Animation
World Magazine, Issue 1.12, March 1997
 |
Excerpt from a film made by a student at Yellow Ball Workshop in 1970. © Yellow Ball Workshop. |
Yvonne Andersen:
Profile of a Pioneer
by Wendy Jackson
Yvonne Andersen
As an animation artist, teacher, filmmaker and
author, Yvonne Andersen has influenced the lives and work of hundreds of
people. From organizing exhibitions and experimental film screenings, to
teaching animation to children and adults at her Yellow Ball Workshop,
she has been a radical and innovative pioneer in everything she's done.
I spent some time talking with Yvonne and a few of her students and collaborators
to learn more about her fascinating life.
The Sun Gallery
In 1955, Yvonne Andersen and her husband, Dominic Falcone, opened The
Sun Gallery, a revolutionary art space on the tip of Cape Cod, in Provincetown,
Massachusetts. Set up in a storefront, and open only in the summertime,
the gallery featured weekly exhibitions of work by up and coming avant-garde
artists of the time. "Our goal was to find new artists, who possibly
hadn't had shows before, who had interesting work." Yvonne recollects.
Red Grooms, Lester Johnson, Robert and Mary Frank, Vera Williams, Tony
Vevers and Alex Katz were among the 100 artists who exhibited at The Sun
Gallery during its five year life span, 1955-59. Many of these went on
to have great renown and extensive careers in the art world. "I was
criticized for some of the people we gave first one-man shows to,"
she recalls, "but after the second year, everyone wanted to have a
show in our gallery, because people were becoming famous."
One such artist was Red Grooms, formerly known as Charles Rogers Grooms.
He adopted the nickname "Red" after being renamed for his first
one-man show at The Sun Gallery, and the name stuck with him. Today, Grooms
is a established New York artist, with paintings lithographs, sculptures
and other works selling for tens of thousands of dollars a piece. (Yvonne
recalls that they didn't sell a single piece at his first one-man show!).
"Yvonne Andersen was one of the paramount influences on my life as
an artist," Grooms said recently. "I was lucky enough to meet
Yvonne and Dominic upon my arrival in Provincetown the summer of 1957,
when their magical Sun Gallery was in full bloom. Yvonne not only showed
me the way to the future of art, she also taught me carpentry."
Brochure from The Provincetown
Art Association and Museum's 1981 retrospective of The Sun Gallery.
Events, Screenings and Installations
In addition to exhibitions of paintings,
sculpture, and other static works, The Sun Gallery was also host to events
such as installations, classes, performance art, and film screenings. "The
gallery was run almost like a theater," recalls Andersen. "We
didn't just have exhibitions, we had possibly the first environment."
One of the visiting artists was Alan Kaprow, an early pioneer in the American
performance art movement known for his "happenings." Grooms also
presented several performances in these years, of which he said "[I
was] plunging into the unknown, something existential, just letting it
happen. It was the opposite of literary theater; rough, crude, but stimulating."
At that time, Andersen was also presenting programs of experimental films
at night; she said that, "The film screenings were highly controversial.
Even in New York, people were hearing about what we were showing."
Renting 16mm prints from many now-defunct distributors like Brandon and
Contemporary Films, Andersen was disappointed by the limited selection
of animated films. She recalls, "I was always trying to get good variety
for my programs: documentary, fiction, maybe a few features, and animation.
But there wasn't too much high-quality animation. And what little there
was, was very expensive. That's when I said, 'Well, I'll just make some
stuff for the show.' I had never animated before. I couldn't even run a
movie projector." So, Yvonne invested in a camera and some equipment,
learning by trial and error. "I found out it wasn't quite as easy
as I thought it might be. But that's how I started." she adds.
