Leah Schreiber

Visual A-i-R at MPS

My latest adventure as an Artist-in-Residence has very recently begun at 65th Street School on Milwaukee’s north side. For the Summer Recreation Enrichment Camps, in partnership with Milwaukee Public Schools, I will be working for the Summer 2010 season as Visual Artist in Residence. This fun and important opportunity will get me working hands-on with over 150 local kids a day, making mixed media artworks that will reflect a playful look at important modern and contemporary artists, from Japser Johns to Andy Goldsworthy.

To find out more about the program, you can go to: www.milwaukeerecreation.net/srec/

Public Lecture at AGSL

Daily Navigation, an Artist Lecture by Leah Schreiber

When: Wednesday, January 28, 2009
4:00pm
Where: The American Geographical Society Library
Golda Meir Library, 3rd Floor

Leah Schreiber, graduate student at the Peck School of Visual Art on the campus of UW-Milwaukee will be presenting an artist lecture in correspondence with her recent drawing installation, Daily Navigation, made over the course of her position as the Artist-In-Residence at the American Geographical Society Library, which began in September of 2008, and of which this lecture marks the closing.

Artist Leah Schreiber, Lecture at AGSL

Pathways and Patterns

Daily Navigation Poster

Floor Shots

Here are some views of my project, Daily Navigation, a site-specific drawing installation at American Geographical Society Library, on view from Nov 2008-March, 2009.

Daily Navigation Installation Process

From the end of November 2008 through mid-January 2009, I worked on the installation of the data drawings, sewing the pathways into the AGSL carpet using a curved needle and crochet thread.  

The Materials

AGS Librarians

Once I had the patterns of the individual librarians delineated, I wanted to find out what color thread they wanted to represent them in the work. After they had chosen, I created a set of small colored buttons that represent each of the librarians’ thread colors.

Data Selection

After getting a good look at the collected graphic data, I had to decide what it was that I wanted to represent in my final installation. Knowing that my plan was to sew the lines of recorded movement into the carpet, I had to consider how much of that data I could include, and how I wanted to select that data from my collection.    

I finally decided that I would analyze the data of the librarians individually, by pulling their movements from the color-coded maps I had already drawn, finding their individual patterns. I could then simplify the total data by only using the repeated movements, thereby showing the patterns of each of the librarians over the course of the “average work day”. Here are each of the floor plan drawings that show the repeated patterns of movement by individual librarians.

Compiling the Data

Once I had the data from a full work day of observation, I thought it would be important to see what a whole day looked like. After scanning the data sheets/mapped floor plans, I used Photoshop to create a view of the data compiled.