Artaware's Blog

AAUW sponsored students and parents from Camden Forward School at the Philadelphia Orchestra Family Concert last Saturday. The Enchantment Theatre Company danced the story of Stravinsky’s “Firebird” with the Philadelphia Orchestra.

The Philadelphia Orchestra will host the 4th of their subscription family concerts at 11:30 a.m. this Saturday, March 27th. Camden students, their teachers and family members will see and hear it at the Kimmel Center. An excellent pre-concert activity at 10:00 a.m., designed for young people, will prepare them for Stravinsky’s “Firebird.”

When else can you hear the Philadelphia Orchestra for $6.00? Tickets are available at the Box Office on the day. Please join us! 

For 42 years AAUW has enabled thousands of inner city children to experience the Philadelphia Orchestra. This time more than a dozen from Urban Promise’s Camden Forward School will attend.

The glass structure of the Kimmel Center houses the main concert arena, Verizon Hall, and the smaller Perlman Building. It’s a thrill for students to visit the roof garden on the Perlman, to look up at the towering high rises, to look across to Verizon Hall and to look down at the tiny people strolling on the ground floor five stories below.

There’s a lot to look at – including a group of nude statues on the second floor, which, as this student discovered, are more accessible than at an art museum.

Beautiful children going to beautiful places – that’s the way the world should be. Don’t you agree?

Art Aware was invited to give presentations to students by principals and art teachers of different inner-city elementary schools. We would bring reproductions of famous paintings, talk about them, ask the students to respond to them verbally and through their own artwork.

The concentration and skill shown in both works is a tribute to their Camden art teachers as well as to the students and, of course, to the artists they were inspired by.

Our art appreciation program didn’t work well in some Philadelphia schools we visited which didn’t have art teachers. The students couldn’t express themselves, couldn’t “read” reproductions of artwork, couldn’t put their own marks on the page.

For twenty-five years Art Aware has visited dozens of inner-city public, charter and parochial elementary schools with resident art teachers and found their students exemplary. We got feedback through the students’ art work. We saw their end-of-year art exhibitions. The proof was and is in the pudding.

Credit must be given to the school boards and to individual principals for maintaining art education in inner-city schools – past, present and future!

The Philadelphia Museum of Art ends its Picasso Show on April 25, 2010. Be sure to see it before it ends. William H. Johnson was influenced by Picasso and found his own style. Elementary school students, then, seeing reproductions of his work, enjoy doing their own variations on Johnson’s themes, which I’ll post at a later date.

Johnson’s “Going to Church” is so colorful and surreal. Look at those blue horns, hooves, fence, churches to carry the eye around the whole picture. Brilliant! And look at the stretch of blue sky attached to the tall pine trees. Don’t you love it! Of course what really clinches the whole painting are the two guys sitting on the back of the wagon, feet dangling, hundreds of feet above the farm fields.

Next is Johnson’s “Cafe.” That gal is holding onto her man, who wants to get away. His eyes and his feet are screaming to get up and be gone!  The kids in an Art Aware class  ask, “why are her legs white.”  “Why do you think?” “White stockings?” “Sounds good to me!” “Look at those crazy chair legs and that change-purse about to fall off the table.”

Ahhhh, Picasso and Johnson do well!

Do you like William H. Johnson’s artwork as much as I do?

Picasso and the Avant-Garde in Paris

http://www.philamuseum.org/exhibitions/354.html

Students from grades 3, 4 and 5 at Camden Forward Elementary school traveled to the Philadelphia Museum of Art to see Picasso, thanks to Art Aware informing art teachers Julie Kring Schreifels and Susan Baker that a PMA grant was available to them.

What a great time they had. And you will too! The show is on until April 25th. The Camden Forward students are doing artwork influenced by Picasso and friends, which I’ll post later.

