January 11, 2011
Yesterday we started with an introduction to our unit. First, we had a discussion:
What is art? How do we make art?
~ The students gave me lots of good answers that mostly included standard art forms:
- Art is making pictures or telling stories through pictures. We make art with paper, pencils, crayons, markers, paint, etc. They also informed me that they know many artists - their cousin, uncle, friend, neighbor, etc. are all artists.
- I then asked the students to take 5 minutes and make the best artwork that they knew how to make.
Here is one example that was given to me at the end of class:
After they finished these drawings, we switched gears and talked about our BIG IDEA for the semester:
Art: Thinking Outside the Box
We then talked about 3 different artists:
Courtney Perry (me):
I brought in two of my ceramic sculptures and we mentioned "abstract" or "non-objective" art and talked about sculpture as a form of art.
Shahzia Sikander
Is a woman from Pakistan trained in the painstaking art of traditional Pakistani miniature painting. She uses tea to paint her ground and uses things like vegetable juice for some of her colors.
"Reinventing the Dislocation", 1997.
Learn More about Shahzia Sikander:
and
Paul Curtis aka "Moose"
This guy does what is called "Reverse Graffiti". He uses stencils and cleans off parts of dirty city walls to create murals and bring awareness to the public about the dirty state of our cities.
Learn More about "Moose":
We ended class with a challenge - each student had to make 3 marks on their paper without using pencils, crayons, pens, markers, etc.
~What they did:
- Rub - the metal and/or yellow sides of their pencils and glue sticks.
- Draw - on a paper towel, and rub the towel on their paper. Then one student used his eraser to draw into the rubbed graphite!
- Dry-erase board erasers!
- Glue with pink eraser dust.
- Cut the paper with scissors
- Rubbed fingers across to leave a mark.
This was a great post and great introductory lesson it sounds like. I love the links to the artists websites and am fascinated by "Moose" VERY COOL! I look forward to seeing what else you have to share with these students, they are so lucky!
ReplyDeleteCourtney i absolutely LOVE all the example artists you used and i think each of them can lead to an even greater exploration of 'thinking outside of the box'. I just had a thought, when minimalism arrived on the art scene it was this big revolutionary thinking to think art in terms of art that explores the minimal and manufactured...how was this 'thinking outside the box; when in fact, the box or cube was one of the most explored minimal forms? ... could be an interesting tie in , but Just a thought!
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