About the Educator Camp

NMWA’s virtual Educator Summer Camp is designed for all educators: schoolteachers, home school instructors, scout leaders, and more. We just ask that you come with your learners in mind and a playful spirit!

We will offer 1.5-hour sessions daily, Monday, July 21, through Friday, July 25. Sessions, inspired by the Art, Books, and Creativity (ABC) Institutes and NMWA’s collection, are hands-on, participatory, and fun. Sessions will explore NMWA’s collection and resources, introduce historical and contemporary women artists, and engage participants in experimental making and close looking.

Guest instructors include artists and educators from around the country. You will receive a recommended supply list, applicable digital resources, and a Zoom meeting link in advance of each session.

Register for one session or many depending on your interest and commitments.

Session participants can request certificates of completion reflecting total earned participation hours.

About the Program

Indigo Som’s workshop is based on their artists book, he likes you, a set of fortune tellers riffing on the cisheteronormative socialization of desire in preadolescent girls, which is on view in the current exhibition A Radical Alteration: Women’s Studio Workshop as a Sustainable Model for Art Making. The folded paper fortune teller (aka “cootie catcher”) is an interactive toy/game, divination tool, and widespread item of folklore that has persisted through many generations of children, inevitably carrying cultural messages along with it. When Indigo was in elementary school in the 1970s, mostly girls made fortune tellers, and the content was frequently about boys.

This workshop will explore childhood messages we received about gender, sexuality, romance and more, through the medium of the fortune teller. Writing exercises, group interaction, and simple image making/sourcing (e.g., drawing and collage) will create your personal fortune teller. You will also have the option to explore the fortune teller as a divination tool with any other content you prefer.

About the Artist Instructor

Indigo Som (she/they) is a Cantonese diaspora queer cis femme & a lifelong guest on Miwok & Ohlone lands. She cross-pollinates practices & communities of healing, nourishment & transformation. Some of these practices are dreamwork, divination, making & growing, organizing & stewardship, pleasure, magic, & meditation. Some of the communities they have nurtured in recent years include Chinese Medicine & Magic; Asian Diaspora Deep Refuge Sangha at East Bay Meditation Center; & a QTBIPOC cabin collective who rematriated the land to Sogorea Te’ Land Trust.

Indigo’s making process is emotionally & conceptually motivated, exploring identity, place, language, folklore, repetition/accretion, & the mundane. Perhaps her best-known work is her long-term Chinese Restaurant Project investigating relationships between Chinese restaurants & American identity.

Questions? Reach out to education@nmwa.org.