smART Kids

smART Kids Art Program

The smART Kids Art Program is a grant and participation funded program providing in-class room and on-site Art Center art education lessons and experiences for Quincy Area Students, Kindergarten – Third Grade.

Two art lessons are brought into the class room, one in the fall semester and another in the spring semester. These lessons cover National Learning Standard for participating age groups, new vocabulary for students to improve understanding and communication of art, brief lesson and introduction to a famous artist or artistic style, materials to create their own project inspired by the lesson, and step-by-step guidance from our trained instructors to help build confidence for future creative expression.

Funding for the 2019-2020 smART Kids Art Program was provided by:
Tracy Family Foundation
Community Foundation
Samantha Otte Foundation of the Community Foundation
Walmart Community Foundation
Quincy Public Schools Foundation & PTAs

2019 Fall smART Kids Lesson

Paul Klee

National Learning Standards Covered: VA:Cr2.1.Ka-3a; VA:Cr2.2.Ka-3a; VA:Cr3.1.Ka-3a; VA:Re7.2.Ka-3a; VA:Re8.1.Ka-3a

Objective: Students will create abstract artwork in the style of Paul Klee. They will learn the difference between abstract and realistic artworks, practice balancing colors throughout their artwork, and use good craftsmanship when creating.

Vocabulary:
Line: An element of art used in drawing, painting, and sculpture. A line is
the path of a moving point.
Shape: The element of art that describes a two-dimensional area (height and width).
Abstract Art: Art created from a realistic situation but represented unrealistically. Abstract art images are “abstracted” from real life images.
Composition: The arrangement of the parts of a work of art.

Materials Needed: pencil, eraser, Sharpie, media paper, and chalk pastels.

About the Artist: Paul Klee…
1) Was born in Switzerland in 1879. Was an important artist as well as a very good musician. He used both of those talents to create Modern Art.
2) He loved color and used numbers and letters of the alphabet that had special meanings to him.
3) His art is known as Abstract Art, where the figures in his pieces look different from that of real life and may sometimes not look like anything at all. Most of his greatest known paintings are just colors and shapes.
4) He and his colleague, Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, both taught at the Bauhaus school of art, design and architecture. His works reflect his dry humor and his sometimes-childlike perspective, his personal moods and beliefs, and his musicality.
5) Notable Works:
AD Parnassum, 1932, Considered his masterpiece and the best example of his
pointillist style; it is also one of his most finely worked paintings.
Twittering Machine, 1922, dubbed as “degenerate art” by Adolf Hitler in 1933, this piece of art can now often be seen in children’s bedrooms. This is one of the best-known treasures at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Fish Magic, 1925 Klee creates a magical realm where all forms of life intermingle with the aquatic. Some say this is the best example of his works in which two of his gifts of intellect and imagination come together.
Cat and Bird, 1928 An image dealing with thought more than perception. This is one of his most well-known works.
6) His lectures Writings on Form and Design Theory (Schriften zur Form und Gestaltungslehre), published in English as the Paul Klee Notebooks, are held to be as important for modern art as Leonardo da Vinci’s A Treatise on Painting for the Renaissance.

2019 -2020 smART Kids Tour & Hands-On

Drawing Techniques: Seasonal Scenes

National Learning Standards Covered:
VA:Cr2.1.1, VA:Re8.1.2

Objective:
Students will create a construction paper crayon drawing. Students will experiment with the medium and develop art vocabulary.

Principles/Elements Vocabulary:
Color
Cool Colors: ½ of the colors on the color wheel. Includes: Blue, Green and Purple. Scientists and artists have learned that these colors make us feel cool because they remind us of cool things like water and grass.
Warm Colors: ½ of the colors on the color wheel. Includes: Red, Yellow and Orange. Scientists and artists have learned that these colors make us feel warm because they remind us of warm things like fire and the sun.
Space
Foreground: Part of a view nearest to the observer. The main object.
Background: Part of a view farthest from the observer. Area behind the main object.
Atmospheric Perspective: Technique of creating an illusion of depth by depicting distant objects as paler, less detailed, and usually bluer than near objects. It is an effect that can be used to add mood, beauty, drama, and a cinematic quality to imagery.
Other Vocabulary:
Crayon: invented in 1902, is a stick of colored wax. which is created by mixing paraffin wax & colored pigment together. Crayons are used for writing or drawing.
The word “Crayola” was originally thought up by Alice Binney. Binney, a school teacher, combined the French word “craie”, meaning “chalk”, with “ola”, shortened from the French word “oléagineux”, meaning “oily”.
Paul Klee, a famous artist who you learned about last Fall, used crayons in
some of his artwork.

Drawing Techniques – Seasonal Scenes

Jeffrey Robert, also known as “The Crayon Artist”, is a famous professional artist from Hawaii who makes and sells art that has been made with nothing more than Crayola Crayons.

