Youth Art Month

When I was at the Alabama Art Education Conference, there was some discussion about Youth Art Month reports. I realized that all our school was doing for Youth Art Month was dropping off some art at the Carnegie Visual Arts Center. This year I decided to do a little more. Since one of the things I require my AP Art History students to do is a presentation on the art of a chosen culture, we made it into a YAM activity. Each student made flyers with a cheesy photograph, and that they were presenting a lecture on the art of whichever culture they were doing. The date and time were also on the flyer, so anyone could come. We billed it as the "Youth Art Month Lecture Series."

Also, I had a college or two express interest in speaking to our students. So we had "College Week," where both art schools and nearby colleges with art programs came to speak with our students and show off our school.

Also, we had our Youth Art Month exhibition. The young man shown above is one of my Art II students, but he won for a photograph for another teacher's class. The sculpture of Sadako Sasaki with a paper crane at the top of this post was by this young lady:

She did it in my Ceramics & Crafts class. It started out as a crane, but wound up looking more like a kneeling figure. We haven't done a glaze firing yet, so she painted it with watercolor. Totally different from what she expected, but it looks pretty good.

I also had a winner from my Art II classes. I taught my Pattern Value Drawings lesson for the second year and one student took second place for her Carrie Underwood:

My other entries were a tapestry woven piece:

A 3-D shoe (using an idea from a teacher's Digication e-Portfolio here):

...and a print that I won't show here because I want to enter it in another contest. We were limited to 5 entries and I had a drawing, a print, a weaving, a clay sculpture, and a cardboard sculpture, so we are obviously using a wide variety of media.