Artaware's Blog

Here’s a “3-D photo” example: origami resting on a book by African American artist, Romare Bearden

“The goal of Art Aware is to celebrate art, individual creativity, and the accessibility of art—for elementary school kids—so that they can put their mark on the page. I’m very interested in peace in the world, in people getting along; and I think that, as Americans we have a unique perspective on that. Although we are two or three generations removed from our native countries, we are always looking to get back to our roots, so I love to examine the human condition and get that idea across to inner city kids. And the kids—whether they are from Cherry Hill or from the inner cities of Camden or Philadelphia—they all love the artwork. When you draw a square with four lines and then draw another square on top of it—it is still just flat.
Then you draw the diagonal lines which connect one square to another and suddenly it’s magic! It’s not just flat anymore. From there we talk about how a painting is made on a flat canvas. How do artists do this?”

One of Barbara’s favorite assignments for children involves a painting by Vincent van Gogh of his bedroom. She uses the idea of the diagonal lines from the drawing of a cube to show how he uses slanted lines to create perspective. “There’s a picture frame. You have slanted lines on the picture frame.” Her students draw variations on van Gogh’s bedroom. In fact, “what they love is seeing variations famous artists have done on the masters of the past, and the connections artists have made with history. That’s important for kids to see—that we’re always learning from the past.
Roy Lichtenstein did a variation of van Gogh’s bedroom, and the kids see it right away. Also African American artist Horace Pippin did several variations on Edward Hicks’s The Peaceable Kingdom.”

“This year has been a year of exhibiting the kids’ artwork, especially when the Governor’s Symposium on Community Transformation came up and a third grader’s “Motivating Music” from the Art Aware ’08 poster was used for the logo, and with all those paintings at Cooper Hospital. It’s important that people see. The kids work so hard.”

The spirit, holy and otherwise, that is the human, universal experience
I want to be a part of that and to leave behind a message that
I have been a part of it
It will take the rest of my life to figure out how.
–from a poem by Barbara Pfeiffer

Samples of 4th and 5th grade students’ variations on Van Gogh’s Bedroom

Six “Camden Students at Peace Doing Art” posters from
six years – exhibited at Cramer Elementary School by Art Teacher, Faize Watkins

From a conversation with Barbara Pfeiffer:
“For several years in the mid-90s the Camden County prosecutor’s office produced 10,000 copies of a calendar with kids’ artwork. It was wonderful! Then the committee, of which I was a member, decided they couldn’t do it any more. I said ‘That’s terrible! Everyone loves it so. Let Art Aware take it over.’ And so we did—for a few years.
“I mixed the calendar art from the kids with pieces from well-known artists. There was this wonderful peace figure, with a cross and a peace sign, but no head.
The artist was a first grader. It was a perfect segue to Picasso! Then another, by a young girl, was of a road lined with flowers, and that was a good segue to Monet.

“The calendar was a great project but it took so much time to raise funds and distribute the 10,000 copies we had little time in the classroom. So in 2002, I changed from an Art Aware calendar to a yearly poster of “Camden Children at Peace Doing Art.” We produce different sized color posters and distribute about 300 of them yearly to the schools and the communities that put them on display. They have been in the schools, post offices, supermarkets, City Hall, Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, and even at a special, very large, ten-month exhibition at Cooper Hospital. The 2008 poster represents student artwork, initiated by their art teachers, from 17 schools.”
(NOTE: You can explore the posters and projects of Art Aware at their website: artaware.org)

Barbara Pfeiffer (by Steve Wills, PMA educator)

“The most important thing is getting the kids to own the art for themselves and tell what they think about it—for them to give their ideas and put their mark on the paper.”

This is the primary mission for Barbara Pfeiffer—who one day recently taught a second and a fourth grade class at one area school and followed with a first and seventh grade class at another school. It is a schedule requiring flexibility and travel, and represents the culmination of a long journey for Barbara: founder and director of Art Aware, an art appreciation program for inner city elementary school students in Camden, New Jersey, and Philadelphia.

