Week Fifteen and Sixteen

​These past two weeks have been a blur as we have finished up multiple projects, gone on a field trip, made more progress on our ArtPrize piece, and planning our big Art show. I can only assume the rest of the year is going to fly by like this as we get closer and closer to exams and the BIG celebration in New York City for Scholastic! 

Objects Complete

Last week, students finished up their objects projects and posted the results on Artsonia. It was fun to see how they interpreted the assignment and even better was that many of them tried new media in new ways because they could not use materials they had used before. 

For the past four years at least one of our National Scholastic Medalists' works have been a result of this prompt. I think the main reason for this is that when you are forced to go outside of your comfort zone with new media, you are more willing to try creative risks you might have otherwise avoided. 

Here are some examples of the creative risks students came up with for this assignment:

Avery: For this project I created a bracelet made of many different materials. By using wire, magazine clippings, and clay I was able to compose a decorative wrist piece. This bracelet connects to the project theme because jewelry is often used as family heirlooms and can be very sentimental. I also based my artwork after Mitchell Feinburg's work because he uses ordinary objects and hides a deeper meaning within them. This bracelet has many hidden meanings such as, diversity, awareness, and recycling. By creating this artwork I hoped to show that even small objects can make a difference or impact people's lives.

Chelsea: For the projects “Objects” I chose to do a tray of sushi because it is one of my favorite foods. The sushi rolls are made out of felt and wool to add texture to make them look real. The tray is made out of clay and it has flower designs to make it look more realistic. My artwork relates to Mitchell Feinberg because I used a 3D material and made a piece of food. Mitchell also had art focused on food. I liked doing this art project because I got to work with new materials.

Gabby: For this project I chose to choose an object that means something to me that was given to me from my grandma. In order to execute this I chose to block print to put an emphasis on the necklace and my grandma passing it down to me. This piece relates to both Jim Dine's robe piece because of all the different lines making up the art and also Mitchell Feinberg's piece where he imprinted bags and other objects into flower just like with what you do when block printing.

Aron: I took some paper and put it in a plastic mask face thing. Then I drowned it in glue, and after a few days of waiting I got a mask. After that I took a piece of paper, painted it red, cut it into shapes, took a reflective sheet, cut some shapes, and glued it together with the red paper. After that I glued it all together, after hole punching spaces to put yarn, so that the mask would be wearable. I believe this artwork is sort of like Audrey Flack because she uses a lot of color in her work, and I believe that this mask uses color.

Olivia: For this artwork I created my own scratch art paper and scratched out my glasses onto it. To do this I used oil pastel and drew my image out with that. Then I painted black tempera paint over this and because water and oil resist I was able to scratch off the the paint. Now you can see the image of my glasses with scratched designs. This artwork relates to the theme of objects because it shows an object but in a fun way. My piece relates to the works of Wayne Thiebaud who draws lots of objects but in simple ways that interest you.

Madeline: I like to make things that is out of the box, not just a typical painting, even though those can still be powerful. Gumball machines are in lots of stores and it seems like they are never empty, yet many people get them. I chose this material because it helps convey the message that every quarter you leave behind for the gumball, helps the store that it is in. Like Mitchell Feinberg my art shows things that get left behind but, in his picture of cigarettes that shoes how they effect the earth. In my artwork the quarters help the earth, so in a way they have the same idea of things getting left behind.

Caden:I used block printing for the first time. This technique was good for making the object pop out at the viewer. I carved out a block and applied paint to it. Then I put the painted block to a piece of paper. I used the brayer to apply an equal amount of force to get all the paint from the block, onto the paper I think my art relates to Audrey Flacks art because I used a lot of color in my art piece. Audrey used lots of color in all of her art pieces too. Each color used in this piece of art makes the object visible in a different way.

Issues

After students turned in their objects projects, we focused on the theme of Issues. Students looked at Wordless News by Maria Fabrizio as inspiration before doing some research and creating works that went into a topic or issue they thought was important to highlight with art. This was a very quick project, so students were limited to 2D media. We also got to use the iPad cart with new apps we received thanks to a newly funded DonorsChoose.org project! This has been a great resource in our classroom so far and I am so excited to utilize it even more next year! 

Here are some of the results:

Jeffery: This work is about being stressed out about school and everything you have to do.

Allison: The inspiration for this piece was the world issue fracking. Fracking is the act of forcing a high concentration of gasses and chemicals into the earth to make it crack open to get to natural gasses and oils. The act of fracking causes an immense amount of damage in habitats and the earth in general. It was also inspired by my English class where I read a book talking about the issue. This images was aquired for PBS LearningMedia teachers and students from Getty Images. Provided by: Science Source.

