Much of my partnership with Holly focused on researching the CAG’s featured artists to write a Teachers Guide. Teachers guides are written to support high-school teachers to educate their students about the CAG’s artists, providing questions and workshops that enable accessible knowledge platforms for students to learn from. As Holly Schmidt’s position has taken over public programming for youth, much of her energy at the CAG goes in to writing teachers guides and other forms of youth programs. As as homage to Holly and the work that I have personally carried out researching the January exhibiting artist, Haroon Mirza, for the to-be written Teacher’s Guide, I’ve decided to write a mini teacher’s guide about Holly as an artist herself. I felt it would be an appropriate culmination of the work I pursued at my time at the CAG, and to gift Holly a break from writing the plethora of teacher’s guides about other artists with one about herself.

I started by researching Holly’s practice. What I found interesting about her work were parallel to the artist in resident at the CAG throughout my partnership, Keg De Souza. Similar to what I found incredibly interesting about Keg’s work, Holly’s practice very much focuses on creating participatory informal pedagogy, engaging discussions concerning sociopolitical contexts of elements in the changing urban landscape. In addition, likewise to Keg, Holly’s work often deals with food culture in these respects. The qualities of discussion, history, pedagogy, sociopolitical contexts, culture, and community I found were incredibly compelling, and influenced how I wanted to frame the teacher’s guide.

I framed the teacher’s guides in the same respects that the CAG organizes their teachers guides, giving a short description of the artist in relation to the contemporary art community and the CAG, and then pulling out key themes, key words that help contextualize the artists practice. As discussions surrounding food seemed to be predominate in Holly’s practice, I decided to make an homage to her practice, most specifically her project “Grow”, by creating a teacher’s guide/mini education about Holly’s personal favourite food- popcorn. The guide incorporates a brief introduction of Holly’s practice, the significance of her project “Grow”, and the socio-political history of popcorn to reflect Holly’s use of informal pedagogy. Throughout researching the history of popcorn, I’ve created key themes and words that contextualize popcorn’s history in similar ways the Teacher’s Guides function. “Grow”, a project whereby Holly and Othersites worked together functioned to prompt discussions about agriculture in the changing urban landscape of Vancouver. By engaging the community living in the Olympic village with building agricultural plots, discussions around the sociopolitical importance of community gardens in the changing urban space manifested out of this project. To reflect this project, I incorporated a knowledge guide to how to grow your own corn so that one could themselves “grow” their own popcorn. The elements I chose to bring together spoke to the implications of food culture, discussions, and sociopolitical contexts inherent in Holly’s work, and the pedagogy that relates to both Holly’s practice and the nature of the Teacher’s Guides. The components are of elements that deeply influenced my time at the CAG, and  frame the homage to this mini teacher’s guide/discussion about her own favourite food. It functions as a gift of “giving back to Holly” what she has so passionately provided for the community and contemporary art world throughout her own practice and position at the CAG.

To wrap this project up, Michele and I both agreed that our projects were in dialogue with each other. To sum up our time at the CAG, I think we can both agree that the strong factors we took away from our experience at the CAG was the importance of education, research, discussion, and most importantly- community, throughout the multifaceted engagements of Contemporary Art.