Picasso was a spiritual prophet to the world of art and philosophy. Although he died in 1973, he is still leading human beings away from a representational fundamentalism that cripples creative minds. How many times have you heard people reject their artistic nature by saying “Oh, I’m no good at art. I can’t draw a straight line.” In 2010 people have options way beyond having to draw something that looks “real.”

When artists, young and old, experiment, investigate and play with ideas in the art studio, they open up paths of communication – variations of what has been done before, but also perhaps  forging new ground for the art and philosophy of the 21st century.

At the PMA show, I thought about perspective:  my own, the kids’, the teachers’, the docents’, the guards, etc. The artwork forced us to bust our brains making connections between the world and how we see it. We mentally climbed on the vehicle that brings us to universal dialogue:  Art!

Above are samples of 4th graders artwork initiated by Nicole Cucinotta at Sacred Heart School. It was influenced by Pablo Picasso and Maurice Sendak.

Many of my education colleagues wear more than one hat in their lives as homemaker, teacher, volunteer, etc. Sylvia was such a person – a long-time friend, teacher, past AAUW President and Co-chair with me of the Children’s Concerts in which The American Association of University Women provides subscription series tickets to Philadelphia Orchestra performances for Camden elementary school students.

One year the Orchestra sponsored an art contest for kids to draw their favorite thing. Aaron Copeland’s “Appalachian Spring” was to be played. The winning drawings and photos of the artists would be displayed during the concert. ALL of the drawings we submitted won. What a thrill for the students to see their artwork and photographs shown on large screens at the Kimmel Center, accompanied by the Philadelphia Orchestra playing “My Favorite Things.”

Sylvia died this week, suddenly of congestive heart failure. She leaves behind so many friends she touched as teacher and volunteer and also countless inner city children (and adults) who don’t know her by name but know and remember her through their Academy of Arts and Kimmel Center visits – often once-in-a-lifetime experiences.

We will miss Sylvia so much but her legacy lives on.

Camden, NJ, a struggling city, has reason to be proud of its elementary school art teachers who produce results similar to those in Cherry Hill, a well-to-do town. Please enjoy the samples of artwork initiated by Ms. Kring Schreifels at Camden Forward School (Urban Promise).

The students did variations on themes by William Johnson and Romare Bearden.

On Saturday, home-bound by our 29″(!) of snow, I made origami in preparation for an upcoming class with 7th graders. I needed a hard surface to work on and chose the nearest thing to where I was sitting, a children’s book by Romare Bearden, “Li’l Dan, the Drummer Boy.” On the back of the book is a wonderful picture of the artist’s sensitive face. I felt he was looking up at me, helping with the difficult origami instructions!

Several years ago Art Aware got a grant from Faith Ringgold, the African American creator of story quilts, to teach students about Romare Bearden, the African American collage artist. It was after Bearden had his huge retrospective at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. and part of that show was to go the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City.

The grant allowed us to work with art teachers in eight Camden elementary schools and one Philadelphia school. Large murals of collages in Bearden’s style were created and displayed and then nine busloads of elementary school students went to the Whitney to see his original artwork.

I hope it was an experience those two hundred young artists will never forget. I know I never will.

And my origami session with Bearden on my lap made me feel even closer to him.

Art Aware would give presentations to all the art classes scheduled for the week with the resident art teacher observing. Five hundred students a week from first through eighth grade would be an average number for most schools.

Thanks to having art every week for all of their elementary school years, the students knew how to put their marks on the page.

I gave them oil crayons and the choice of plain paper or graph paper to work with. Hexagon-sided paper in some classes was given out so that the finished art could fit together a class mural.

Julie, a sixth grader, chose vibrant colors and solid shapes to do a flat view of Van Gogh’s bed; her modern, yellow chair was influenced by the Lichtenstein reproduction.

Stephanie, a fifth grader was entirely creative in her design of the bedroom which was influenced by Van Gogh, Mondrian and Lichtenstein.

You can see great results when kids realize different strokes for different folks is entirely the way art works – and that they themselves are the artists!