April is National Poetry Month

Poetry and Art seem like perfect cohorts, both inspiring each other in the creation of new ideas and the celebration of old ones. Poems are also great ways to practice writing without worrying about form or grammatical error.

Scholastic has wonderful project ideas, lesson plans and samples of poetry workshops educators can use in the classroom and/or at home. http://teacher.scholastic.com/poetry/

There are also several blogs and websites filled with great ideas for poetry...

Poetry4Kids.com

        http://www.poetry4kids.com/blog/news/twenty-fun-writing-prompts-for-children/

Creative Writing Now

http://www.creative-writing-now.com/poetry-ideas.html

Writeshop.com

http://writeshop.com/poetry-writing-prompts-for-kids/

And there are many more. 

Quotes are also good starters for poems. In the workshop below. I gave participants the rules to making a haiku poem, quotes and book passages to use in their poem collage.

Ellen Gallagher

About this artist

SOURCE: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

American painter, collagist and draughtsman. She studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Skowhegan School of Arts, ME, graduating in 1993. Using very minimal means, her pictures can be viewed in both straightforward formal terms and in terms of a political and culturally specific visual language linked to her identity as an African American woman. Her characteristic works consist of lined paper (of the kind used by school children) glued onto canvas and superimposed with images of eyes and lips. These symbolic body parts, which function as her trademark motifs, are taken from the American minstrel tradition; she has described them as evidence of language in motion, an example of the process that creates stereotypes. In Untitled (1996; priv. col., see 1998 Ikon Gal. exh. cat., p. 21), for example, the eyes and lips flood rhythmically across the lined picture surface in a process of aggregation. Although she uses a variety of structures and devices in her paintings, through a process of accumulation and subtraction the body parts are repeated in rhythms that suggest entrapment and diffusion. In Untitled (1998; priv. col., see 1998 Ikon Gal. exh. cat., p. 25) the lips gather as white imprints over a tainted green smudge, a pair of eyes trapped in the centre of each pasted page. Interested in the cool aggression of such performers as Bert Williams and Miles Davies, Gallagher’s work presents itself as a simple, Post-Minimal practice that retains hidden depth.

Francis SummersFrom Grove Art Online

In this art workshop students looked at the work of Ellen Gallagher (American, born 1965) and created collages woman portraits. My students were 2.5 to 4 year old so I had to prep/cut the pieces for assembly.  

Try to discuss and think about the work as it develops. Using language to describe what one sees gives children vocabulary and practice in speech. 

Hale Woodruff

“I wanted to do more than teach art; I wanted to bring art to the community as a whole.” Woodruff, Hale Woodruff, 50 Years of His Art, Exhibition Catalogue, 1979

Biography

"It's very important to keep your artistic level at the highest possible range of development and yet make your work convey a telling quality in terms of what we are as people." —Hale Woodruff, quoted in Albert Murray et al., Hale Woodruff : 50 Years of His Art (New York: The Studio Museum in Harlem, 1979), 76.

Born in Cairo, Illinois, Woodruff grew up in Nashville, Tennessee. In the early 1920s, he studied at the John Herron Art Institute in Indianapolis, where he lived for a number of years. He later studied at Harvard University, the School of The Art Institute of Chicago, and the Académie Moderne and Académie Scandinave in Paris. He spent the summer of 1938 studying mural painting with Diego Rivera in Mexico, an experience that greatly affected Woodruff's evolving style until the early 1940s.

Woodruff's earliest public recognition occurred in 1923 when one of his paintings was accepted in the annual Indiana artists' exhibition. In 1928 he entered a painting in the Harmon Foundation show and won an award of one hundred dollars. He bought a one-way ticket to Paris with the prize money, and managed to eke out four years of study with an additional donation from a patron.

In 1931, Woodruff returned to the United States and began teaching art at Atlanta University. It was Woodruff who was responsible for that department's frequent designation as the École des Beaux Arts" of the black South in later years. As he excelled as chairman of the art department at Atlanta University, his reputation also grew as one of the most talented African-American artists of the Depression era.

Woodruff's figurative style of the 1930s was bold and muscular. Southern lynchings of blacks stirred his conscience deeply, and inspired him to design a series of block prints that were as impressive as his oils and watercolors. His best-known and most widely acclaimed works at this time were the Amistad murals he painted between 1939 and 1940 in the Savery Library at Talladega College in Alabama. These murals were commissioned in celebration of the one-hundredth anniversary of the mutiny by African slaves aboard the slave ship Amistad in 1849, their subsequent trial in New Haven, Connecticut, and return to West Africa following acquittal.

