Artist Discussion with Jay Youngdahl

"What Did You Do In School Today?"

Join Artist Jay Youngdahl as he discusses his art exhibit "What Did You Do In School Today?", displayed in near the Lucky Day Lobby.

About the exhibition:
What causes us to think what we think? One major influence is what we learn in school.
 
This exhibition considers the effects of textbooks on students, like artist Jay Youngdahl, who attended Little Rock Public Schools in the 1960s. In Little Rock, and spurred by the Civil Rights movement, issues of race were a constant part of life for the city’s African American community, and also for a middle-class white boy like Youngdahl. He writes, “While our schools were slightly integrated, our textbooks taught us that life under slavery bordered on the idyllic, where slaves ‘knew their place.’ But that after the conclusion of the Civil War, former slaves were ‘idle, penniless, lawless; they stole, plundered, [and] burned houses’ we were taught.” Youngdahl features textbooks used in Little Rock public schools during the mid-Twentieth Century, and via photography, collage, and sculpture, considers ways that what we are taught in schools has a lasting effect on people in adulthood.
 
About the artist:
Jay Youngdahl grew up in Little Rock, Arkansas.  He currently lives and works between New York and St. Petersburg, Florida. Youngdahl received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2022, a Masters in Divinity from Harvard University in 2007, and a law degree from the University of Texas at Austin in 1981. Mainly working in text, collage, photography, and extended media, his practice can be described as “participatory action art.” Taking inspiration from his life experiences as a union and civil rights lawyer in the South and Southwest, he produces conceptually oriented art exhibitions on contemporary themes.

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