Art Zines & Artist Talk at FPC

A Zine a Day

Fort Pierce Central High School Visual Art teacher Ms. Emily Royo hosted a recent artist talk with Florida Designer Naomi Taher and her drawing students. Aligned with Florida’s Sunshine State Standards, Ms. Royo infuses relevant context, and contemporary practices, and introduces local artists. Taher and Royo are FAU alumni and former classmates. Currently a Senior Graphic Designer at FAU, Taher frequently works with Zines, 2D collages that combine text and imagery layered on folded papers. Zines are mini-collections of art and visual journals that collect personal thoughts for visual expression. Taher trades her Zines with friends or keeps them if they serve as personal, sentimental capstones of her life and experiences. The subject matter is always different, witty, or “silly” as she claims. Taher used humor as a way to “scream her thoughts” as she appeals to readers and viewers while encouraging students to do the same.

During the artist talk, senior Audysee Gilles asked Taher “What was your first zine?” Taher went on to explain how she started her zine journey as personally as possible, with the usual humor that she uses today. Her first zine was a zine about various hardships she was facing and used memes as a vehicle for humor and content. In one example Taher explained: “At another point in time, I was having a horrible time with my teeth and I disliked dentist visits because they caused me nothing but pain.” Taher used memes to cushion tragic content, explaining that it wasn’t a “cohesive thought” and zines don’t have to be.

Taher ended the talk with valuable advice about approaching zines as research papers. “Any piece of paper you have that you come across and you have a thought, write it down. Keep sketchbooks. Write everything down. It could just be words, and the words don’t necessarily have to make sense to anybody else, but as long as they make sense to you, that’s great.” Taher shared her included works.

• Develop skills, techniques, and processes as they strengthen their abilities to focus, remember, and process sequence information (VA.912.S.2), while using information resources to develop concepts (VA.912.s.2.4), and incorporate skills, concepts, and media to create images from ideation to resolution (VA.912.S.2.6).
• Assess their own and others’ artistic work, using critical-thinking, problem-solving, and decision-making skills, as being central to artistic growth (VA.912.C.2)
• Examine and revise artwork throughout the art-making process to refine work and achieve artistic objectives (VA.912.C.2.1)
• Investigate the process of developing a coherent, focused concept in a body of work comprised of multiple artworks (VA.912.C.2.6).
• Create works of art that include symbolism, personal experiences, or philosophical view to communicate with an audience (VA.912.O.3.1).
• Create a series of artworks to inform viewers about personal opinions and/or current issues (VA.912.O.3.2).