As the art instructor of the group I took the role of the teacher who “teaches and the students are taught” (Freire, 2002, p. 73). In order to contradict this attitude of the banking concept, I wanted to provide a learner-focused pedagogy that gave a chance for the students to narrate and visualize their experience. What I wanted to focus on in my new art teaching approach was to center the students’ interests over my chosen content for them to discover their own voices and express themselves freely beyond achieving “good” technique. I found insights and inspiration for the new art teaching approach from a few contemporary artists. Those artists included Kimsooja, a South Korean conceptual artist, and Faith Ringgold, who draws upon the African American quilting tradition. These artists broke fresh ground for me to find subjects from the artists’ lived lives. They also helped me to realize the social issues that cause concerns for Kimsooja and Ringgold are ongoing processes that require people to constantly think and express themselves to make positive progress. I thought about my students’ concerns which originated from their language barriers and cultural differences and how the students wished to be free of those struggles. While appreciating the artworks of Kimsooja and Ringgold, I found their concerns became the subject of their artwork and the voices of the artists were turned into a valuable resource and created connections with the viewers. Their ideas were shared and expressed in their artwork while generating dialogues between the viewers and the artwork. The concerns and ideas no longer remained within the artists; it was shared to the viewers through freshly built connections. The artwork of Kimsooja and Ringgold broadened my horizon to recognize that the daily challenges and struggles of the students of Chicago Moms Art are not something to conquer but to be expressed and shared with others.

Many of Kimsooja’s works are rooted in Korean traditional color patterns, the red, green, yellow, blue, white, and black called Obangsaek, and her stories of immigration. Her effort to understand “the universal tension between perpetual displacement and the desire to preserve an element of familiarity” (Kimsooja, n.d.) was manifested in a video work called Bottari Truck - Migrateurs. Kimsooja sits on the top of a truck full of bottaris—“bundles” in Korean—as she traverses the streets from Vitry to Paris, encountering historic immigration landmarks in France. Each bottari is packed with used clothes that Kimsooja collected while thinking of the absent people who have worn them. On her website, a description on the video said “the clothes she transports become invisible bodies, representative of the different populations living in the area, and carrying within them the memories of lives and absences” (Kimsooja, n.d.). As the bottari, echoes the life of the artist, who has been “a nomad since her early childhood.” I was intrigued by how she uses her past experience and integrates it into her symbolic journey. Her work also suggests the contemplation on the matter is ongoing and progressive. She presented her concerns on invisible and forgotten immigrant communities in this performance while metaphorically advocating that bringing attention to these communities is an ongoing process until we arrive at a destination. Kimsooja opened up possibilities for me, giving me a new way of expressing one’s lived experience other than through paintings and carrying the thought of the moment into the journey of life that continues to progress and change.