The curvilinear rhythms of Woodruff's Mexican muralist-inspired works such as the Amistadmurals were absent in his productions of the 1940s. His Georgian landscapes of the 1940s are simpler in concept and dominated by diagonal accents and bold contrasts in darks and lights. Whether in oil or watercolor, many of Woodruff's landscapes of the 1940s depict tarpaper shanties, community wells, and outhouses to the extent that he frequently referred to this group of landscapes as theOuthouse School. These subjects were handled accurately and sensitively but without sentimentality.

During the 1940s Woodruff also completed a series of watercolors and block prints dealing with black themes related to the state of Georgia. In the September 21, 1942, issue of Time,Woodruff stated, "We are interested in expressing the South as a field, as a territory, its peculiar run-down landscape, its social and economic problems—the Negro people."

In 1946 Woodruff moved to New York where he taught in the art department at New York University from 1947 until his retirement in 1968. During the mid-1960s Woodruff and fellow artist RomareBearden were instrumental in starting the Spiral organization, a collaboration of African-American artists working in New York. Woodruff's New York works were greatly influenced by abstract expressionism and the painters of the New York School who were active duringthe late 1940s and 1950s. Among his associates were Adolf Gottlieb, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, and Jackson Pollock. Following a long and distinguished career that took him from Paris to New York via the Deep South, Woodruff died in New York in 1980.

Regenia A. Perry Free within Ourselves: African-American Artists in the Collection of the National Museum of American Art (Washington, D.C.: National Museum of American Art in Association with Pomegranate Art Books, 1992)

bio from: http://americanart.si.edu/collections/search/artist/?id=5477

Looking at Hale Woodruff's oil on canvas, Alicia and the Bull 1958

my students played with the concept of creating a black, white and gray collage using pieces inspired by the painting. 

Alicia and the Bull by Hale Woodruff, oil on canvas
a part of the Studio Museum in Harlem permanent collection

Supplies:

- pre-cut pieces 

- black, white and grey construction paper

- glue

- marker, oil pastel, pencil or some kind of writing tool

- white paint

Begin on a gray card stock for the background and have the students paint it white. 

Add glue and the cut out pieces to the composition.

Finish up with a border and some extra drawing. 

Lyle Ashton Harris

Lyle Ashton Harris photographed over a ten-year period using a large-format Polaroid camera, “The Chocolate Portraits” consist of 200 subjects, each portrayed as dual images (the face and back of the head). These unique 20 x 24-inch monochromatic dye-diffusion transfer prints represent individuals across the social spectrum. Work from this series was first exhibited in 1998 at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art (Ridgefield, Connecticut) and in 2011 at the Studio Museum in Harlem (New York). In 2009 a monograph of the complete series, titled “Excessive Exposure,” was published by Gregory R. Miller, featuring an introduction by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., a critical essay by curator Okwui Enwezor, and a conversation between Harris and the artist Chuck Close.

 http://www.lyleashtonharris.com/series/the-chocolate-portraits/

In this workshop for children 2.5 to 4 years old and their loving care takers we looked at the self portrait of Lyle Ashton Harris from his Chocolate Portraits series and discussed what we saw. We talked about the parts of the face and front and back. 

Supplies:

- flesh tone construction paper

- face collage images

- colorful construction paper

- glue 

- ribbon

- synthetic hair

Futuristic Sculptural Objects with Artist Sylvia Weir

In this art workshop artist Sylvia R. Weir facilitated a fun and colorful sculptural intro to Afro-futurism. Use found objects to create your afrofuturistic sculpture. Space is the place to create so close your eyes and imagine your own ship.
Supplies:
- cardboard
- glitter paper
- stickers
- patterned paper
- cellophane
- tacky glue/ glue gun (for adults)

According to Wikipedia: Afrofuturism can be identified in artistic, scientific, and spiritual practices throughout the African diaspora. Contemporary practice retroactively identifies and documents historical instances of Afrofuturist practice and integrates them into the canon. Examples are the Dark Matter anthologies, which feature contemporary Black sci-fi, but also include older works by W. E. B. Du Bois, Charles W. Chesnutt, and George S. Schuyler. Since the term was introduced in 1994, self-identified Afrofuturist practice has become increasingly ubiquitous. The afrofuturist approach to music was first propounded by the late Sun Ra. Born in Alabama, Sun Ra's music coalesced in Chicago in the mid-1950s, when he and his Arkestra began recording music that drew from hard bop and modal sources, but created a new synthesis which also used afrocentric and space-themed titles to reflect Ra's linkage of ancient African culture, specifically Egypt, and the cutting edge of the Space Age. Ra's film Space Is the Place shows the Arkestra in Oakland in the mid-1970s in full space regalia, with a lot of science fiction imagery as well as other comedic and musical material.

Afrofuturist ideas were taken up in 1975 by George Clinton and his bands Parliament and Funkadelic with his magnum opus Mothership Connection and the subsequent The Clones of Dr. Funkenstein, P Funk Earth Tour, Funkentelechy Vs. the Placebo Syndrome, and Motor Booty Affair. In the thematic underpinnings to P-Funk mythology ("pure cloned funk"), Clinton in his alter ego Starchild spoke of "certified Afronauts, capable of funkitizing galaxies."

