Jen Delos Reyes

Jen Delos Reyes is an artist of sorts, educator, writer, and radical community arts organizer. She is defiantly optimistic, a friend to all birds, and proponent that our institutions can become tender and vulnerable.

Her classroom project, The Ghosts of Arts Schools Past, invites students to research and then embody the pedagogies of influential historical art schools for a haunted house Halloween party. Student Umi Chun created a headstone for Immaculate Heart College.  Fusing an event with production, research, celebration and play echoes elements of Corita’s teaching practice.

Delos Reyes created attendance prints for each student and requested that students put their phones done on their assigned prints before class.  She notes, “Presence is care.  In my classroom if students are in class but on their phone I call that a digital absence. . . I feel all members of the class should give the full attention, care and support to the artists sharing their work.”