Hannah: I decided to do my issue on anxiety, its something I have dealt with for such a long time now.Many other people deal with anxiety as well,I decided to do photography because it can capture the real meaning and the time.I decided to do my pictures a bit blurry and crazy,because people with anxiety knows how it feels durning an attack.I wanted people to see what it was like.Alot of people are scared to speak up about there anxiety or just don't recognize they have anxiety, but I have a voice and I want people to know there not alone.

Alex: I chose homelessness as the issue for this project. Homelessness is a problem across the U.S. and people walk by it as if these people don't matter. However, they may have a mental issue or never got the chance to learn education or have enough money to even start for a job. This piece of work can be related to the hardships we learn about in history class and how that has made things increasingly more difficult for people. I was able to really understand this topic by looking at a video on PBS learning media which had a video from 2017 about a student athlete who didn't have a home.

STEAM projects

The past two weeks have been busy in the Art classroom. In STEAM, we go through five units (one for each letter of STEAM) that have two parts: a "Have to" and "Can do." "Have to" projects are projects I direct students through that connect with the letter of focus for the unit and "Can do" projects are student developed. Students completed their "Can do" projects earlier this week and uploaded them to Artsonia.

t was fun to see students work through a variety of solutions. To help them brainstorm, I directed them to the "Hands-on Projects" section of our online subscription to Scholastic Art Magazine. This helped many students gather ideas and take bits and pieces to make their own project. 

It was so much fun to see students develop their own ideas and implement techniques from their "Have to" videos that they shared the week before. It was even more fun to be able to make additional artist connections to students' works and help them develop the creative courage to take bigger risks in their own art.

Sophia: The artist that inspired me to do this artwork was Robert Rauschenberg. He does colorful printmaking and layers the things he prints on top of each other. For my artwork I did 2 different block prints of Paige in black. Then I took two different pieces of paper and put colorful mono prints on it, and did a collage background. Lastly, I printed the faces onto the collage background and put frames around them.

Evie: For my project of choice, I decided to try felting again. I tried to do something similar to this last year, but I ended up with far less details, the work being smaller, and just lower quality art. Revisiting this, I had more materials and more time to work on this, which helped me make it far better from last time. The art work also has more personal meaning behind it which made me more passionate to complete it, something that makes my work far better than when I'm just doing it for a grade. I got to use buttons (which I forgot last time) and I made two (which I wanted to do last time) instead of one. While some parts were more rushed and look not as good, I feel like I did a lot better and I'd love to keep working on my felting skills.

Jenna: For this project i did mono printing and cut the prints in to shapes and glued them down.The spots that didn't have a shape i used a stencil and a pencil to fill it in.

Khiem: One of the thing that I learn through out this steam years is a mood board. So I organize my past art with some changes in them into a mood board because I think it would be a good way to end the marking period, is to include most of my art in to one with some extra idea or idea that I have before I created my final art. So to round it all up I use the mood board design to organize my art or sketch that I have over the year to remember what I accomplish.

Marie: In this piece of work I was inspired by artist Tom Friedman in Scholastic Art Magazine. Friedman developed a piece of artwork made from corners of cereal boxes. In his work, he put all of the geometrical triangles together to create a cereal box sculpture. With my own work I used the idea of 3 dimensional triangles formed together in order to create larger piece of work. But instead I used paper folding and origami techniques, as well as mono printing and mixed media ideas.

Ashtyn: For this project I made a wire hand, because in STEAM we are on the art can do and Mrs. Campbell said that we can do what ever we want as long as it is art related. I made a wire hand because I have never used wire before and thought it would be interesting to try out, and it was.

Students also worked on their Math "Have to" projects this week with a look at radial symmetry. We did this in a variety of ways: first we worked on making buttons, then we made chalk art outside, and finally worked on digital works. This lesson was adapted from Liquitex and I will also be sharing this on Instagram in hopes of winning a $1500 contest I found out about at NAEA in Seattle. Wish us luck! 

Trever

Jenna

Sophia

Kenzie

Chloe

Meijer Gardens Field Trip

For the past ten years, I have been able to bring students to the Frederick Meijer Gardens and Sculpture park. It is one of my favorite parts of Spring and we could not have had better weather for our trip!

Students were led on a tour of the Japanese Gardens (which is a new addition to the park) by docents and learned a lot of information about how they created this part of the park. They were also in the process of installing a new exhibit with cranes that lowered sculptures into place, which was exciting to see in action. 

Getting Ready for Arts a la Mode

This week is going to be another action-packed one! We are so excited about Tuesday and hope to have a great turn out for the events planned and look forward to sharing the results in our next post!