Salón Sala Salón (2014)

This project consists of physically exchanging a classroom from the José M. Labra public school with one of the neighboring Museum’s exhibition spaces. Students take their classes inside the museum, while an exhibition from the Museum’s collection is installed inside the school classroom. The building where the museum is located was once a school and was later restored and transformed into the Museum. As part of the exchange, a weekly creative workshop is offered to the students and teachers.

For five months, the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico (MACPR) in San Juan and the neighboring Rafael María de Labra School exchanged institutional spaces for the duration of Taller Vivo: Salón – Sala – Salón (Live Workshop: Classroom – Gallery – Classroom), a project created by artist Chemi Rosado-Seijo in collaboration with teacher Rita Duprey and the young students of the de Labra School.

The project explored the interconnected histories of both buildings, the roles each institution plays in the local community, and the intersection of contemporary art and public education in Puerto Rico. The project was on view in the MACPR exhibition gallery inside the Rafael María de Labra School until December 21, 2014.

I was interested in how architecture would affect the students’ experience, and how students would affect the museum experience. The museum became a more active space—filled with adolescents every day from 8:00 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Math, Science, and Spanish teachers used the artworks on view to teach their curricula. The museum lost its sepulchral silence and became a school again, which for me was surreal. Students reclaimed the old building: We literally opened a door and created a passageway between the institutions. The school gained a calm, reflective exhibition space, and museum visitors experienced daily life in a public school as they walked to see videos that would normally be displayed in a museum.

Rita Duprey, a Spanish teacher at the school, requested an artist intervention in her classroom, so I directed a weekly art workshop for her students, involving other artists and museum educators. We focused our conversations and drawing, collage, and sculpture projects on the museum building, as well as on language and mass media communications in Puerto Rico.

The immediate results were incredible. We formed working groups in which students chatted, proposed techniques, and then worked enthusiastically on their own creative projects with minimal input from me. One group made frottages of the names of past students carved into the museum’s bricks and wrote stories and plays imagining their possible lives. Another group wrote words and definitions from their everyday language on Post-it notes and created a community dictionary, which the museum will publish. By the end of the project, the students realized that they were artists too; our original perceptions of each other changed.

— As told to Cheryl Hartup

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