Growing Day By Day - MFA Boston

This week (my school vacation week btw, I'm so exhausted)- I am the visiting artist at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston!

I am facilitating a week long collaborative sculpture installation called "Growing Day by Day" bridging Ellsworth Kelley's painting with Louise Nevelson's work which is directly across from it in the contemporary gallery. 

We will have had around 1000 participants by the end of the week. 

Each group that comes in gets a goody bag of monochromatic materials and constructs a sculpture to be added to the installation.

The MFA Boston's facebook page is posting the progress. 

I will do a round up of how this lesson came to be, the prep involved, and how it works at the end of the week. However if you live in Boston come on by! (and say Hi!). I will be there today and tomorrow as we continue to make this huge installation grow.

A sneak peek:

It has been getting amazing feedback! I'm so proud!

curiosity

Hello blog world!

I noticed I have a TON of traffic coming from somewhere on Facebook but I have no idea where exactly? 

Do any of you lovelies know? 

I also wanted to share a glimpse into our snow-COVERED Boston and my husbands massive snowman masterpiece that I styled this morning. 

Enjoy!

Salt Dough Inuksuk/Innunguat

I learned some new things about inuksuks this time around!

What I (and most of the world) commonly thought is an Inuksuk is not! 

Inuksuk or Inukshuk : a landmark 

Inuksuit : plural

Innunguaq : imitation of a person

Innunguat : plural

Apparently this Olympic logo is partially to blame for the misconception. 

The project:

This lesson was a great round out to a unit on Native American art, culture, and history. 

My fifth graders made a large batch of salt dough as our clay for this. 

The recipe is:

2 cups flour

1 cup salt

1 cup water

Then it has to dry for a long time (or you can bake it on low for a long while).

It was also a great lesson in ratios for them as they measured and made them really

invested in the project making their own materials. 

After we made out dough we made pinch pots since some of my kids have

never had art until this year and we don't get to use clay a whole lot. 

The next day we discussed native peoples of the arctic region of Alaska, Canada, and Greenland.

I introduced Inuksuit and Innunguat and then we watched a really good five minute you tube video.

This video is such a great introduction to the lesson depicting

the landscape as well as explaining the purpose of the sculptures/landmarks. 

We used two to three toothpicks as the armatures for the stone people.

The image above shows the plan for how the clay "rocks" are held together. 

When they dry they look and feel like rock. 

We painted them brown and grey to look like rock when they were dry. 

 

winter shade and shadow landscape

I based this lesson on these two pins but gave it a winter twist:

 

Day one we worked on tints and shade mixing with blue for the sky around the moon.

Day two we discussed shadows, added on snowmen and their appropriate shadows and a small house in the distance demonstrating depth. 

(I apologize because these are some of the worst pictures I've taken in a long while.)