Artaware's Blog

Thanks to art teachers at Martin Luther King Day Care Center and at Yorkship Elementary School in Camden,
children are taping into their creative cores. Ms. Miyet held the hand of 15 month old Amari holding the brush to paint this abstract design and the 4 month child expresses delight in what he sees!

Maybe this world would be a better place if kids’ artwork were displayed EVERYWHERE!

Towards that end I laminated a mural by Mr. Blake’s 8th grade class at Yorkship School for outdoor display on my chain linked fence – behind the Weeping Cherry tree. See how it humanizes the environment!

If you want to display kids’ artwork outside – you need to make a color copy of it (so the original can be displayed inside) and laminate it. Then get a piece of luan board, glue the artwork to it, punch holes to hang it, and then polyurethane it. It will last outside for a long time.

Ten Months of art by Camden elementary students – exhibited on the walls of Cooper Hospital! It was the largest and longest display in Art Aware’s twenty-five history.
With all the updating to the Art Aware website (www.artaware.org), the blogging and Facebook postings, I can’t believe I haven’t electronically documented our Cooper Hospital Show of 2008.
I guess it’s because I was overwhelmed at the time – it was so much work putting up the artwork of 100 murals (which included the work of over 1,000 students), and the fact that I had recently returned from a trip to Japan and China, and Matt Katz (now with the Philadelphia Inquirer) wrote about it in the Courier Post (5/13/08), so I didn’t have to.
You can read the article on the Art Aware website (as soon BJ Swartz has a chance to put it up) or on my Facebook page (as soon as I get a chance to type it up). So finally I’m electronically documenting the 2008 Show of Camden students’ work initiated by Camden art teachers and Art Aware.
I’ve gotten much more computer literate in the past four years and of course the Internet technology has progressed in leaps and bounds. The Cooper Show was only a few years ago – and yet I couldn’t find the article in the Courier Post online archives and had to go to Cherry Hill Library to make a copy from microfilm. That seems like the middle ages.

In view of the horrific child abuse scandal at Penn State, I find it especially important now to celebrate the beautiful, innocent images of children through their artwork. How important it is for everyone to encourage children’s self expression through the arts by exhibiting it everywhere! Art Aware makes a point of creating and distributing a yearly poster of images of elementary students’ artwork from approximately twenty-six Camden public, charter and parochial schools.

Let me know if you want a poster. There will be no charge.
Barbara Pfeiffer 11/14/11