Youth Classes

Week Two: the 1930's-early 1940's

This week we will take much of our inspiration from the wide range of artists of the New Deal and WPA including Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Aaron Douglas, Rosa Rush, and Jacob Lawrence. Students will learn about the role art played in helping lift the United States out of the Great Depression and the wide spread legacy of these programs that remains visible to this day. Like the works of this era, our projects will spark the collective spirit of art making and celebrate belonging.

Week Three: Late 1940's-1950's

This week our artworks will be inspired by both the "high" art of Abstract Expressionism and the "low" art of a newly expanded post-war pop culture. One day we might have fun absorbing the influences of action painting (think Jackson Pollack) and color field painting (think Mark Rothko), and on another day make work related to the birth of rock and roll and artists like Sister Rosetta Tharpe who pioneered the movement.

Week Four: the 1960's

In this week of art camp, students will learn about the aesthetic revolutions of Pop Art, Op Art, minimalism and performance art, as well as the social revolutions that inspired them. Our art projects will explore the still relevant influences of consumerism, mass production, and entertainment exemplified by Pop artists as well as provide an opportunity to play with graphic art, color, and repeated patterns.

Week Five: the 1970's

In this week of art camp we will have fun creating artworks inspired by pioneering conceptual artists of the 1970's like On Kawara, Joseph Kosuth, and Yoko Ono. We will also learn about Land Art, making our own temporary, collaborative, nature-based sculptures here at the center. Expect a week that, like the 70's, emphasizes experimentation, process, and free-thinking!

Week Six: the 1980's and 90's

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!

Daniel Spoerri Inspired Collaborative Pizza Party

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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