprehensible.

Lee: It’s a meditation both making and flying them. Some Buddhist traditions say that women come from the sky and men come from the earth. I figure maybe that’s conducive to my love for making them; it’s very grounding.

Zebadiah: I hadn’t flown a kite since I was a child, so there was a sense of mystery, magic and wonder about flying. What really attracted me was the other members’ philosophy: focusing on meditation, gratitude, awareness, kindness, compassion – for human beings and the earth itself. I believe these to be the highest values one can have; the Collective drew a link between these beliefs and the act of flying a kite, which I thought was an incredible way to connect and share with the community.

“Kite Collective Studio,” photo courtesy of The Kite Collective.

AiOP: What inspired the Kite Machine Project? Will you be expanding locations in the near future?

Whitney: The Kite Machine Project was inspired by musings on the ordinary. Most often we see consumable, profit-driven and disposable objects for purchase inside vending machines. The Kite Machine reimagines this exchange by offering a whimsical, familiar object made with love and care that will stand the test of time. On the practical side, the Kite Machine allows us to share our love of kites without requiring our physical presence and, by design, lends itself to be a breathing grown-up project with a life beyond its creators. Yes, we are in the process of location scouting for 2012 and beyond!

Lee: The Kite Machine is also a way to make kites accessible to people. When you fly a kite, you want to share it with others, and the happiness spreads.

“Kite Machine,” photo courtesy of The Kite Collective.

AiOP: Describe the playlabs; what is the atmosphere of these classes? What do you hope to achieve through teaching people about kite making?

Whitney: The atmosphere changes with the environment of each playlab. The objective of the playlabs is to capture the wonder and tickle the curiosities experienced when we learn a new skill, exercise our creative energies and let our inner child roam free. The underlying result is sparking a community built on the ideals of creativity, craftsmanship, skill-sharing and the energy and growth spawned by playfulness and experimenting. I can wholeheartedly say that with these objectives of the playlabs felt in heart and mind, the atmosphere generated is one of openness, heightened energy and a sense of satisfaction.

Lee: Through teaching kite-making, we hope to show how something as simple as making a kite can provide a deep kind of satisfaction that doesn’t come from giving in to consumer culture. Living in such a place as New York City where there is so much excess, we lean toward using recycled synthetic materials like used windbreakers to make kites with and this can help break old patterns of consumption.

Whitney: Yeah, the concept of resourcefulness is a major component of the playlabs.

“Built in Brooklyn Craft Fair Workshop,” photo courtesy of The Kite Collective.

AiOP: How has the Kite Relief impacted support efforts for hurricane relief in Rockaway? Has this experience helped inspire any future projects or directions the collective might pursue?

Lee: Kite Relief happened as a natural reflex to the disaster in Rockaway. Paolo and I were at a meditation retreat when Sandy hit and we came back to this chaotic, instinctive effort to get everyone what they needed in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. It was awesome to see the community coming together in such a natural way to help out. The Kite Collective was involved in relief at the grassroots level, distributing basic necessities such as cleaning supplies and food at a relief center near the old Kite Machine post. Once those basic needs were met, we started giving out kites and kite-making kits to create a diversion for people and teaching kite-making classes.

Whitney: Our mission as a whole is to offer an outlet or escape for people. The other day, Paolo said that in Italian the word relief carries more of a sense of “diversion” or “change.” Being able to offer a lending hand in both the practical sense of clean up and rebuilding and in the more intangible sense of offering a creative outlet in a time of distress is second nature. The latter is an often overlooked, undeniably necessary form of relief to breathe life back in an area that was devastated.

Zebadiah: We were welcomed into the Rockaway community so warmly with the launch of the Kite Machine and our events on the Boardwalk. Like Lee, I felt a desire to lend a hand to a community that treated us so kindly. After volunteering in general relief efforts – cleaning basements, moving debris, delivering food – I realized that what the community also needs is something immaterial; a boost to flagging spirits – hope. As an artist and a teacher I have seen time and time again that creativity and imagination can ignite the soul and illuminate meaning and purpose for individuals and groups alike. Kite-making workshops serve that purpose, giving freedom of thought and spirit, along with a sense of empowerment to those who participate. This idea has inspired me to begin arranging classes that focus on storytelling through drawing in the Rockaways. The goal is to give people a chance to share their voice with the larger community.

“Kite Relief poster,” photo courtesy of The Kite Collective.

AiOP: What types of projects and events does The Kite Collective have planned for the future?

Whitney: We want to continue installing Kite Machines and spreading kite magic in other creative ways. I’m in Chicago right now and am working on getting a machine running here. Lee is going down to South America to work on a Kite Collective film project this winter. The sky is the limit, literally.

