Artaware's Blog

The elementary schools in Camden are blooming with art shows. The walls are covered with student work initiated by art teachers. Every year at this time Art Aware volunteers scout the corridors for pieces to exhibit in the following year’s poster of Camden Students at Peace Doing Art.

A successful closure for The Lion King activities that consumed the eighth grade art classes for the past month: everyone discussing it in class.

Students at Camden Forward School, under the direction of art teacher, Julie Kring-Schreifels, completed the masks that were influenced by the production they saw of Julie Taymor’s Lion King at the Philadelphia Academy of Music on April 15th. Art Aware sponsored the theatrical outing.

The proof is in the pudding. Look at the results!

These students will be graduating in June. The years of creating art and having it displayed throughout their classrooms and at home will be an important memory of their elementary school experience. It will remain with them for a lifetime.

With luck, when they have their own children, they will find an elementary school with a extraordinary art program similar to the one at Camden Forward and pass down the creative tradition.

Art teacher, Julie Kring-Schriefels had briefed them about Julie Taymour’s artistry and had them start to create their own masks. We will post the results as soon as they’re completed.

Two younger students who had sung songs from the show at a recent school recital accompanied the eighth graders. Everyone had seen the Disney film. They knew the story backwards and forwards and yet it was new to them. That is what live theatre does for people:  it speaks to the immediacy of the moment and their involvement in it.

When the huge elephant, shown in the above picture, lumbered through the orchestra seating, gasps could be heard throughout the theatre. Up in the ampitheatre it took a while for us to see it. What a thrill!

Four years ago, Art Aware took students from Molina School to a production of “The Lion King.”

We hope to do it again for yet more students when it comes to Philadelphia again! It never gets old and it’s an experience of a lifetime!

Yesterday I went to watch a “horse whisperer,” Diane, work with her horses. Being a “dog and cat” person myself, she demonstrated to me how horses, even more than dogs, need an authority figure.
(Of course cats are their own authority figures.)

My experience with horses has not been intimate. I have ridden horses all my life but have never owned one. My cousin, Catherine, bought her first and only horse, Scarlett Moon, fifteen years ago, when she was forty-four years old. Here’s a photo of me introducing Catherine to her first ride at age three and yesterday, fifty years later, – a photo of me with her beautiful horse, Scarlett.

I learned that it’s not cute when horses “nudge” – it means they don’t respect your “space.” I love it when I get nudged by my dogs or cats and haven’t minded a gentle horse nudge, but strong horse nudges are dangerous. Horses are a lot bigger than people – and certainly than children. In addition to regular classes, Diane teaches autistic children. She must teach her horses a respect for “the spaces” of all of her students.

All animals, four- and two-legged, need their space to be respected. With great authority and kindness, Diane teaches the horse who is boss. And the horse teaches Diane about its stellar ability to perform with the right telepathy – to the point of blurring the equine/human distinction.

A talented elementary school instructor enables his or her students to perform in extraordinary ways. Look at what Lydia, a kindergartener, produced under the step-by-step direction of her art teacher, Sandra!

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?