First month at The Madi!!!! :)

Hello again everyone!! Megan and I have been at the The Madi for a little over a month, and so far we have done a lot!! We created our first education program for a group of students that came from Irma Rangel Young Women’s Leadership School. Because of the current John Henry exhibition we decided to utilize the artworks in it for our program. The exhibition is comprised of architectural blueprints for John Henry’s works, both small scale and life size sculptures, and photographs that document the construction of his works. For our program we had the class first go through the exhibit to see the pieces and learn about the history and process of John Henry’s work. Then the group was given materials to create a blueprint of their own John Henry inspired work. Finally the group was then able to bring that blueprint to life by creating their own small scale sculpture that they could take home. It was a lot of fun and the class really enjoyed it! 

For the rest of the summer Megan and I want to think of at least two more program ideas. The rest of the groups that will be coming this summer are comprised of kindergarten through 3^rd grade students, so I am excited to see what we come up with for this age group! One idea we have is a program focusing on Salvador Presta, a very prominent Madi artist who came out of Argentina during this movement. Many of his works are similar to mobiles, so we were thinking of creating a program where the children could make their own mobiles using 2D and 3D shapes/blocks as well as utilize specific color patterns like Presta does. This project could possibly be sensory related, mainly through sight, so I am obviously very excited to see this happen!

We have a few weeks before the next class, so in the mean time I am helping Megan with her project involving the redesign of the museum’s wall labels. We have been working on them for about a week and have got a pretty good chunk nearly finished! One of the most rewarding things that has come out of this is learning where all the artist’s come from. By working on labels we have been able to see how the influence of Madi spread from South America to Europe.

So all in all, I believe we have already seen success with the initial goals/projects we wanted to accomplish over the summer! :)

Below is a picture of Megan and I using different materials to test out the John Henry program.