Responding to Barry Lopez: Art Improvisations

Art Conversation. 4.29.13

In an earlier post, What Makes Your Heart Beat?, I shard plans of work I intended to do with staff developers in manhattan.

Below is one publication that was generated from the work. Found poems and paintings generated via art conversations comprise the book.

6 Word Memoirs: Big City Style

I love this 6-word memoir project that was done in Minneapolis and think it can easily be adapted at other sites, including schools and other cities, towns, etc.

How about one that was done state wide?
Or country wide?
Or world-wide?

What would you six words be?

6 Words Minneapolis: a public art project from Emily Lloyd

What Makes Your Heart Beat?

I am planning some work I will be doing tomorrow with staff developers in Manhattan. It is a full day and I hope to help them to know, if they don't already, that close reading is aesthetic reading. The afternoon will be dedicated to deep thinking, dwelling, and full aesthetic immersion.

Below is a Slideshare, I will be using to engage the educators in close reading of Barry Lopez's essay, "Gone Back into the Earth." The students will conclude with an art conversation that begins by discussing the question: What makes your heart beat?  which echoes Lopez's conclusion.

Close reading of barry lopez'z gone back from Mary Ann Reilly / Blueprints for Learning, Inc.

Learning from a 7 Year Old Poet

It is morning and I am conferring with a first grader while her teacher observes. The child has written a poem about people rising early to see spring leave and summer arrive. This is the finished poem:

Summer Time 

Spring has bloomed out
under the tree of hope.
Morning is light.
Many have risen
early to see spring go.
Rapidly, watermelons start to grow.
The beach becomes a summer home.
The time has come for summer.
It has come to stay.

After we finish working on the poem, she asks to draw as she says drawing will help her to rethink the poem. At the end of March, I had the pleasure of teaching her in several 3 hour blocks and one of the things we did was draw in order to think through stories, add detail, and better understand our intentions.

After a bit more discussion, she asks if she can perform other poems as she thinks that acting them out helps to make poems.

As I watch and listen, this 7-year-old moves about the room dancing the poem awake. I marvel at her understanding of poetry and the inherent joy she finds while making poems.  She tells me,  "Poets act it out to feel the poem. I like to do that. It helps me answer."

Unsay the World

Times Square at Near Night (M.A. Reilly, 2013)

The emancipation of both nature and the human imagination depends first on the capacity to ‘unsay’ the world and, second, on the ability to image it differently so that wonder might be brought into appearance. 

                                                                                      - James Corner

I Dreamt... A Book About Hope

Early in the week Gabriela Olmos's children's book, I Dreamt arrived at my home. Originally published in Mexico it is now available in an English version via Groundwood Books.

This is the description of the text via Groundwood:

Children whose daily lives are afflicted by violence dream of a different world in this powerful book created by Mexican artists as a fundraiser for the IBBY Fund for Children in Crisis. 

In many parts of the world, including North America, children are living with violence. Wars, gangs, guns, crime, bullying, harassment and fear keep many kids from living the full, free lives that every child should enjoy. This book was created in Mexico, where for the past six years a vicious war against drugs has brought fear and insecurity into every child’s life. Many children’s dreams have become nightmares. Some of Mexico’s best illustrators have donated their art to create this book, which gives children a way to talk about their fears, a reason to hope and the inspiration to resist falling into grief and depression. Like some city trees they have the possibility to grow strong and, despite everything, to try and make the world a better place. 

I dreamt... is being published in North America for the same reasons. Royalties from sales will be donated to IBBY’s Fund for Children in Crisis, which supports bibliotherapy projects that use books and reading to help children who have lived through wars, civil conflicts and natural disasters to think and talk about their experiences.

The bold illustrations created by twelve Mexican artists show the transformations of once deadly objects like pistols that now shoot butterflies and drug lords who only blow soap bubbles. There are robbers who steal nightmares and wars fought with flowers.

The book turns from focusing on dreams to taking action.

The narrator urges children to learn from those city trees that in spite of concrete learn to grow and in doing so help all of us breathe.

The text is recommended for children 9 years of age and older.

Reading the World Critically via Allan Luke

I hope you will take a moment to watch these three video clips featuring Allan Luke. I am posting them as I want to suggest that continuing to discuss whether technologies belong at school, as if technologies could be anything less that ways we are in the world, seems like dead end discourse--especially when they fail ti migrate into maters of power, access, representation.  How we apprentice young people to read the world through critical and comparative lens requires our attention.