Jazz up a hallway with a permanent student art gallery!

On The Artful Advocate blog, I shared about the student art gallery in my former school, pictured above.  I'll share a gallery tour in this post, as well, but I also want to point out a few pieces of interest.  For example, these two adorable elephants pictured below were painted more than 10 years apart!  (Sorry about the picture quality in this post; the hallway is narrow and there's a lot of unavoidable reflections on the glass in the frames.)

Let me tell you more about the gallery.  The school building in the tiny district where I taught was brand new in 1999, and for the first time, all K-12 students (between 500-600 kids total) were housed in one building.  A long stretch of bare hallway connects the high school and elementary wings, and I decided it was a perfect place to adorn permanently with student artwork.  With the support of my administration and school board, financial support from the PTSA organization,discounts and donations of mat board and frames from my favorite framer, and help with the installation by my fabulous custodians, the gallery became a reality and several pieces of artwork were added each year. To see the elementary gallery as it looks now, adorned with more than a dozen years of student artwork, watch the video tour below.

A year or two after my gallery began, the high school teacher also began adding artwork at the high school end of the hallway, and you can tour that section of the gallery in this video.

What's really fun is seeing some things that have happened.  For example, there's a few kids who have a piece on both the elementary and the high school end of the gallery, such as the 4th grade painted tissue paper collage below, and the high school acrylic painting underneath, both created by a talented young lady.  This artist, as with many others whose work hangs in the gallery, is now a college graduate! 

And there's these two paintings of trees, painted by talented twin sisters while in 4th grade.  I believe one of the girls has gone on to an art-related career, and a younger sister is also an artist.  We drew trunks that touched the top of the paper, and added branches that also extended to the edges of the paperl  The kids practiced color blending with tempera paint to create these paintings. 

While I was videotaping and photographing the gallery a few days ago, I noted many pieces of artwork are from projects I've never blogged about, so I'll be posting about them in coming posts.  For example, this fan design below was made by a 4th grader.  It was painted with values of India ink with the addition of some charcoal, and coated with Mod Podge.  Most students folded their fans and added cardboard sticks so they could actually be used, but this student chose to simply mount his fan, and was happy to have it selected to add to the gallery.

Perhaps my favorite piece in the gallery, and the story that goes with it, is this 1st grade portrait "of Mary by Karen" below, created before the gallery even existed. (Again, I apologize for image quality.  Along with the reflections on the glass, the artwork has also faded a bit.)  The students did these portraits sitting across from a friend they wanted to draw.  The artwork was done with construction paper and colored  pencils, and honestly, this looked JUST like Mary, bright blue eyes, freckles and all! The drawings had been sent home with the artists.  When Mary and Karen graduated from high school (still best friends), the same year I retired, Karen's mother brought me the artwork and suggested it hang in the gallery.  I framed it, and hung it at the very beginning of the gallery.  I swear, it STILL looks jut like Mary!

In the coming few days, I'll share stories (and lesson instructions) for a few other pieces hanging in the gallery.  Come back to take a look!

Welcome to the Museum of Bad Art!

Yes, it's a real thing! The Museum of Bad Art is available for viewing in three galleries in/near Boston.   They are located at:

• The Somerville Theater in Davis Square
• The Brookline Interactive Group
• The New England Wildlife Center

This past weekend, my husband and I visited our son who lives in Somerville, and we noted that one of the galleries was located there. (Somerville - where Tufts University is located - is basically one of the communities that ring Boston, as is Brookline, where another of the galleries is located.  These communities feel like a part of Boston!) 

The gallery we visited is in the basement of the Somerville Theater (in walking distance from my son's home!) and is open to ticketed movie goers whenever the theater is open.  We were at the theater to see the movie Lion (I highly recommend it), and came early so that we could visit the museum for our first time.   Here's a bit about the museum and it's philosophy, which is all very much in tongue-in-cheek fun.  And by the way, if you stick with this post till the end, you'll see what I thought was the craziest piece on display in the museum!