Barbara’s journey, even at its earliest stages, cultivated an appreciation of other cultures and how art can represent that appreciation. “Born and raised in Manhattan, I attended Marymount School, across from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Music, art, theatre, and literature were integral to my upbringing. A BA in communication from the University of Michigan led to an administrative assistant job in New York City at Franklin Book Programs, a publisher of American classics in foreign languages.

“Then I went to Tokyo for three years and taught English Conversation at Futaba Girls School (famous for Empress Michiko’s attendance). English was a vehicle for teaching about American culture—as I knew it from multicultural New York City. I also began a life-long study of Japanese culture and language.

“After Japan I did administrative assistant work at the East West Center on the University of Hawaii campus, teaching English conversation on the side and studying Japanese. My father’s health brought me to Cherry Hill where I discovered the Art Goes to School program and fell in love with it. Through reproductions of art, ancient to modern, 700 volunteers bring multicultural perspectives into the lives of 125,000 elementary students in Delaware Valley suburban schools each year.

“After my father died, I moved to Camden to start a pottery business and to start Art Aware for inner city students with the forty-year organizational model of Art Goes to School. Art Aware differs due to a lack of city parents able to volunteer. Basically, the program is the same. A few volunteers and I each partner with an art teacher in a particular school, offering interactive art appreciation presentations to that teacher’s students. In our twenty-two-year history, we have been to approximately 40 different public, charter and parochial schools in Camden and in Philadelphia— and to some schools many, many times.

(A LONG OVERDUE POSTING!)
Art Brightens Visits to Hospital – Camden children’s works on display at Cooper 5/13/08
By Matt Katz – Courier Post

The routine appointment for a bone scan began with an inspiring conversation between the patient, who is the founder of a children’s art non-profit in Camden, and the X-ray technician, who is an amateur artist with paintings decorating her office walls.

That was January. A few short months later, that chance conversation has resulted in an exhibition of more than a hundred pieces of art by Camden school children now on display in a heavily trafficked corridor at Cooper University Hospital in Camden.

Marleen Vesci of Tabernacle, an X-ray technician at Cooper’s outpatient radiology facility in Cherry Hill, serves on the hospital’s newly formed Arts and Entertainment Committee.

Her patient, Barbara Pfeiffer, noticed Vesci had decorated her office with a Christmas-themed window scene she had painted.

“I’m just very sensitive to visual art and educating people to looking for it,” Pfeiffer said. “When someone like Marleen does it and combines the worlds, I’m just so grateful.”
So the two got to talking.

“It makes the patients feel good,” Vesci explained. “They say it makes them forget why they are there.”
Pfeiffer told Vesci about her 20 year-old nonprofit, Art Aware, which operates at public, charter and private schools in Camden running art classes, organizing trips to art museums and displaying children’s artwork around the city.

Pfeiffer told Vesci she is always looking for new spaces to display the children’s work.

“I said, ‘Oh my gosh, I have to present it to the committee,’” Vesci said. “She and I were so excited, I couldn’t wait to present it.”

The committee approved the idea, and the dozens of pieces of artwork are now located along the walls of a temporary bridge connecting two main buildings at the hospital.

The exhibit is expected to be up until a new, unnamed pavilion, currently under construction, is fully operational in the beginning of 2009.

“It was just a long, long walk,” Vesci said of the bridge. “It doesn’t seem so long now with all the artwork.”

Pfeiffer said the art, much of which consists of multiple students’ work collaged onto large poster-size pieces, is a “retrospective,” because it features work by students over the last several years.

A poster by third-graders at Yorkship School, for example, features paintings of percussion instruments that students made in preparation for a performance by the Philadelphia Orchestra. Another features first graders at Molina School painting dogs as inspired by the book “I Want a Dog” by Dayal Kaur Khalsa.

Pfeiffer, who lives in Camden, often shows the students famous works of art and then tells them to interpret the works as they see fit.

