It’s Not all Black and White

Great things have been happening at Artsmith! The students have been engaging in projects that stretch their minds and encourage dialogue about current events.

One of the activities the kids worked on was a mixed media project. Using materials including fabrics, sequins, and beads, the students made posters covering a wide range of topics that are of interest to them. One project in particular featured basketball, one of the girl’s favorite sports. Incorporating a zipper on the side of her piece as well as glitter throughout, she made a basketball court. Her work featured the initials GSW for her favorite team the Golden State Warriors and she also included a ribbon as she is inspired by cancer awareness. An extremely well thought out and rich project, it created a great bonding moment with volunteer Riley, also a big basketball, and in particular, Warriors fan. Another student incorporated some of her favorite things, which included using puff balls to create cotton candy, which she then colored blue and pink. Another student made fruit bowls using woven threads to add texture to her basket. She wanted to compare how that fruit basket looked compared to the still life she painted of a fruit basket the previous week. Tet another student showed off his love of crocodiles by drawing a picture and using pointed beads to represent its sharp teeth. Thank you to Materials for the Arts for providing the items used in this project.

Then there was Picasso. The children were taught about Cubism, color, and contrast using his Marie-Thérèse, Face and Profile and Weeping Woman paintings. They were not immediately fans but a discussion soon ensued about what makes art “good” art:

“Black and white is boring.”

“All those colors make it look crazy.”

“It doesn’t look like a real person. Why would you paint her like that?”

“She’s crying. I see the tears. The picture makes me feel sad like she is.”

They didn’t agree on much but two things got unanimous approval. They would not pay millions of dollars for a Picasso, at least not the ones they saw. And they get to decide for themselves what they like, or don’t like, about a piece of art. They ended the class by painting only in black and white so they could practice shading, using Marie-Therese as inspiration.

After torturing some of the kids by allowing them to use only black and white, the following week was all about color and self. Self-portraits are one of the kids’ favorite things to work on whether they’re drawing, painting, or coloring. They always work very hard to get their portraits to look like themselves or representations of who they want to be.

In the midst of all the art they also wrote. In one activity a student would decide on a topic and then write a sentence. They passed the sheet to the next student and so on, with each student adding one sentence to the story. With each new sentence, the page would be folded down so the student writing could only see the sentence the person before them wrote. At the end there was a mashup of stories that twisted and turned based on the students reactions to each other’s words.

That wasn’t the only things the students had reactions to. They were all very eager to discuss the presidential election and results. It was apparent they had been paying attention to the contentious conversations and impressive to see how much they took in. They asked pointed conversations about gender, race, equality, and honesty. They discussed ideas they have about people and that people have about them based on stereotypes and whether that was right or wrong. During the discussion they were given the choice to write a letter to either candidate to tell them how they felt about their campaigns.