Marit Dewhurst: Making MOMA's In the Making

As an associate educator for high school programs for the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York, doctoral student Marit Dewhurst, Ed.M.’03, knows the importance of art, how it can impact high school students lives, and change the course of their futures.

“There is something unique about the arts that allows people to engage in the world in a different way — imagine a new reality,” she says. “Today, we think globally about problems in the community and art gives us a space to voice ideas and engage in the world without being shut down by the system.”

After a college internship at the museum during her days as an Arts in Education master’s student, Dewhurst designed MOMA’s In the Making — a free museum program that draws 75 high school students from throughout New York City for six weeks each summer to experience art in different capacities. Now, Dewhurst spends her days as a summer coordinator, engaging with high school students on the brink of discovering themselves through the arts.

Students who apply and are accepted to the program spend their summer studying film and video, printmaking, design, architecture, or contemporary art in and out of the classroom. The program provides an opportunity for students to experiment and learn about the arts, but also develop ideas. “The process of making art can honor a voice, an idea, and allows students to be the experts,” Dewhurst says. “It’s about their own ideas and the creation of knowledge, but also about what the world could be and how their art can transform it.”

Through Dewhurst’s experience at MOMA, she’s discovering that art can give students space to be successful and to engage with complex ideas about identity, politics, society, and art itself. “We get a lot of students who struggle in standard academic areas, but then come alive here. It sounds cliché, but art allows a different way of thinking,” she says. Now, in its fourth year, many In the Making alums are in college and often come back to share stories with Dewhurst,  some even handing her their résumés with interest in interning at the museum.

The impact of In the Making has prompted Dewhurst to research more about how art is transforming students’ lives today, especially considering the rigid academic focus in schools.

“Schools are struggling right now and a lot of the shift toward a focus on math and science is wonderful — those are important skills — but sometimes they can invalidate a student’s experience and opportunity to express [him or herself],” she says. “The arts are a place where students can be creative, express ideas, engage with each other, grapple with complex ideas, and feel that their ideas have some value and meaning. As schools shift away from students as active participants in their own learning, museums and the arts become places where activist learning can happen.”

This fall Dewhurst will begin exploring more deeply how art affects students. As part of her dissertation research, she plans to use qualitative research methods to create portraits of five to six young artists through observations, in-depth interviews, and visual ethnography to explore how these young artists see the connection between their participation in the arts and social change.

“I’ve seen work done with high school students that can convey very complicated ideas or allows space to grapple with huge community or social problems through the arts that students aren’t able to do in conventional models of education,” she says. “I’m hoping that through conversations with some of these young artists I will gain a better understanding of the role of the arts in creating educational spaces for wider social change.”