The final week of our summer camp season will be an exciting investigation into two decades that many of us lived through: the 1980's and 90's. Some of our projects will take inspiration from Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, the Guerrilla Girls, and Street Art, a paradoxical movement that returned to more traditional figurative imagery while also rejecting the primacy of galleries and museums spaces. We will also be inspired by the introduction of digital art, music videos, and the zine. This one might be the most fun for parents!
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In the first session of Art Academy for 6-10 year olds this spring, we looked at artists and artwork inspired by food and our rituals and habits around eating. For this project, we took our inspiration from contemporary Swiss artist, Daniel Spoerri, who is best known for his so-called "snare pictures," which are large scale assemblages of what is left on a table after a meal has been eaten by a group of people. These works are made up of "used" cutlery, dinnerware, and napkins. They might also include spilled drinks, leftover bites, change, ashtrays, flower arrangements, wine corks and bottles, or paper ephemera left behind by one of the diners. His works are hung up on the wall, taking the table and its contents to the vertical. Viewed like this, they become intriguing tableaus with clues about what has happened in the moments before we, the viewers, arrived. Our students had fun following the clues and making educated guesses about who was there, what was eaten, and where the meal was enjoyed. In viewing Spoerri's work, they readily made connections to their own experiences dining with family and friends and to the idea that these times are poignant and celebratory. It was easy after this conversation to leap into creating our own tableau of a pizza party interrupted. This lesson could be adapted for students K-12.

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Prairie Arts Center is excited to once again partner with the OSU Museum of Art for this year's Spring Break Camp. Camp will begin with a visit to the museum for an interactive tour of  BLOW UP II: Inflatable Contemporary Art, a whimsical exhibition that explores "the imaginative ways that air is used as a tool to create large-scale sculptures." Students will use these larger than life artworks for inspiration as they collaborate to create a large scale sculpture of their own. We will also visit some of downtown Stillwater's public sculpture, and have the chance to plan and draw out an imagined piece of public art. Finally, as a class, we will create a sculpture garden in miniature, creating works made from polymer clay, cardboard, wood, and more. 
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