My next topic of interest…

Although I did work with art and community, this is a book I was recommended by Danielle Devoss and will be devouring over this holiday break.

With a strong interest in conscious art and how it plays a role in all of our lives, this seems to only make sense. I’m interested in seeing what kinds of stuff it has to say.
Read more about it here —-> http://www.amazon.com/Feminism-Art-Theory-Anthology-1968-2000-Hilary-Robinson/dp/063120850X

Things I am going to do over break

So i’m done with school at last, and I’ve just got a few things to post here. One of these things are my plans for break in the art world.

Here’s a photo essay of what I’m going to do. Excuse the bad lighting/photo quality, I used photobooth and I just moved to Lansing’s Eastside and I’m not quite settled in.

Screen Printing with a screen my Grandma gave me. She used to make archery targets for my dad with this.

Spray painting is fun!!!

Relief Printing is probably one of my favorites. This is one I did for Guillermo's class when we made our own accordion books. I want to make lots of prints!

Last but not least... my most mastered art- knitting. My goals are to make lobster gloves (the three fingered gloves- perfect for biking!) and to actually make a sweater.

We’ll see how this all goes. My new place has tons of creative energy in it- I think lots of this will be happening!

from last week…

Guillermo Delgado and Doug Delind put on a really cool event at the RCAH last week. The Midnight Print Jam, which ended up bringing about 30 students into the RCAH Art Studio for some awesome printing madness, ended up being a blast. On my own time this semester I worked on a relief print of an octopus, and then ended up printing it on some t shirts supplied at the studio! I’m hoping the octopus print will eventually be a series…

Here are a couple of photos…

Mine's the light blue one with the octopus on the far left.

Check out more photos here!

My last day at REACH…

As the snow covers the earth, the nights get darker, and the final projects add up, I am reminded that this semester is coming to a close, as well as my work with the Patterns of Place at REACH.

Today was my last day at REACH working with my mentee Allison. A day that was expected to be chaotic (and was in some senses), ended up going incredibly well. The time mainly consisted of the kids putting their books, aka personal maps together. They turned out really awesome! I didn’t take pictures today so i’ll have to do my best to be really descriptive. Inside, you’ll open up the first page with the title, personalized by the young artist. Then there was the community map, which they drew during our first class, their block print, photograph, haiku, watercolor… and then the end page. The process of putting things together once we had it figured out proved to be quite easy. Then the kids made these really sweet covers for their books. They took a piece of square cardboard and tissue paper of their color choice. They then took the tissue paper and crumbled it into a ball. But then they spread out the paper, and glued it on to the piece of cardboard (or partially wrapped it…) They made two of these and put them on both ends of the book. They looked cool and had a really neat texture!!

Putting the book together made me think about how this semester went by really fast, not only with this class but in a lot of respects. With this being said, I think overall Patterns of Place proved successful. It was an interesting experience working with an age group i’m not exactly used to, and being immersed in REO town, a place that I would have never expected to find fascinating, but was able to see what it was like from being at REACH. I wish I would have been able to spend more of the semester at REACH.

Even though I won’t be writing about my experiences at REACH after this entry, I will be posting some art and community engagement related things i’ve done over the semester. So come back and check it out!

It’s been a while…

As it grows colder and it gets darker earlier each week we’re in REO town, I realize there is only a couple more weeks in the semester and soon we’ll be putting together our books. Amazing how time goes by.

Anyways, so last week the RCAH’s Mark Sullivan came in and did photography with the young artists. It was pretty comical, the kids LOVED it. We went on a walk around the block. The young artists were instructed to look for various shapes in their surroundings, such as circles, lines, triangles, squares… They really enjoyed just taking pictures, especially my mentees. I don’t know if they really grasped the meaning of what we were doing. There were a few really humorous moments, when they were instructed to go take pictures in certain places, such as people’s windows and in a yard that said “BEWARE: SECURITY DOG.” The energy that each young artist had the whole time was great- they were having a blast! Even if they didn’t really grasp what was going on, they still had fun and that’s what really matters.

I have a hoard of photos for all of you, considering last week was photography, seems entirely appropriate. It ranges from the young artists taking photos on the walk, photos of my own during the walk, and then post walk photos taken by my mentees when they were working with shadows. Enjoy!

Take care,

Fiona

Haiku Hike in REO Town

After having had quite the rough morning/early afternoon yesterday, it was a surprising relief to get to REACH, even though a group of us was running late. I was expecting the day to be work but it ended up being a wonderful couple of hours of insight, storytelling, and wonder.