Materials Needed: 9×12 black construction paper, construction paper crayons- divided into warm and cool colors, examples of fine art crayon drawings on black paper

2019-2020 Exhibits:

Selections from the Permanent Collection and the 6th Annual Student & Instructor of the Art Center Exhibit
Mary S. Oakley & Lee Lindsay Artist Showcase
46th Annual High School Student Art Competition, 3rd Annual High School Teachers Exhibit, and Emmy Lingscheit New Biomes
100 Faces of War – Smithsonian Institute Traveling Exhibition Service POSTPONED
Sandra Gottlieb and Just Desserts POSTPONED

2020 Spring smART Kids Lesson: POSTPONED TO 2020 FALL

Kehinde Wiley: Modern Portraits

National Learning Standards Covered: VA:Cr.1.1.Ka-3a; VA:Cr1.2.Ka-3a; VA:Cr2.1.Ka-3a; VA:Cr2.2.Ka-3a; VA:Cr2.3.2a; VA:Cr3.a.Ka-3a; VA:Re7.2.Ka-3a; VA:Re.8.1.Ka-3a; VA:Cn10.1.3a; VA:Cn11.1.Ka-3a

Objective: Students will create a portrait in the style of Kehinde Wiley using their teachers as a model. Students will learn about gesture drawing and how to use light and shadow to bring realism to their paintings.

Vocabulary:
Art History: the academic study of the history and development of painting, sculpture, and other visual arts.
Art Periods: a phase in the development of the work or an artist, groups of artists, or art movement.
Renaissance Art: Marked by a gradual shift from the abstract forms of the medieval period to the representational forms of the 15th century. Subjects grew from mostly biblical scenes to include portraits, episodes from classical religion, and events from contemporary life. Human figures are often rendered in dynamic poses, showing expression, using gesture, and interacting with one another. They are not flat but suggest mass, and they often occupy a realistic landscape, rather than standing against a gold background as some figures do in the art of the Middle Ages. Renaissance art from Northern Europe emphasized precise detail as a means of achieving a realistic work.
Rococo Art: style in interior design, the decorative arts, painting, architecture, and sculpture that originated in Paris in the early 18 th century but was soon adopted throughout France and later in other countries. It is characterized by lightness, elegance, and an exuberant use of curving natural forms in ornamentation.
Contemporary Art: the art of today, produced in the second half of the 20th century or in the 21st century. Contemporary artists work in a globally influenced, culturally diverse, and technologically advancing world. Their art is a dynamic combination of materials, methods, concepts, and subjects that continue the challenging of boundaries that was already well underway in the 20th century. Diverse and eclectic, contemporary art as a whole is distinguished by the vary lack of a uniform, organizing principle, ideology, or “-ism”. Contemporary art is part of a cultural dialogue that concerns larger contextual frameworks such as personal and cultural identity, family, community, and nationality.

Materials Needed: matte frames, wall paper (cut to fit and taped to frames), pencil, paint, brushes (medium and small), water cups, paper towels, “classic poses” cards, poster of Kehinde Wiley Charles 1, and Anthony van Dyke’s Charles 1.

About the Artist: Kehinde Wiley…
1) Born February 28, 1977 in south central Los Angeles, California. He is one of six children including a twin brother, Taiwo. His mother is African American, and his father was a study abroad student from Africa and is Yoruba from Nigeria.
2) Raised by his mother, Freddie Mae, after his father moved back to Africa. She enrolled him in art school when he was 11. He grew up going to museums and seeing great men painted in very powerful poses and grand scenes but none of them looked like him. “On weekends I would go to art classes at a conservatory. After school, we were on lockdown. It was something I hated, obviously, but in the end, it was a lifesaver. In art school, I just liked being able to make stuff look like other stuff. It made me feel important. Back then, it was basic apples and fruit and understanding light and shadow. From there I did the body and a lot of self-portraiture.”
3) Graduated from the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts, San Francisco Art Institute, and received a master’s in art from Yale University.
4) While doing a residence in 2001 at the Studio Museum in Harlem, he found a discarded New York City Police Department mug shot of a black man. He thought of the mug shot as a portrait and decided he wanted to change the projected images of black men in modern society. He began to ask black men he met on the street to come and pose in his studio and began to replace the heroes, prophets, and saints of “old Master’s” paintings with these modern men in their street clothes.
5) Wiley talking about his juxtaposition of classic and contemporary: “Art is about Communicating Power, back in the early eras of art artists worked for the church and the state to communicate and project power onto certain individuals. Now artists are allowed to imagine alternate possibilities and heighten what’s going on in the world.”
6) Has studios around the world including Brooklyn, New York and Beijing, China. He has assistance who help paint the intricate back grounds of his paintings leaving him to focus on the subjects.
7) In 2017 he was chosen by President Barack Obama to paint an official portrait of him and it now hangs in the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery “American’s Presidents” exhibition.
8) In 2019 he exhibited at the St. Louis Art Museum with and exhibit entitled “Kehinde Wiley: Saint Louis” where he chose subjects from the St. Louis area for his paintings. The museum purchased ‘Charles I” which is now part of their permanent collection.