Faith Ringgold

Faith Ringgold is a painter and sculptor, but she is best known for her painted story quilts.  She combined the her paintings, the African American tradition of storytelling, with the tradition of quilt-making all in these unique pieces designed after the Tibetan tanghka.  She used the quilting to frame her artwork and as an easier way to transport/ship her work.

Students created a torn paper collage American Flag and used her Flag Story Quilt as a jumping off point.  I wanted students to play around with composition/ color and words/ images to create a meaningful personalized flag.  Colored magazine pages were glued to tag board with collage glue in the first class.  The next class, students were provided access to a wide variety of materials to use for printmaking, spraying stencils, applying words and images.  This was quite a feat since I am a traveling art teacher, but it was well worth it for a big artful bang at the end of the year.  Students have spent this year working with many different materials and learning techniques through their projects, so this is a great opportunity to be creative and experiment by layering many different materials over their flag while not completely obliterating the image under it.

Guidance needed to be given on how to use and layer materials and in what order so as not to ruin dry materials by using it over wet products and that sort of thing. I had many 'drawing' materials on their tables and set up stations at tables near the back of the room for pastels, spray inks, paints, and printmaking. Students worked hard and had a blast blending these products to create some amazing results. Really nice with the 4th of July coming up.

This was the final class for the year.  While students were working on their project, I quizzed them about the many artists we had studied that semester (9 in 15 weeks).  I was sure to include questions about the artist's life, their style, subject matter, as well as our projects and what they learned about techniques they used to create them.  I am truly grateful to be able to teach and do something I love so much.  A big thank you to the parents for sharing your wonderful children with me...what a great group of young people I have had the privilege to work with this year!

Folk Art 'Quilt' completed

Students at all grade levels completed their 'quilts and added borders before gluing them to a colored background.  Lots of creative ideas from the students on this one!  It was also a good problem solving task when they missed the opportunity to do alternating positive/negative space with the coloring.  Students really enjoyed personalizing this and making it their own.

Folk Art

Sewing theme

Chubby animals!

Use of two colors...

Love the size of these symbols

Christmas and nice job keeping simple shapes!

We were studying the terms primitive, naive, and folk artists and how these terms are used.  All have to do with an untrained artist with their work being very child-like.  Their perspective and proportions are usually off as well.  We were focusing on Grandma Moses and the amazing story of her success as such a late age in life, her late 70's. Students looked closely at her paintings and observed how much she painted like she stitched her embroidery work with blocks of separate colors. She has such charming work and I love how her paintings tell a story.

We discussed different forms of folk art and how it was often utilitarian in nature, such as weathervanes, decoys, quilts, etc.  We are working on a 'quilt' of our own and keeping the shapes simple in the style of folk artists.  Students are choosing a theme for their work and had to divide the paper into 16 squares.  Each square needs to have an image which took some time to draw.  We will be doing a border for these quilts next week and coloring in one or two colors of marker, focusing on alternating negative space and positive space.  Fun and cannot wait to see them completed!  I did this before with a class and we put them all together to make one big quilt, which is fun if you can leave them hanging on display in a classroom. More images of the complete work next week.