Lee: Right now we have an installation of “relief kites” in Room 2C at the Hester Street Fair, 233 Mott St. NYC. It runs through the month of December and concludes with a kite-making workshop at the market on December 23rd at 5pm. (http://www.hesterstreetfair.com/)

By Matthew Morowitz

New York City, with its leading institutions of higher learning and wide array of museums dedicated to culture and the arts, offers a large variety of educational opportunities for the aesthetically minded. But auditing university courses can be expensive and museum lectures can sometimes go over the heads of the audience members. Many might also feel that they are not receiving a very personalized or hands-on education by taking these types of classes. In this series, “Guerilla Academia,” Art in Odd Places will be highlighting different organizations and individuals who are offering innovative and engaging art education opportunities outside of the traditional venues of the university and the museum.

Gene Wisniewski: The Six-Hour Art Major

Described as “a concentrated seminar in visual art” by his brochure, Gene Wisniewski’s Six Hour Art Major “is geared toward anyone with an interest in visual art or creativity in general. Even those with an arts background will find opportunities to explore fascinating new insights.” Mr. Wisniewski’s course involves lectures geared towards art history and art appreciation, as well as hands-on drawing exercises so students develop an understanding of the art making process. As it is a basic survey, no previous art education or training is required to take this seminar. Included below, Mr. Wisniewski answered some questions that delve deeper into the course, how it came to be, what to expect, and where to take it.

How did you come up with The Six-Hour Art Major?

I started as theater major at Rutgers, but took a couple of art classes, some with Leon Golub, who was a big deal. I started studying art in the late 80s and early 90s at the New York Art Academy and National Academy of Design, mostly nights and weekends while working for a living. I worked as an administrator in offices and different companies until the financial crisis, where I became unemployed and couldn’t find work for two years. Then I decided “I’d rather work for nobody for myself than work for nobody period.” This was 2008-2010. I credit the idea of the Six-Hour Art Major to a chance meeting with an LA acting teacher on the bus who encouraged me to pursue creating this seminar. I spent two years researching the material for this, which is as much time that goes into writing a thesis. I am going to make a book out of it.

What need do you hope your program will fulfill?

The course is meant to give people the experience of what it’s like to go to art school so they can go to a museum or gallery and look at art and be able to understand it more on their own. I want them to understand what goes into making a piece of art, knowing the artist’s hand through looking at the strokes, to understand it the way an artist would. They do a few drawing exercises, they get a brief rundown of art history, and there is a whole section on how to look at a painting from an artist’s standpoint, what an artist thinks about. I have exercises that are specifically geared towards how to understand the differences between doing realistic art and doing abstract art because I think there are different mindsets. When people say “this course really opened my eyes” or “I’m going to look at art a completely different way now” then it feels like I accomplished what I set out to do.

What are your classes usually like?

Generally get more women than men and a lot of teachers. Some of the people I have taught have had advanced degrees in things like creative studies so those classes are a little intimidating. It’s very conversational and very relaxed. It’s a lot of give and take. It’s essentially a Powerpoint presentation, and there are a lot of images of about a couple hundred different paintings because each one is supposed to represent a very specific point. For example, if I am talking about economy of line I show them a Toulouse-Lautrec and a logo and a cartoon for a few seconds in order to get the point across, and there is a lecture that goes along with it. They also get some basic drawing exercises, essentially pencils and crayons, but they’re legitimate exercises for teaching the students something about art and they get some hands on education.

How are you working to find new material and to update your course?

Part of it is when things just don’t work I eject them. Also, a lot of it comes from class suggestions. People are encouraged to ask questions and I like when people throw in information because then I get to learn from my students and if I can’t answer some of their questions it gives me something to look up. It helps the program expand and I am able to make it more interesting. I am afraid sometimes that this seminar is going to get out of hand as it has grown in length.

How is the timeframe of the course broken down?

I try to make it worth the travel time and do two 3-hour sessions; it is really like a part 1 and a part 2 so that works out very well. The first part is more about the drawing and the creativity part, while the second is the appreciation and the history. I wish people would do it in one 6-hour session but I think that is too much of a demand, and nobody has ever taken me up on that offer. It varies though; at one place I am going to do a 4 ½ hour session, as that is just how their schedule works out, so I am going to do it in one day with a lunch break in between. The course is very modular and adaptable; I can cut some information if the need arises. Since it is done in units I can in some cases just do a 1-hour talk on, for example, the art history alone, or take it out altogether and the program still stands with or without some material that I include in the full 6-hour seminar.

What venues do you use for this seminar?

I teach at the 92^nd St. Y, JCC Manhattan, city colleges, adult education programs, therapy centers and health facilities, and it is offered privately and for corporate events as well.

For further information, or to arrange a booking, contact Gene Wisniewski at 917-566-8390, or gene@genewisniewski.com.

The Kite Collective: An up-in-the air effort that’s very down to earth

Guerilla Academia: art education without accreditation