TGIF, LET US WALTZ

(kindergarten) ART BRAINS BALLROOM DANCING from Make slash Believe on Vimeo.

 The inaugural balls may be over in the District, but the ballroom dancing continues at Make/Believe! The clip above is from a 2012 ART BRAINS "Performing Arts" class in which 5-6 year olds performed self-written and improvised mini plays on "stage" for their fellow campers. We had the luxury of costumes provided by Artisphere, and the class saw many dramatic sword fights, lost princesses, and one lone polar bear. The cuteness of the narrations, over-sized crowns slipping down over little heads, and the unselfconscious, brave, and spontaneous performances totally slayed me and my then co-teacher Rachel. I may not have easy access to such lavish costumes again, but I'd love to do this type of performance project with kids another time in the future.

The Talent, behind the scenes and on stage.

VICTORY!

In celebration of the safe return of my recovered external hard drive files, I'm posting one of said files: a collaborative, cut-paper stop animation made by my Summer 2011 ART BRAINS class:

ENVIRON-MENTAL

Environ-mental Part 1:  In this first part of the 2-part, collaborative “Environment-mental” project, youth will create an enclosed mini-environment installation. Thinking about how elements like color, texture, and light affect a person’s mental and emotional state, they will fabricate a space that conveys a certain mood or atmosphere to the viewer.

Environ-mental Part 2, Soundscape:  In this second half of the 2-part, collaborative “Environ-mental” project, youth will create a computer-generated soundscape to accompany the installation they fabricated the previous week.

Working on this project with the Art Brainers was pretty incredible. It was one of the most stressful projects I've done so far with kids, simply because there was so much to complete, but I am so proud of how it all came together, and I know the campers were too. 

We talked again about different kinds of installation art, and about how artists use elements like light, color, texture, and sound to affect the viewer's mood and emotional state. Working collaboratively, the campers aimed to create a small enclosed space that made the viewer feel a sense of magic, mystery, beauty, and excitement. They painted the walls of the little cardboard room (about the size of a telephone booth) in swirling sections of  slightly metallic blue, red, and orange, and covered sections of the wall with colorful stalagmite-like forms, flowers, reflective plastic jewels, and more, while glitter-encrusted colored balls rained down from above the viewer's head (along with a lone bat!) where light entered through small holes cut in the ceiling.

THEN, using Garage Band, we also created an accompanying soundscape for the installation, which reminds me of the inside of a watery, shimmering cavern filled with undulating light. We first looked through the sound libraries to pick out a selection of sounds we felt fit the mood we were trying to convey, and then each camper individually selected from these sounds, playing notes on the keyboard to record multiple layers of tracks. Please play the video below to hear the campers' soundscape - they did a fantastic job. Between this project and the kindergARTen Brains Belly of a Whale project, I think the Fall 2011 ART BRAINS Camp had an outstanding season finale.

Play the video below to hear the Environ-mental soundscape!:

BELLY OF A WHALE

 

kindergARTen BRAINS, Belly of a Whale:  During this session, the Education Lab will feature a small round tent that has been transformed into an open-mouthed whale. Youth will fabricate objects and cut-outs to place inside that represent things they imagine the creature may have swallowed in its travels, making a temporary and interactive installation simulating a whale and the contents of its belly.

I feel like I say this a lot, but this project really was SO much fun. The campers had a great time imagining and making drawings of things they thought the whale might have swallowed: fish, sharks, lizard-creatures, shoes, a tire, a trash can, a necklace from a sunken ship, an anchor, a submarine... The drawings were cut out and attached to the tent's domed interior (aka the roof of the whale's mouth) and were also hung with yarn from the same surface.

I was pretty anxious about the making of the whale before class (tent + plastic tablecloths + various stuffing to make it look slightly less exactly like a tent draped with plastic tablecloths), and may have once or twice accused it of looking like a wrinkled muppet made of blue trash bags. In the end though, I thought it was a perfectly friendly DIY creature for the kiddos, and the more they added to it, the more excited everyone was to crawl inside and check it out. Belly of a Whale, we <3 you! Come see us again sometime.

