This past Saturday, K.I.D.S. Art Education collaborated with Open House New York and the P.S. 15 Fall Flea to offer TWO very special "Drawing Together" programs!
In the morning, Meghan Keane led kids and adults on a journey down Van Brunt Street to discover architectural elements, landscapes, and other neighborhood sights. With Meghan's help, everyone made their own sketchbooks and filled the pages with their observations. Some had themes in mind, some just drew whatever caught their eye! This video showcases their drawings as well as their amazing book-making skills:
Later in the afternoon, we moved over to the P.S. 15 Fall Flea and set up a "design your own city" workshop complete with markers, tape, stickers, paper clips and other 3D materials. Several families dropped in to create imaginary streets, skylines and parks. Have a look at what they came up with:
This fall we are holding "Drawing Together" workshops on the first and third Saturdays of each month. Our workshops are geared towards children ages 4 and up and their caregivers. If you'd like to join us or want any more information, feel free to leave a post or contact me at sallie@kentlergallery.org. Thanks for reading and be sure to look out for more posts as fall K.I.D.S. Art Ed. 2012 continues!
K.I.D.S. Art Education kicked off our 2011-12 season with a Drawing Together program at Red Hook Flea- a fundraiser for P.S. 15, our neighbor and partnering school. Teaching artist Meghan Keane invited participants to "Draw big. Draw Colorful."
Using handmade stencils designed by Meghan and using all recycled materials, children and their care givers worked together to explore colors, shapes, and textures. Surrounding the students there was music, dancing, food, crafts and dreamy ephemera as folks from the neighborhood sold their wares in a wonderful collaborative fundraising effort.
Thank you P.S. 15. Thank you participants. Thank you Red Hook for your vitality, creativity and community spirit.
Next up? Thoughts and images from our fall program built on our exhibition "MARKING SPACE.A collaborative drawing, performance and sound project." by visual artist Lezli Rubin-Kunda and sound artist Ellen Moffat.
K.I.D.S. Art Ed has welcomed local Red Hook students from P.S. 15, P.S. 676, and BNS to the gallery this month. We have been looking at work by artists Beverly Ress and Arezoo Moseni. The question that we're focusing on this session is: How can a drawing grow? Using each artist's work as a starting point, students have begun exploring different ways drawings can grow (or expand) and different ways to make a drawing. This blog post will highlight the activity we do with Arezoo Moseni's work. Our next blog post will feature the activity we are doing with Beverly Ress' work. Led by teaching artist Meghan Keane, students first spend time looking at one of Moseni's works on paper in which indigo, the dye used to color jeans, is her medium.
Changes #24. Moseni
Students noticed she uses lots of different colored blues and purples, that there are many triangles and diamond-like shapes that come in a variety of sizes, and many students notice that it looks like a portal or a worm hole or something caving in toward the center. It has alternately reminded students of a star, a crystal, water, and...a mountain (because of the layered curves)!
After spending some time discussing the work students worked individually with laminated triangles, of many different colors and sizes, to create a drawing on the floor. Students were asked to imagine that the large brown floor was their "piece of paper" and the colorful triangles were their "crayons," their drawing material.
Students explored what happens when you place ONLY the sides together
and then ONLY the points:
create a HOLE in the middle of your drawing,
or what happens when you work with a partner to create a drawing of something they can find in the city. These are some of the images of what we've come up with!
Our next post will feature student work from their explorations with the work of Beverly Ress.
This week students participating in K.I.D.S. Art Ed after school programs with Good Shepherds Services and Red Hook Community Justice Center (RHCJC) gathered for Career Day at RHCJC to hear graphic novelist Dean Haspiel talk about his career as a cartoonist. The students have been exploring Dean's work on view at K.I.D.S. in "Cuba: My Revolution-The Making of the Graphic Novel and Related Drawings." Their explorations have included a visit to the exhibition and art making sessions with our teaching artists.
Teaching artist Katherine Gressel and RHCJC students exploring "Cuba: My Revolution" at Kentler.
