Youth Classes

Art Academy is an after-school class designed for students who wish to develop and grow their artistic aptitude. Throughout each six week session, students learn and practice foundational skills in the visual arts and are exposed to a variety of mediums in both the 2D and 3D arts. Art Academy students also develop strong visual literacy and critical thinking skills through looking at and discussing their own artwork and the artwork of others. For the 6-10 year old cohort, each session yields a "final" work or project that is shared and discussed. For the 11-14 year old students, the focus shifts to skills-based instruction with an emphasis on drawing, painting, design, and composition.

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.

These imaginative ink and watercolor castles are inspired by prominent turn-of-the-century Oklahoma architect, Joseph Pierre Foucart. Foucart was the first architect to establish a practice in the Oklahoma territory and many of his unique and historical buildings remain in use today. They are especially prominent in Guthrie, OK, where Foucart set up his practice in 1889. Foucart brought the influence of European Gothic with him to Oklahoma and helped develop a new style called Prairie Gothic. Foucart was known to break some of the rules of his day, irreverently mixing and matching window, door, and column styles on the same building. Without a doubt, Joseph Foucart changed the landscape of Oklahoma with his love for the fantastical and whimsical. The following lesson plan was used in a mixed-age setting with students ages 6-12. It could be adapted for students up through high school.

Description: 
Another of our week long summer camps this year was inspired by the artwork and ethos of the much beloved Georgia O'Keeffe. The following mixed media project was developed in order to explore more deeply the influence that photography had on O'Keeffe's work. From the beginning, O'Keeffe was moved to paint vast open landscapes of land and sky, a place that she called lovingly "the faraway." But it was from the rise of art photography and those artists working in the new medium, including her husband Alfred Stieglitz, that O'Keeffe learned the value of zooming in. Some of her most iconic works are the result of these up close studies. In this lesson, students take their cues from O'Keeffe and create their own vision of the faraway, while also practicing seeing what is up close. This project was designed for our 6-10 year old cohort but could be adapted for any age group.