TAUB BECAME Executive Director in November 2000, two months before the warehouse was moved from Chelsea to Long Island City.
With her experience as MFTA’s liaison between DOE and Project ARTS, Taub had the unique outreach experience to know the difficulty of convincing teachers of the virtue of MFTA’s nontraditional supplies. “They’d ask ‘where are all the watercolors?’” recalled Taub, “we had great stuff, but they just didn’t know how to incorporate these supplies into their classroom curriculum.” She knew the key to demonstrating MFTA’s value would be to educate teachers on the variety of available uses of nontraditional materials.
One way to do this was by conducting workshops for teachers. Along with Joy Suarez, a talented teaching artist and seasoned MFTA shopper, Taub brought bags of materials to teachers all over the City to get them excited about creative reuse. Their dream of creating an Education Center at Materials for the Arts was about to come true.