The first film finished was Spaghetti Trouble, made together with
Red Grooms in 1963, and still in distribution by the Filmmaker's Co-op
in New York. From then on, she and Dominic went on to make many more films--several
in collaboration with Red Grooms, including Fat Feet, Meow, Meow
and Appolinaire Unexpected. Independently, and in collaboration,
Yvonne has produced more than nine shorts,, films, most recently We
Will Live Forever, an animated illustration of a poem by Dominic Falcone.
Yellow Ball Workshop: Accidental Beginnings
By 1960, Yvonne and Dominic had closed
the gallery and were raising their two children, Jean and Paul Falcone,
in Everett, Massachusetts. Thinking back to the beginnings of her teaching
activities, Yvonne recalls a seemingly unrelated incident. "We had
moved into a new apartment, and we had to get some furniture for it. My
mother-in-law knew this guy who tore down old buildings and schools, so
we went to get some used furniture. They had all these little children's
chairs, they were exquisite, and only 50 cents each. So I bought 8 of them,
took them home, and put them around the work table." Andersen had
always provided plenty of art supplies for her own children, who often
had friends over to make art projects. Soon enough, children were coming
to the house, asking to come in and play, even when her own children weren't
home. "The next thing I knew, there were always little people sitting
in those little chairs, using up my art supplies!" recalls Andersen.
"They were doing very good work, so I decided I might as well get
it organized." So, in 1963, the Yellow Ball Workshop was born when
Yvonne began offering art classes in her home, for two hours every Saturday,
charging each child only one dollar per lesson to cover the cost of supplies.
The evolution of the art classes into animation workshops was not something
that Yvonne had planned. "One day, I showed the students the film
that Red and I had made, and they wanted to make a film, too." she
recalls. "One of the boys had lots of good ideas, but he never really
made anything. So I said 'Well, you write a script and we'll do it.' The
next week the boy came in with a script. So there I was, I was stuck, we
had to do it!" The first film they made was The Amazing Colossal
Man, a group project with papier-mâché characters shot
in stop-motion on 16mm film.
Word spread about the animation workshops, and the class size tripled from
12 to 36. Yellow Ball films were screened with acclaim at universities
and festivals, a compilation of them winning first prize at the Rhode Island
Film Festival. The $300. in prize money enabled Yvonne to pay off the film
lab bills that had added up.
 |
Paul Falcone, age 6, working on Underwater Creatures. |
In The Public Eye
Before long, people were beginning to notice her and she was being approached in all directions. "I didn't know it at the time, but apparently nobody had done this before," Yvonne said, recalling the overwhelming attention that ensued. Schools and educational institutions began purchasing and renting the children's films. She appeared as a guest on the Mike Douglas Show and the Today show, and in 1970, she produced a 13 minute documentary for CBS television called Let's Make a Film. That same year, Yvonne was approached by two different publishers to write instructional books about animation, resulting in the publication of Make Your Own Animated Movies, written for children, and Teaching Film Animation to Children, done for adults. From 1973-77, Yvonne wrote a regular column on animation techniques for Super-8 Filmmaker Magazine.
All of this attention even led to commercial projects for Yvonne and her students, bringing in some money to finance the film, supplies and accumulating lab bills. Such kid-produced films that came out of Yellow Ball include four "peacock logo" spots for NBC, test commercials for Cheetos snacks, an educational series for Westinghouse, vignettes for the children's show, Hot Dog, and opening films for the White House conference on children.
Andersen's book published by Little,
Brown in 1991.
Expanding to venues outside of her home studio,
Yvonne began teaching more involved classes at elementary schools and community
centers, such as Project Incorporated in Cambridge. It was at the Newton
Creative Arts Center, where she taught a six-week summer class, that Yvonne
first met Amy Kravitz, one of several students who went on to careers in
animation. Amy recalls, "When I was a child in her class, one of the
most important things Yvonne did was take me seriously. She took all of
us seriously. She was direct, contained, structured and responsible. She
almost never praised us--she worked with us. She helped us make our ideas
concrete, to make things happen. Yvonne has the magic ability to make learning
exciting and gratifying."
