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Project: Create your own Super Power
If you could do anything, have some extraordinary power, what would it be, who would you be of service to, and what would you (or you super emblem) look like? This work was done by a client who wanted to be Captain Addiction and his superpower was the ability to cure people of their addictions.
Project: Torn Paper - Using only torn paper sourced from magazines and glue this class challenged the clients to make an image that reflected their personality through a created or familiar phrase or slogan that was an attitude or belief that they could stand behind. In this piece, the slogan ‘the show must go on’ was an idea and an attitude the artist jubilantly expressed with images from the circus and an explosion of color.
Project: Look/Describe/Interpret - Each client was randomly given a postcard of a famous art work and was asked to describe what they saw and write their description on a file card. The file cards were then collected, shuffled, and randomly redistributed. Now each client had a file card that only described something they couldn't see. One card might contain a lot of information...subject, color, orientation, emotional content, story. Others, just a few words or an abstract concept. The clients were then given magazines, glue and paper and were instructed to make a collage that illustrated the description on the file card they had received. At the end of the class we read the file card describing the original art work while displaying the new work that the client had made based on that description. We then talked about the client's artwork in comparison to the original work of art printed on the post card. In the above example, you see Yoshitomo Nara's "Green Eyes" and the client's art work.
Project: A Room of One’s Own
We start class by talking about the ideas and frustrations that author Virginia Woolf addressed in her essay, “A Room of One’s Own”. From that idea we asked clients to create a room of their own hoping to move beyond the basic furniture needs and desires towards a more fundamental and personal desire. Woolf felt she needed the space and privacy and authority to write…what do you need? To create space on the page we all began by drawing a square or rectangle in the middle of our paper and then connecting the four corners of that rectangle to the corners of the paper. Here is one client’s room…a place where he would be honest with himself.
Project: Word of The Day
We start our day in class with morning meeting. Run by a staff member, each volunteer and client says their name and then gives a positive word of the day. In this project, we use that word as a springboard to express that word graphically or visually to represent what our word means to us in a more complete way. This client’s word of the day was ‘faith and he created this collage to express how his faith brings joy in to his life.
Project: Transformation
Clients were asked to think about transformation and use that as the basis and inspiration for the project. Transformation can take on many different forms and shapes. In nature the caterpillar becomes a butterfly. A snake crawls out of its skin when it outgrows it. But it also applies to us; we are all transforming all the time, physically, spiritually and intellectually. Transformation is growth and change. For this project clients were shown some examples of how transformation has been used in Art ranging from Picasso to Francis Bacon. Clients were given multiple portrait images to use and were instructed to transform them into something new, with positive transformation in mind, by either combining different images, adding images and words, or free styling using markers and tape.
Images used ranged from Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillipsy, Picasso to Louis CK among others. We then discussed some of the interesting and varied transformations that took place.
Project: Black Out Poetry - Using newspapers and black markers we created visual poems, emphasizing the idea of creating art/poetry by ‘taken away’ from the source (in this case, the newspaper page) to discover a completely original and new work. Searching the body of the text is a bit like a treasure hunt, a surprising source of material that can bring a different meaning, a voice of one’s own to what otherwise looks like any typical sheet of newsprint. Using the marker to first select and circle the words we want to keep and then to blacken, cross out, the words and images that we don’t want, the clients discover a completely new visual text of their own creation.
Project: Before & After - Using supplies found in the kitchen (foil, wax paper & parchment paper) we asked clients to express two states: before & after. No other directions except for a few suggestions…the egg and then the chicken for one. We had many powerful finished products at the end of class. This is just one of them, titled: before & after using crack cocaine.
Project: From Scratch - In this class we used simple scratch pads…paper that has been pre-coated with a waxy black surface that is removed by scratching in to the surface revealing the white paper base. The idea that sometimes you remove in order to reveal was interesting to discuss in class before we began. Here are two of the results, one a powerful graphic, one a beautiful drawing.
Project: Shadow Me - This project used as source material a photograph as back round or ‘canvas’ and green, blue and black masking tape. The original image was enlarged and then sectioned off into twenty equal parts so that each client and volunteer received one part. Each client was instructed to think about color, shape and form in response to the street and to shadows. The project focused on how individual parts make a more dynamic whole.