Projects in progress and completed.

Good evening everyone,

I am so excited for everyone's projects coming together, getting job offers, and doing amazing work!!

On my end, I finally got my Art Cart project approved by my supervisor. It is an interpretation project for one of Louise Nevelson's sculptures that will be on display later this year. I'm not going to lie, it has been pretty challenging to get the activity on the right track. I've turned in a few proposal ideas, went through various possible activities with different materials. However, due to the museum's guidelines for education materials I had to rethink the project and I came up with a new one that got my supervisor's thumbs up!

I am still working on it, we have a meeting in the morning to refine the idea and get everything written, printed, order materials, to start testing and get feedback. So with that said, I AM SUPER EXCITED! - Caps for dramatic effect - but yes, I love Louise Nevelson's work, this project has really helped me understand Interpretation projects for museums at a much deeper level! I don't want to say any more until I get it ready for testing and just in time for our final reflection!

Another amazing project that just ended was my second story time in front of Louise Nevelson's "Lunar Landscape" sculpture. The research helped me figure out what are the major takeaways that I wanted the parents and children learn about the piece. So i created a document with bullet points and set of questions that would lead to the story time participants to associate things that they know to the sculpture. The actual story I read was not a very long one, and did not really have a narrative. The theme that day was "Loud and Quiet" and the story I read was Noisy Night by Brian Biggs. It is a really sweet and funny book about an apartment building where everyone is loud and they can hear each other through the walls. However, as I asked the kids to participate and be loud, we got in a bit of trouble with the other Educators as everyone could hear us. It was really fun to have the kids participate.

I took the opportunity of the story being so short so that I could talk about the artwork. I had them do a little bit of Slow Looking, and created a set of questions for them to make associations of the details of the art work with things they were familiar with. For instance, besides the shapes they could see, I told them the title of the piece and asked how they associated the title "Lunar Landscape" with the color of the artwork, which is black. This lead to understanding the word Landscape with the materials of the sculpture, wood that she picked up living in New York. For little kids, these are complex ideas that they were able to connect at such a young age, so my next step to get them to connect with the art was to imagine that the sculpture was the apartment building in the story. Every page of the book had a different room, so we would stop and look at the artwork and I asked them where they think that room would be in the sculpture. The parents really seemed to enjoy the story and learning about it with their children. One thing I still need to work on, is getting my nerves under control! I know that that just comes with becoming comfortable talking in front of people, and I want to say that the last two stories I read were a lot easier and flowed a lot smoother. As they said, practice makes perfect... or in this case: practice makes for fun and relaxed learning environment.

I forgot to add this amazing experience I had at The Dallas Contemporary! I volunteered to assist the amazing Shoshana Macintosh during her session for the DISD art teacher professional development. Shoshana is magical and everyone learned new ways to approach art education in the classroom. Her session Social and Emotional Empowerment SEE ART was a huge success, !!!!  (Photo to be added.) I did not get to see the other sessions, but i know all the teachers had a great experience. 

Teaching about Louise Nevelson and her work.
Photo credit: Emily Sullivan, Public Programs Coordinator.