THEMES FOR FALL 2014

Photo by Florian Maier Aichen

Too soon to talk about the upcoming Fall semester? Never! We have a creative season planned for the Art Brainers for Fall 2014, including:

- Action/Adventure movie making
- crystal balls/wheels of fortune
- houses for mouses
- cave drawings to be explored in makeshift caves with flashlights
- neo-rainbow paintings (that's "neo" not "neon"!)
- a Jekyl/Hyde Halloween project
- and "Thanksgiving on Mars" makes a comeback

Projects for the entire year are all planned, and include a couple recurring themes: theaters and/or cinema appears every season (including a "3D movies" project and one called "Shadow Show") as well as some seriously collaborative group projects involving city planning, print making, and art games. 

What's up, 2014/2015 school year! We're comin' for you!

Please visit our website to bring an Art Brains program to your school.

POSTCARDS FROM SPACE

Oh, did I forget to mention that the Art Brainers traveled extensively in space this Spring? Well, they did. Here are a few postcards they sent back to Earth from their travels. 

We did these early in the season, and I'm hoping kids will have forgotten by about now, so that they're semi-surprised to receive interstellar mail at their homes during summer vacation.

All of the aliens' names are Jimmy.

Too many eyeballs.

From Gumball Planet

TRUE DETECTIVES

L: The Big Questions. R: A student details found evidence.

One of our Spring 2014 Art Brains projects involved playing detective and building "case files" for imagined mysteries. Before my first class worked on this project, I was a little nervous that some kids would be confused about how to formulate their own mystery from scratch, or that I would have to continuously discourage violent themes in their work inspired by TV and movies. I could not have been more wrong. The kids picked this up right away and ran with it (mini magnifying glasses and evidence baggies in hand)! It was so fun to watch them hatch new ideas about clues and suspects, all for totally PG mysteries of their own invention. Here are some snaps of some of the reports, photos, and other evidence gathered in the files. Elementary (school), my dear Watson.

Okay, "Ded pepl" might not be totally PG. That one slipped by me!

A red ghost left behind sooo many red fingerprints. And ghost bread, a big break in this case.

This is cupcake frosting, not blood! It's a cupcake caper.

MINI MUSEUMS

"Mini Museums" is one of my very favorite Art Brains projects of the season. After looking at some inspirational pictures and talking about all the different kinds of objects one might find in different museums, each student created his or her own mini museum display case, complete with shelves and labels, and accompanied by detailed informational pamphlets. Take a look at some of the treasures the Art Brainers have invented and presented here!

Left: Is it or is it not? Was this a mermaid's bra? Which is Anne Frank's diary? Is this a spoon from the Titanic? Is this a unicorn's horn?

Right: "Taylor Swift wore this necklace. Katy Perry ate off of this plate."

This display case commemorates various surprising and untimely deaths of earthworms. Yep.

Thanks so much to teaching artist Eun Jeon for contributing pictures to this post! Eun is a talented graphic designer, and is on her way to North Korea for a summer internship at a non-profit that advocates for human rights there. Best of luck Eun, we'll be thinking about you!