Art readers' digest

Lucy Lippard, keynote address at a symposium, "The Feminist Future," at Museum of Modern Art, 2007:

"I've always been ocsessed with the collage esthetic that defines so much feminist art -- a layered, cumulative mode.....  Collage is about shifting relationships, juxtaposition and superimposition, gluing and ungluing.  It's an esthetic that willfully takes apart what is or is supposed to be and rearranges it in ways that suggest what could be.  Collage makes something of contradictions.  It contains the possibilty of visual puns, accessible contrasts and irony.  It's also the medium of surprise, which can shake us out of our stupors.

"Collaboration is the social extension of the collage esthetic, and it characterizes a lot of women's art.  Collaboration has long been a weapon against the powerful sense of alienation that characterizes late capitalism, which divides and separates through specialization at the same time that it homogenizes.  Putting things together without divesting them of their own identities is a metaphor for cultural democracy, the diametric opposite of a global corporate culture."

a few of my daily collages

Junk art -- the kids make some

Here are the fourth-graders working on their junk art.

We had sheets of mat board for them to use as supports; they could choose either the blue side or the white side.  We had two hot glue guns going with grownup assistance, but encouraged the kids to stick down as much as possible with Elmer's glue.  Unfortunately, on some of the pieces the glue became a major artistic element.  (It will probably be less so after the glue dries.)

Some of them used my suggestion to group objects by color.

Some made words.

Some made pictures.

Others made symmetrical compositions.

Some were possible candidates for psych evaluation.

More later -- stay tuned.

Sign of the week

in the teachers' restroom

Junk art -- the tutorial 2

Here's the rest of what I told the fourth-graders about different ways to make junk art:

Fourth, choose objects with similar colors.

Word on the Street: Orange

Green on the Street 




















Fifth, choose objects with similar shapes.

Paper Moons

Road Kill 2: Circles

Road Kill 3: Rectangles 

Sixth, make letters or words.

Tupelo

Street Runes (yes, it's words -- you just don't know the alphabet)

 I'll show you what the kids came up with tomorrow.

Junk art -- the tutorial 1

I had the pleasure yesterday of working with three fourth-grade classes to help them make art from found objects (aka junk), a gig that was arranged by my friend and fellow fiber artist Melinda Snyder, their art teacher.  A month ago Melinda shared some photos of my found-object art and instructed the kids to start finding their own stuff at home or on the street.

I told them that the most important thing in making art from miscellaneous stuff is to think of a way to make the disparate things play well together.  Six different methods came to mind, each one illustratable by some work from the show I had in spring.

First, make a picture.

My Valentine

Hot Lips

Second, find a "picture" in an intriguing object.

Gator on a Leash

Beyond the Blue Horizon

Third, use multiples.

Powerless

104 Counts of Assaulting a Battery, an AA Felony

Caravan

Hey, that's enough for one day.  Tomorrow I'll tell you about three more methods of organizing junk into art.

Photo suite 71 -- dancing in the street