Allison was the only one of my two mentees there yesterday. It had been two weeks since I saw my mentee Allison, since last week the kids didn’t have school, so there was no program either. She was filling me in on her life when she got her sketchbook back that she had been drawing on the cover last week. She was really stoked, and wanted to start drawing on it with permanant marker again, saying “I’m not finished!” Our guest yesterday was the RCAH’s Anita Skeen to take the kids on a Haiku Hike. The idea was that the kids would take a hike in the neighborhood, and we would make stops where the kids would make observations of where they were based off of their five senses. These observations later will be the basis for haiku’s they will write.

Prior to this, Anita talked with the kids about hiking, how the five senses of sight, smell, taste, touch, and hearing are used. They were really excited, and their responses to her questions humored and impressed me. My mentee, Allison, kept talking about being able to smell garbage. We went on our hike and it was a brisk, November day. Most of the leaves were off the trees, yet some trees were still flaming with orange. The first place we stopped was in the middle of a roundabout, there were neighbors around, looking at us wondering what we were doing. There were a group of people on the porch nearby and I couldn’t really figure out if they were laughing at their own stuff, or at us.

We then continued to walk, and we went by Moores Park Elementary School, which closed last spring. Allison became incredibly nostalgic, since she had gone to this school. She told me lots of stories about when she went to school there. She told me it was a great school, but she didn’t like going to school there. She would point at the graffiti on the school, saying “Do you see that writing on the school? That was never there before!” She would tell me stories of playing in Moores Park, a park with big trees by the river and a giant power plant. It reminded me of being a kid again, and it made me realize how huge that park probably seems to her. The park ended up being our next stop. Allison went to the swing set, sat on the swing, and told me another story about how her friend was swinging and kicked her in the chin. “This was the same swing!” she said. As she swung on this swing, she says “You can still hear the squeak the swing makes when it swings!” It was fascinating. She always has a story to tell, and shes a great storyteller. She has so much enthusiasm when she tells stories. We went down by the river and looked at the ducks…

After the park, we walked back through the residential area, wandering by houses with Halloween decorations and wiltering pumpkins from Halloween, dogs and cats, a young girl waving in a window by us, by the Quality Dairy factory, by the motorcycle club, and eventually got to our last stop for observations, by the old train station. There were two cabooses, one of them had been graffited on, so the caboose looked like it had a face. Everyone was lined up on the curb, and eventually migrated to the cabooses, climbing on them. Soon after, we were heading back to REACH, ending our adventure. As we walked back, the sun was going down, creating a sky with lots of bright pinks and oranges and soft colors of blue, gray, and purple. It was really cool, everytime we looked over, the color would change dramatically in a matter of minutes.

As we got back, the kids seemed to be tired out. I was surprised how well they did, and so far have been pleasantly surprised by how well everything turns out with what we do. I would say this was successful. The kids got really into it, and it was beneficial for myself in a way that I didn’t really expect. My experience yesterday really gave me a new appreciation for a part of Lansing that I was hardly familiar with before.

Here are some photos of Allison and some places we hiked to. Enjoy!

Until next time,

Fiona

Week 2 (or week 3 for the rest)

As you probably see, I ended up missing out on last week because I was out with the flu. Which yes, was a bummer. I was pretty stoked about going but didn’t feel like giving the kids swine flu. But I’m better this week.

This was day 2 of making relief prints (which I was geeked about since relief printing is one of my favorite mediums of art to work with!) I was finally paired with my mentees, Allison (Alison? I don’t know how to spell my girls name- is that bad?) and Katelyn (I could very well be spelling her name wrong too…) They were both friends, so that was nice, but the dynamic between them was incredibly interesting. Allison always has a story to tell and loves to talk about her life, while Katelyn was more soft spoken and shy. There were also a couple of instances where Allison would be almost accusatory with Katelyn, and Katelyn would be like “nuh uhh!!!” Oh, kids.

