Spring Break/Summer Art Camps

Part Two: The Beginning

It all started a year ago that I was inducted into the wide world of teaching in an art museum setting at the Greater Denton Arts Council. This was my chance to really explore my passion for this specific pedagogy and my background in art history, art creating, and creative expression. Also this is my chance to pass this discovery on to my students. Not going to lie, I was nervous. It was an opportunity to take charge and have a lot of responsibility. This meant the importance of involvement from "my kids", their concept of art making and its history, and after all, their safety. My objectives were stated simply but it was a challenge to actually implement them. I wanted to broaden their intellectual understanding of relevant terminology in the art world through art projects, gallery visits, lectures/presentations, and group discussion/critiques. A basic development of the capability to see and translate visual relationships onto two and three dimensional surfaces, in hopes to enable students of creating communication and personal interpretation. 

The GDAC Summer/Spring Break Camps consisted of particular themes that introduces basic methods through enjoyable and simple art making. For example, I created an Art and Nature Camp that took pieces of natural elements and incorporated them into an art museum setting. I wanted to teach them all the strange and wonderful things that Mother Nature had to offer and compare it to the wide and weird world of art. We had fun learning about interesting plants around the world. From there, we created our own classifications of made-up plants. You should of heard the imaginative responses I got from this project. We developed our fictional plants and created a narrative to go along with it. With this activity, I wanted to involve my favorite art movement (Dadaism) and let students build off of one another through the surrealist game Exquisite Corpse. To my delight, my students were actually learning and developing a sense of how nature plays a huge part in expressing oneself through art.

All and all, this was a good introduction on how to successfully engage with this particular audience. 

I think the pictures are a good depiction of the students excitement throughout these camps.

Our morning meeting before our activities began.

We included a river to run through our camp site. If you can look closely, you can spot a pikachu wading in the water. (Big involvement with Pokemon, since Go! just came out)

These students working together on their collaboration of the exquisite corpse game.

Another excellent example of the collaboration through dadaism. Pure wackiness! It is a krabichu. (In case you were wondering)

We made brooches and this particular student included his knowledge on the illuminati. (Which I am still baffled about to this day)