William Gibson's Neuromancer describes Zion, a Rastafarian space station populated by exiles of Earth, and dwelling of Maelcum, a Dub aficionado and one of the novel's main characters.

Other musicians typically regarded as working in or greatly influenced by the Afrofuturist tradition include reggae producers Lee "Scratch" Perry and Scientist, hip-hop artistsAfrika Bambaataa and Tricky, and electronic musicians Larry Heard, A Guy Called Gerald, Juan Atkins and Jeff Mills.^[4]

In the early 1990s, a number of cultural critics, notably Mark Dery in his 1994 essay Black to the Future, began to write about the features they saw as common in African-American science fiction, music and art. Dery dubbed this phenomenon afrofuturism. According to cultural critic Kodwo Eshun, British journalist Mark Sinker was theorizing a form of Afrofuturism in the pages of The Wire, a British music magazine, as early as 1992.^{[citation needed]}

Afrofuturist ideas have further been expanded by scholars like Alondra Nelson, Greg Tate, Tricia Rose, Kodwo Eshun, and others.^[2] In an interview, Alondra Nelson explained Afrofuturism as a way of looking at the subject position of black people which covers themes of alienation and aspirations for a utopic future. The idea of 'alien' or 'other' is a theme often explored.^[5] Additionally, Nelson notes that discussions around race, access, and technology often bolster uncritical claims about a so-called “digital divide”.^[6] The digital divide overemphasizes the association of racial and economic inequality with limited access to technology. This association then begins to construct blackness "as always oppositional to technologically driven chronicles of progress".^[6] As a critique of the neo-critical argument that the future’s history-less identities will end burdensome stigma, Afrofuturism holds that history should remain apart of identity, particularly in terms of race.^[6]

The Power of the Arts

I attended the Power of Art 2015 conference early this month and have written about it in my i am style over fashion blog, 

http://iamstyleoverfashion.blogspot.com/2015/04/the-power-of-art-2015.html 

As part of our gifts we have received a book by Sally L. Smith, the Founder of the Lab School of Washington DC, educator and expert in the teaching of youth with learning differences. The Power of the Arts: Creative Strategies for Teaching Exceptional Learners, provides the theoretical basis for using the arts as a vehicle for academic learning for children who have learning disabilities, ADHD, or other difficulties in school. It explains how these children can benefit from different classroom strategies by discussing characteristics common in children who struggle in school, then it goes on to explore strategies to help these students to overcome their difficulties through the arts. The book also presents techniques for using the arts to assess student ability, measure their progress and increase their self-esteem. It includes practical, how-to guides for activities in ten fields of art, including woodwork, graphic arts, computer arts, architectural design, plaster and painting, film animation, drama, dance, elementary music and secondary music - all written by artists in residence at the Lab School in Washington, USA.

I think Ms.Smith's book is an excellent resource to share with educators and parents and although she is no longer alive her great research lives on through her literature and the Lab schools. Art can be used to teach more than art! 

Braids for Days

I love hair braiding! And braiding inspired me to figure out a way folks can braid hair as well as create a composition to keep. I wanted to create a learning tool that can be reused and or altered for practicing.
This task was as easy as reminding myself of all of the Lorna Simpson projects I had done in the past. Braids for Days allowed participants the opportunity to learn and practice braiding as well as create a composition with the use of hair, color and image.

Hair braiding has been estimated to exist for thousands of years and used by every civilization. Most connect braiding with Africa and this would make sense since according to science, life began there but hair braiding has and is used by all countries and cultures.

Humans have used hair braiding for all sorts of reasons. A persons style of braids can show status (wealth and/or lack there of), maintain neatness and/or cleanliness of hair, signify marital status, and/or connection to a group of people.

Hair braiding is, usually, communal. For some cultures it is a time to talk, gossip, tell stories and connect to one another. I love hair braiding and with this project, anyone can practice the ancient art of hair braiding.

Supplies:
- image of a face without the top of the head.
- glue (wet glue and glue gun)
- synthetic hair in any color
- card-stock
- miscellaneous ribbon, beads, jewels, etc.

First you must prep the heads with hair onto card-stock with a glue gun. The hot glue acts like a scalp, holding the synthetic hair in place despite pulling. 

Tape the completed setup down to a table and begin braiding. 

There are many kinds of braids and I would encourage experimentation of what can be done before finalizing the composition. Challenge yourself to create and name your own kind of braid. 

Different kinds of braids:

- cornrows

- box braids

- french braids

- fishtail braids

- snake braids

- maiden braids

- twists and so on... 

Link to a video short of the workshop: https://instagram.com/p/1YsJ6ByDUY/?taken-by=elanhiart