Through a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, Yvonne was soon
traveling all over the country, offering three-month workshops in elementary
schools, sometimes bringing a teaching assistant with her to stay on longer.
In all, the films produced by Yvonne's young students have won more than
125 awards at international film festivals. In a review of a Yellow Ball
retrospective screening in The Village Voice, Jonas Mekas said, "The
feeling that comes through, the amazing strength and directness with which
children can catch a mood, a situation, their humor. Without any exaggeration,
these are about the best animated films made anywhere today."
In 1985 and 1987, once Yvonne was teaching at the college level, she traveled
to Armenia to work on a collaboration with an organization called International
Artists for Peace. Sixty American artists and children were sent to the
Soviet Union to create art projects in association with Armenian children
and artists. The resulting projects were A Drop of Honey andThe
Golden Ball, both short animated films based on Armenian folk tales.
While continuing with the classes for children, Yvonne began offering extended-period
courses for adults. Once a month, she offered three day intensive adult
workshops. "It started off with one person." recalls Anderson.
"A woman from a university in Pennsylvania called up and asked for
a private workshop." The rest is history. A wide variety of people
came to the weekend workshops for a variety of reasons: teachers, librarians,
people who worked in hospitals and maximum security reformatories, even
people sent by the State Department from Nigeria. Each of them took with
them an experience that they could then go and share with their own students.
In this way, Yvonne educated a whole new generation of educators, many
of whom are now teaching animation workshops of their own.
We Will Live Forever by Yvonne Andersen and Dominic Falcone.
Rhode Island School of Design
In 1979, Yvonne was invited to teach animation
part time at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), one of the premier art
institutions in the country. "At first I didn't think too much about
it," Yvonne said, "but then I realized it would present me with
an opportunity to stay in one place for once, instead of being on the road
all the time. So I did it." Five years later, she was brought on full
time, and served as head of the Film and Video Department for nine years.
As in the Yellow Ball days, Yvonne expects a lot from her students, and
she is recognized for her organized, almost militant teaching style. Even
in her first introductory animation courses at RISD, she taught sophisticated
filmmaking from day one, having her students make complete films, from
A/B rolling and negative cutting to sound design and answer printing. Shortly
after Yvonne started full time at RISD, Yvonne's former student/teaching
assistant Amy Kravitz joined the department; by then, she was a CalArts
graduate and award-winning independent filmmaker.
Today, RISD has one of the best fine art animation programs available,
with Yvonne teaching Introduction to Animation, Puppet Animation and Special
Effects courses, while Amy and her husband, Steve Subotnick, teach the
advanced and degree project courses. Every year, a new generation of animators
comes out of the program, armed with Yvonne's training and instilled with
her love for the art of animation. She gives her students something to
take with them. I should know . . . I'm one of them.
Books by Yvonne Andersen
Teaching Film Animation to Children (Van Nostrand Reinhold 1970)
Make Your Own Animated Movies and Videotapes (Little, Brown, 1991)
Make Your Own Animated Movies (Little, Brown, 1991)
Films by Yvonne Andersen
The Laundry, 3 minutes, 1962
One Hot Dog With Mustard, 12 minutes, 1962
Spaghetti Trouble, 2 minutes, 1963
Fat Feet, 20 minutes, 1966
Meow, Meow, 8 minutes, 1969
Let's Make A Film, 13 minutes, 1970
I Saw Their Angry Faces, 12 minutes, 1977
We Will Live Forever, 5 minutes, 1994
Many of the above and several reels of student films are available on film
and video from: Yellow Ball Workshop, 62 Tarbell Ave. Lexington, MA 02173
USA.
Just A Fishment of My Imagination by Carol Sones, age 16
Wendy Jackson is Associate Editor of Animation World Magazine, and is one of Yvonne Andersen's former students at the Rhode Island School of Design.
Back to the Table of Contents
Feedback?
Past Issues
[about | help
| home | info@awn.com
| mail | register]