The museum has over 600 pieces, but only about 20-40 are on view at each location at any given time, so presumably, you could return several times to see different parts of the collection. On display when we were there were "Dopplehangers" - Selected works from the POOR-TRAITS Collection that resemble, intentionally or not, famous people.  For example, below we have "Pablo Presley"

Please note, the quality of the photos in this post are as bad as the artwork.  It's a basement, the lighting is awful, and the space made it hard to photograph many of paintings straight-on.  And there was a rolling ladder thingy in front of one of the paintings.  Anyhow, here's what the gallery actually looks like:

Yup, like I said, it's a basement.  That's my husband, my son, and his girlfriend, above.  They are not sitting there because they are bored waiting for me; they are making dinner reservations for us, for after the movie!  Here's some pics from the collection.  Reading the tongue-in-cheek descriptions can be half the fun,  so I am including them here with the pics of some of the artwork.  

 Of course, there were bound to be paintings of Michael Jackson in a collection of bad portrait paintings (poor-traits).  [Above and below]  In the painting below, the hand is pretty hysterical, and then there's that squared-off chin...

And presidents.  Lots of presidents!  Here are a few of them.  Below, it looks like Bill Clinton has tiny hands, and perhaps has been painting some brown furniture, or burned his face on the grill while cooking burgers?

 What's so 'bad' about this portrait of President Obama below?  It's not the image of him, but the strange collection of repeating faces that surround him,including Denzel Washington and Morgan  Freeman. 

 And then there's this, below....  EEK!!

 And more singers and actors and such, and even an iconic president's wife...

These are pretty funny! 

And this:

And for the Grand Finale, here it is, the 'Torso Phone'!

 I hope you've enjoyed this little tour; It was hard to narrow down what to share with you!  Anyhow, I'll close with a closeup of a rather awkward hand.  Meanwhile,  If you are ever in Boston, instead of visiting the MFA (Museum of Fine Art), how about visiting the Museum of Bad Art instead! 

My very own art show!

The library in the little community where I taught has a hallway gallery when you enter.  Artists are invited to sign up to exhibit for one month.  For many years, I hung my elementary students' artwork in this gallery for the month of March, to celebrate Youth Art Month, and the teacher who replaced me  has continued this tradition.  The high school art teacher also takes a turn of a month for her student work!  During my final year of teaching, and her first year, she and I did a joint exhibit of our personal work in this gallery; I blogged about that show in a post you can find HERE.   Fast-forward a few years to now, and I'm back exhibiting in the library, this time with just my own artwork, including the paintings above and below.

This past summer, I attended an immersive plein air painting class on the campus of Bennington College, and wrote about it in a blog post HERE.  I recently refined the two paintings directly above that were painted during this time (on the Bennington College library patio, and a statue found in a garden on the grounds of historic Park McCullough House).  I wanted the opportunity to share these paintings, as well as the other work from the summer, and also some acrylic textural paintings I had recently completed.  So I jumped at the chance to show this work for the first time, at this gallery, where my work will be seen by many of my former students!  Here's a few views of most of the gallery, each wall from both directions. First, here's the wall with the oil paintings (and some photos and doodles not visible in these pics).

And here's the other, shorter wall...

I should note that due to the size of the hallway and lighting, I struggled to get decent photos.  I didn't want to use a flash and get glare on the artwork, either.  So these imperfect photos will have to suffice.  Anyhow, here are some close-ups of the work on exhibit. Directly below, four of the oil paintings completed during my Bennington week - trees at dusk outside the painting studio, a brick wall at the faculty village, an interior of the greenhouse at the Park McCullough Historic House, and a campus view. (There's another campus view at the top of this post.) 

Also on display are two recent acrylic textural abstractions.  Directly below is a piece titled 'Elements', and below it is the larger 'Marsh Dreams', which incorporates a lot of fabric collage and beads, as well as the use of various textural acrylic mediums. 

And there's a selection of 8 of my photos.  Choosing just 8 was an insane challenge, but I only had 8 frames and I wasn't ready to buy more or cut more mats...

I am also displaying my doodles, many of which you saw in my prior post.

There's a small oil painting that I did looking out at the lake from our 'camp', where we spend much of our summer and fall.  I keep changing this painting - unfortunately the light was different each time I worked on it plein air, so I gave up and just had fun with it at home in the studio.  Not terrific, but better than it was!

 And a stand of bright flowers painted on the Bennington campus

 And that's the entire show, pretty much!  Thanks for stopping in for a look!