Help! We've been swallowed by a whale!

Oh wait, it's actually pretty cool in here.

FALL 2011 MINI BIG WORLD

After the awesome results we achieved the first time around, I was happy to give this project another go this Fall with the older ART BRAINS group. It was just as fun this time as the last!

MINI BIG WORLD:  Using drawings, cutouts, cardboard, and paper, kids created  dioramas of imagined landscapes that were photographed and projected large-scale onto the wall.  They then had a chance to be part of the worlds they created, and were photographed within their scenery.

Holitiana in her ghost theatre:

Andrew and Arthur escaping Andrew's alien city at war! Note the poisonous gas clouds:






















 Amariah with friend in her playground on Mars:

Andrew and Arthur in Arthur's view of the city from the country at sunset. Drama!

A mass exodus - running and crawling away from the battle!

kindergARTen BRAINS MURAL

Mural:  Each youth will be given one square of paper containing an apparently abstract arrangement of lines and shapes that they will color and decorate in any way they choose. When they have finished, the individual squares will be combined to form a collaborative mural illustrating a single image colored in many different styles. 


The mural was composed of creatures the campers drew during the previous "Animal Planet" class. We did a colored pencil/crayon version, and a painted version as well.

Beautiful!

SHADOW MACHINES

When writing the Fall ART BRAINS curriculum, I was asked to consider tying in the Data Fields exhibition, which coincides with the Fall session of the camp at Artisphere.  It's an excellent show, but I honestly wasn't overly excited about incorporating it into the camp at first, as it's highly technical with a lot of auditory elements  (very cool, but not my field of expertise, per se). Now that the camp is actually underway, I'm happy to have had this nudge in another direction, because it prompted me to design some classes I know I wouldn't have otherwise. Shadow Machines is one of those, inspired by the illuminated/projected works in the darkened space of the exhibition:

Youth will create small cut-paper arrangements that, when illuminated with a light source,  create compositions of shadows on the wall of a darkened space. The shadows will be the final product of their work, prompting the students to think about incorporating light into their art, and visual mediums beyond drawing and painting.

Everyone was pretty stoked on this project.  It was interesting to see the kids thinking about negative space, learning more about how light/shadows work, and how to make adjustments to get the the shadows looking how they wanted them to look.  I like the idea of the final products being these intangible, shape-shifting penumbra-scapes. The campers were into moving the light source (small LED flashlights) from side to side and closer or farther away from their "machines" to produce ghostly, overlapping variations of the shadows. I've included a video here along with the photos that shows a little bit of that.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Side note: During this class, I showed the kids about one minute of a Reading Rainbow show about shadows. None of them had ever heard of Reading Rainbow, which makes sense, but also feels somehow WRONG. What's the modern-day equivalent of Reading Rainbow? My two-second Google search returned this, and this. Reading Rainbow + iPad + twitter + . . . flash mob? I guess that's all great news (minus the flash mob, no thank you please), but it feels bittersweet to think of Reading Rainbow being shown any other way than on a mammoth, 5-ton television set wheeled from an AV lab to the front of a classroom on a rolling cart (which also contains a VCR to play the RR VHS tape that itself is larger than the entire device that will play the show for kids today. Whew.).

Summer ART BRAINS 2011: Mini Big World

Here's one of my favorites from my Summer 2011 ART BRAINS curriculum. We're going to be doing this one again with the 7 - 12 year old group this Fall.

MINI BIG WORLD:  Using drawings, cutouts, cardboard, and paper, kids created  dioramas of imagined landscapes that were photographed and projected large-scale onto the wall.  They then had a chance to be part of the worlds they created, and were photographed within their scenery.

This was so much fun. The campers loved seeing their work made life-size, and of course were pros at hamming it up for pictures. Look how great these are!:

Hank on his alien planet

 Lauren in her forest landscape

Diorama making

Arthur walking through his mountain landscape

Hank and Arthur partying in Arthur's landscape

Dellie under the sea

Io in her kitchen sink!

Amariah in front of her underwater house

Art Brainers

Art Brainers and me

The group with Dan, volunteer par excellence