“You don’t tell them it’s right or wrong, you’re drawing the picture,” she said. “So many professional artists want to get back into the mindset of kids for their creativity and spontaneity.”

Vesci said she believed displaying the work for children and their family members and the general public is a way of “celebrating the positive accomplishments of the city youth and could in some small way help change the image of Camden.”

In the past, artwork made through Art Aware has been displayed in schools, City Hall and the Camden Children’s Garden.

After the temporary bridge is taken down next year, Pfeiffer and Vesci hope the artwork is displayed elsewhere in the hospital.

“Anywhere children’s artwork is displayed is important for the patients and visitors and for the kids,” Pfeiffer said.

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

*school name (art teacher) student name if known (grade level) title of piece

*Camden Forward (Ms. Baker, Ms. Kring-schreifels) 8th graders “Lion King Masks;”
*Lanning Square (Ms. Lippincott) Saleiyah (5) “Paper Mache Puppet Family;”
*Forest Hill (Ms. Jones) Kindergartener “Butterfly;”
*Whittier (Ms. Allen) Vinasia (1) “Self-portrait;”
*Cream (Ms. Grey) Leonardo (8) “Reverse Nike;”
*ECO Charter (Ms. Subramanya) Group project “Banana Tree;”

Hopefully you’ve seen the first two blogs of quadrants and gotten the hang of how the work is listed:
*school name (art teacher) student name, if known (grade level) title of artwork.

*Davis (Ms. Mosley, Ms. DiMedio) Leslie (K) “Butterfly Bees;”
*Dudley (Ms. Spann) 5th grader “Aboriginal Bark Painting;”
*Leap Academy (Ms. Speart) Melanyd (2) “Cold Hands, Warm Heart;”
*Molina (Ms. Demarais, Ms. Moore, Mr. Deitz) Tatyany (K) “Daisy Tree;”
*Washington (Ms. Sassano) Cierra (3) “Dancers in Kente Clothing;”
*Cooper’s Poynt (Ms. Wallenburg, Ms. Knopp) Tianay (7) “Bubble Shop City;”
*Yorkship (Ms. Baskins, Ms. MacArthur) Amanda (6) “Star Fish;”

The following lists: *School name (art teacher’s name) student’s name if known (grade level) title of artwork:

*Holy Name (Ms. Guzman) Lucely (6) “Abstract Tree;”
*Parkside (Mr. Auge) 4th grader “In 2099 I Will Turn 100;”
*Sumner (Ms. Savarese) Siana (4) “The Emerald S Lizard;”
*Wiggins (Ms. Guida) Nayaritte (6) “Red House;”
*Bonsall (Ms. Gail, Ms. Rohr) Monet (3) “Giraffes;”
*McGraw (Ms. Manning) 4th grader “Abstract Flower;”

Some of you have seen the 2011 poster on our website http://www.artaware.org and may have wondered WHO did this artwork? Well, you can click onto the 2009 poster (http://www.artaware.org/2009poster.htm) to get an idea of the scope of Art Aware’s yearly posters in the whole city of Camden.

Now I’ll give you the details of the images in the 2011 poster, many of which have already been shown in past blogs. We’ll give you previews of the 2012 poster in upcoming blogs.

Art Aware celebrates students and the talented full-time art teachers initiating artwork in public, parochial and charter Camden elementary schools.

In the first quadrant we have
*Sacred Heart (Ms.Cucinotta, teacher) and 5th graders “Stop Killing Our Fish;”
*Catto (Ms. Dubbs), 2nd, 3rd, 4th joint projects “The Universe;”
*Sharp (Ms. Saeger) Dennis (1st grade!) “Circles of Color;”
*Cramer (Ms.Watkins), Ruth (4) “Matisse Lady Relaxing;”
*St. Joes Pro-Cathedral (Ms. Deets) Kayla (4) “Seven-Tone Banner;”
*Wilson (Ms. Babilonia) Zenasia (2) “Chinese Bowl with Oranges;”

Go to the website or past blogs to see larger images of the children’s work.