During the gallery visit students explored the content of the artwork through discussion and hands-on art activities. In their follow up art making sessions, students are learning about symbols, figure drawing, layout, drafting, and composition to created their own original comic-inspired artworks. Our goals in these workshops are for young people to have a positive experience making art, to feel more confident expressing themselves, and to have a better sense of what goes into being an artist both personally but also professionally. Since the workshops are mostly focused on art making, we decided to invite Dean Haspiel to talk to the students about the more professional side of being a cartoonist.
Dean's talk took the students through his development from when he got his first drawing gig to the present.
Dean's slideshow.
One on one with the kids. Great questions. Great answers.
Forthcoming about the good and the bad, Dean described his passion for drawing and stories and his desire to develop his own ideas along with his need to make money and take on jobs that weren't always feeding his soul. When a student asked about how one could "get started," Dean's advice was this (I paraphrase): Find other people who like to do what you do. Hang out with them, talk, share ideas and challenge each other. If you like someone else's work, talk about THEIR work (not just your own) to others. In other words, help each other out, support each other! Don't get upset if a buddy gets a gig you were hoping for. Remember that they got hired because their work looks the way the employer wants. When you get hired, it will be because of YOUR "look" and your look alone. Dean reminded the students, "Don't be shy to be who you are." Thank you, Dean!
Earlier this year GKEF sponsored an educational field trip for the children in our program. Board member and Enco-Cinq community member, Karim Koumbassa, took the Guinea Kids' students on a field trip to the village of Habita. The children in our program are inner city kids, many of whom have never been in a car let alone out to the village or the fields where their food grows.
Karim was inspired with this idea to supplement the children's school education with some experiential learning about their food culture, where their food comes from, how it is grown and used. So one day they all piled into a magbana (bus or van) and set off for the fields of Habita.
Some of the children had never even been in a moving vehicle, so there were a couple sick tummies on the way out to the farmland.
Once they were arrived in Habita, the children toured the fields to see where such foods as eggplant, pineapple, peppers, and rice grow. Many of the children had never seen how a pineapple grows...
A Habita woman working in the fields spoke to the students about the food growing on the land...
Next the GKEF students walked through the palm forest and learned about the many uses of the palm tree. There are at least 5 different things the palm tree is used for in Guinea: 2 different oils, medicine, roofing, and palm wine.
The children say goodbye to the farmland and Karim shares some of his thoughts on this exceptional experience for the children...
"This is not a small thing" for these children to be generously given these experiences in their lives. This was such a special event to them. You can see how most of them wore their best clothes...to go out in a farming field! But it was the act of kindness, the act of being treated to a field trip that made it a special occasion; something that most of the children we know here in the States take for granted as a part of their education. This trip for them was very out of the ordinary. They know they are part of something special; that people around the world care about their educations, their lives. I often wonder at the difference that knowing is making in these children's lives and the lives of those around them.
If you have been a contributor to GKEF in the past, thank you so very much for supporting the dreams of these children. GKEF is able to assist them because of you.
If you would like to get onboard with supporting these kids or continue to support them, visit http://www.firstgiving.com/fundraiser/gkef.
Teaching artist Meghan Keane used the Red Hook Waterfront Arts Festival as a chance to explore drawing and sustainability. Recycling her plastic bag collection as a drawing material she engaged children and their care-givers in yet another exciting Drawing Together exploration. Participants had the option to experiment with sailors knots to attach the plastic bags to one another or to simply create their own silly, make-up-their-own knots. Participants came and went, tying and experimenting, and slowly our plastic bag drawing grew and grew:
Our latest session of RHI After School classes is in full swing. With the help of Kentler Teaching Artist Meghan Keane and RHI tutors, Ricky and Destiny, students have been focusing on their goal for this session: "get better at drawing" but specifically "learn to draw people"!
This week students and advisers did musical chairs observational drawing. Students looked across the desk at their neighbor, observing specific facial features, and practiced drawing different parts on cardboard pieces. They switched seats every two minutes in time to music, listening to a local string quartet's new Phillip Glass recording (Brooklyn Rider).
At the end, look what sort of playful, constructed, triangular portraits they created:
RHI middle school group hard at work.
Left: a collaborative portrait playing with textured, perforated cardboard.
Left: trying out what happens when a nose goes across multiple pieces. Right: using dark shapes to create contrast between the neck and the background.
