This article appeared as "Organic Stories" in the Spring 2023 issue of Independent School.No one at Awty International School (TX) knew what to expect when they invited artist and visual anthropologist Marlon Hall to be an artist in residence. School leaders just asked that he work with students to create projects that would reflect the school’s students and the broad mix of people in its hometown of Houston. Pictured at left: Artist in Residence Marlon Hall photographed students and displayed the large-format images—like the one at left—throughout the school as part of an exhibit called “Right Next to You.”
“Our school is very diverse, so we wanted to explore that and create experiences and programs that welcome cultural differences—and see them as a path to make a difference in the world,” says Tom Oden, head of secondary school at Awty, who was familiar with Hall and his work. “The goal is to move the conversation forward from diversity, which is a condition, to cultural authenticity, which is a way a being.”
Hall created three projects during his 10-week residency during spring 2022 organized around the idea of an ecotone—a word combining “eco” from the Greek “dwelling place” and “tonos” from the Greek “tension” used to describe an ecosystem between two adjoining ecosystems. “The ecotone is a shared habitation that grows in the tension between one way of life and another,” Oden explains. “[Hall’s] premise is that because they are often messy or muddy, we overlook—or even avoid—these spaces when we should be peering deeply into them because they hold the source material for growth and transformation.”
During Hall’s residency, he asked second graders to identify items that their families valued and interview the oldest family member about it. One student chose his grandmother’s wedding ring, and another chose a frying pan that had been used by several generations and for important family functions. Hall then created a display with photos of the objects and QR codes that linked to the stories about them.
In the upper school, Hall videotaped students talking about their lives and their families and shot still photos for a project called “Right Next to You.” The photos were blown up to 4 feet and displayed prominently in stairwells, also with links to the audio of each student. Hall also worked with KRAMS, a student audio/visual group, to teach them about filmmaking basics and then used their video footage, to create a short film called The Ecotone of Awty.
Hall’s work with the students took place while there was still concern about COVID-19, so no live programming occurred, but he held Zoom artist talks for the school community and promoted ways for parents and staff to interact with the art.
“The thing that was really cool was the organic nature of it. We had him interpret this theme and our school, giving him an opportunity to live it,” Oden says. “If you give someone a script and they are carrying out an assignment, they respond to what you say. He was interpreting our context the way he saw it and giving us a fresh look at it.”
See more of this project online.
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