Both of the girls were almost done with their prints. They both seemed to try to be minimalist on their works, focusing on one center piece. I tried to encourage them to do a bit more with their works by taking out more of the positive space through the creations of lines and shapes. They both ended up making really cool prints. I remember I was helping Katelyn print hers, which it was the first time I had to teach someone how to print a relief print. It was actually challening for me to teach her because I hadn’t done it in a while, and I had never actually done the spoon method myself- where one puts their print on the paper, flips it over, and rubs the other side of the paper with a spoon. I was used to putting it through a printing press. So Katelyn’s prints turned out different from one another. Her proof was completly black in the positive space, done as intended. Now the final paper, the nice paper so to say, we printed it, but didn’t really rub the print all the way. So it didn’t turn out solid black in the positive spaces as we had intended for it to. Katelyn seemed disappoined but as we looked at it more we realized how cool it actually really looked. I saw that happen to a lot of other kids prints as well and it really turned out great!
After having done some prints, the kids finally received their sketchbooks. Allison really wanted to draw with sharpie on her cover, so she kept drawing little cartoons. It also cracked me up because she was writing “lol”, “omg”, and other abbreviations of sorts. Then, she went to the inside cover of her notebook, and wrote see you later alligator, then circled the first letter of each word, and turned it into her own abbreviation: SYLA. I chuckled to myself a lot. The girls really enjoyed drawing in (and on in Allison’s case) their sketchbooks. They were supposed to be writing responses about their prints, and their experiences with making prints, but my girls weren’t down with that at all. They’d write a sentence and be like, “ok, I’m done.” I’d be like, “Oh, that’s it? What does your print mean? How does it represent you? Did you have fun?” I was lucky enough to squeeze one, or maybe two more sentences out of them.

I really enjoy being a mentor, but felt in an unsure position, because sometimes kids say things to you and i’ll be like, “oh, mhm, that’s cool.” and then not be sure what more to say to them. I think it’s because i’m not used to being around kids. They require so much attention and want to engage with you, which is great, and I think will be a good growing experience for me as this program goes on.

A picture will be coming soon…

Kids, maps, and markers: my first day working with kids at REACH

My first day at REACH working with kids in the “Pattern of Place” program went surprisingly well. I didn’t really know what to expect, I was kind of nervous at first because I couldn’t tell you the last time I worked with kids. As a result, I’ve always felt a fair amount of uneasiness being around kids.  When the kids started to fill the room, I suddenly didn’t know what to do. During the first five minutes of class, I recall standing around with my classmates, feeling awkward. I really wanted to break out of this because I recall even in high school, when a group of college student teachers would come into a classroom and they weren’t comfortable, you could feel it. I was looking for a way out of this awkwardness and vulnerability, and a way into developing connections with the kids in the room.

I finally brought up the courage to talk to one of the kids, a girl who was in 5th grade. She wasn’t talking much, and I found myself asking her a lot of questions and getting short answers. I didn’t want to bombard her with questions, but I didn’t just want to stop talking to her as if she wasn’t interesting. This situation made me uneasy.

The situation was made easier when Jessica asked the kids to introduce themselves to us. I took this as an opportunity to walk around the room and meet some of the other kids. I ended up meeting two very sweet girls, both spunky and filled with enthusiasm about art. They both reminded me a lot of myself at their age in ways, but they also seemed like people that are going to end up like myself when they’re my age. I really enjoyed hearing their stories and learning about their lives. It was a relief to just talk to these girls, and have them not be shy towards you. Looking back, I think that’s where a lot of my uneasiness came from with kids, was having the association of kids being scared of me, and I didn’t want to scare the kids. By talking to these girls I felt like that went away. From then on the ease of talking with the kids about their work went great.

I made my rounds with the kids and found that all of them had some enthusiasm about art, which I was really stoked about—I had expected there to be at least a few kids who were just dumped into the program by their parents. There were a couple rather rambunctious boys who never failed to crack me up: on their name tags we created in class, they wrote their favorite art medium was hip hop (I thought that was awesome). They also kept copying each others name tag, which I also found to be amusing but counterproductive.

Being around all of these kids really brought back to when I was a kid, and remembered a lot about what it was like being a kid with all of the cool college kids around. Suddenly I realized that I was in role reversal, and that these kids were looking up to me, which felt intimidating at first. But I kind of figured out how to go with it and be comfortable, it’s just a matter of not thinking about it. The kids do look up to you though, and that’s something that I am going to always subconsciouslly be thinking about.

For those of you who don’t know much about REACH- I recommend checking out their website- www.reachstudioart.org. They do a lot of other really great programs and are a unique asset to Lansing in that the basis of their organization is art and community engagement. If you’re into pottery, I highly recommend their open clay studio on Monday and Wednesday evenings, and Saturday mornings. They also have a free open clay studio on Saturday afternoons to prepare for their Empty Bowls Fundraiser coming up in November.

Here is one of many photos I managed to take while the kids were doing some work.

Until next time,

Fiona