Austin Museum Of Art

Plenty of things for teens to do in Austin

In some places, being a teen in the summer means flipping burgers, flirting at the pool, sitting on your car hood in front of 7-Eleven and saying "I'm bored." But Austin teenagers are offered a veritable feast of incredibly cool classes. Like urban art and trapeze, clay animation and parkour. So in addition to the other amazing things to do, like tubing and festivals and volunteering, it's just a great city in which to be a teenager.

The Dougherty Arts Center started offering teen workshops last year but keeps adding to its program. This year, teens can still sign up for classes including mixed-media sculpture in which students make sculptures out of several different materials. There's digital animation, fashion design, performance art and they're even gearing up for guerrilla performance art where teens disperse in a crowded place and freeze, or begin to dance in a way that seems spontaneous and baffles the crowd.

"We have the classes in labs taught by working artists," said Teruka Nimura, culture and arts education specialist. "We go beyond the basics, using special materials and innovative techniques ... . We expand the idea of what the mediums are."

The urban art class, for example, will make a spray-painted mural on the back of the building with the help of a master of fine arts student from the University of Texas who is a local graffiti celebrity. The classes run from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. every day for one to two weeks. Most cost about $100 per week.

For artistic teens with a bent toward film, there's the 9th annual Summer Film Camp put on by the Austin Film Festival's Young Film Makers Program. The camp, held at Austin High, includes classes on making films using clay animation, making comedy short films and taking a film from script to screen including script writing, direction, camera operation, editing and sound.

Most of the classes are $200 to $400 with discounts for Austin Film Festival Members and staff and faculty of Austin Independent School District and current Austin High students. Classes run half-day Monday through Friday. Script to Screen is an all-day program.

For students more physically inclined, former Ringling Brothers performer Russell Codona Torretto has started Trapeze Austin inside the SoccerZone facility at 9501 Manchaca Road. Students begin learning one trick, to hang from their knees and swing to someone who catches them in midair. The trick takes a two-hour, $75 class to learn, and students go up a half-dozen times before mastering it. If students go back, they advance based on what tricks they can do.

Austin Museum of Art: Crunching the Numbers, Part II

For each article, I comb through the 990s of Texas art institutions between 2004 and 2009 and try to make sense of their finances. I’m reconstructing a story from numbers filed with the IRS, so take all my data and conclusions with a grain of salt. Should my analysis need correction by someone with more intimate knowledge of the organizations, I would welcome it. The first article in the series considered Arthouse and the Dallas Contemporary alongside the San Jose ICA. Here, I discuss AMOA and use the Tucson Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville as comparison cases. In the third and final article, I’ll look at the Contemporary Art Museum of Houston alongside the Museum of Contemporary Art St. Louis and the Contemporary Art Center New Orleans. on May 26), the resulting organization will be have assets of somewhere around $40 or $50 million. That’s the size of Los Angeles’ MOCA, but without the collection to match. The non-collecting Aldrich Contemporary might be the most apt comparison to the potential Arthouse-AMOA museum; it doesn’t have the huge building and collection that distinguish most other museums. What the newly formed institution would do with its resources remains to be explained. Education—including the art school at Laguna Gloria —has been equally if not more important than exhibitions to AMOA’s mission, and the production and exhibition of really new triennial. Arthouse, on the other hand, has focused on exhibiting new work by international and emerging artists. Its small education programs focus on teens, the demographic least served by AMOA’s programs. In addition, the “publics” to which the two organizations have catered has been completely different over the past decade. AMOA’s public has been primarily regional, even local and primarily families. Arthouse’s public has been “the art world” (artists, curators, collectors and arts supporters) state-wide and nationally. I guess if the new organization were to meet half way between where AMOA and Arthouse are now, it would exhibit not-too-contemporary contemporary art and cater primarily to a state-wide audience.