This Spring, Mentor Artist Lisa Summers worked with students at Hamilton Middle School to create multi-media projects based on the work of folk and vanguard artists through Youth in Arts’ Arts Unite Us program. Students started with metallic pens and black gesso boards to assign lines to words they felt best described them. Over the next several weeks, students used a bird pattern to create work inspired by Indian Gond art, a form of painting that is practiced by one of the largest tribes in India with whom it shares its name. We began by looking at examples of Gond paintings, and then started our own artworks by incorporating our individual “lines” into the composition.
We built upon these skills with exercises such as contour line drawing of faces and animals, in which we used unconventional drawing and painting utensils like sticks and cotton swabs to experiment with pattern, color theory, composition, geometric shapes and shadows. Students learned about graphic artists like Peter Max and self-taught artist Kiyoshi Awazu by making posters using collage and oil pastel. As a reflection exercise, students were asked to consider advertisements that use visual language and to evaluate their own work by asking questions such as: “What makes this pop? What gives this line or shape emphasis? What attracts you to these colors and the design? What do you think the message is?”
We had lively discussions about their work, and students were encouraged to revise if they felt a particular work was not complete. Classroom teacher Ms. Moon and staff jumped into the collage project as well. Examples of student artwork were hung in the front office, and many of the artworks created throughout the residency will be on display at Youth In Arts during the summer exhibition, “Outside the Lines: Collaborative Art in Special Day Classrooms” opening on July 31st, 2019 at the YIA gallery.
Through the California Department of Education’s Student Support and Academic Enrichment (SSAE) grant that the Marin County Office of Education received, Youth in Arts was in multiple Special Day Classes this spring.
