The  Sometimes Journal

Elgin High School - Digital Art Projects  January - February, 2023

Three examples from three different projects:  Unusual Product Design, Creative Storytelling, and Calaveras (sugar skulls).  In the first example the student combined Adobe Illustrator with Photoshop. The next two examples the students used only Illustrator. 

Larsen Middle School - Contour Drawing Autumn Poem November, 2022

This project, and the one that follows, focused on integrating language arts with visual arts. First I had the students make a series of blind contour drawings with watercolor of leaves they had gathered from outside.  Then I gave the students a poem writing prompt that went "As the leaves fell...". I encouraged the students to  engage in the stream of consciousness writing method to help liberate them from inhibitions. Many went back and altered their poems. Some kept them as they came out naturally. Here are three that for me were exceptional.

Larsen Middle School - Halloween Themed Comic October, 2022

For this project I had my middle school students work together in pairs. The idea was for them to write a short spooky story having to do with Halloween and then create a comic with panels and images to go along with it. This one is my favorite.

Larsen Middle School - Decorative Paper Bowls October, 2022

These are hand-made bowls using colored strips of construction paper with a clear glue, glitter, and other ornamentation.

Larsen Middle School, Elgin, IL - Hand Zentangles

One of our early projects was to create a patterned design without any preconceived idea, and just let the act of automatic drawing lead the artist to discovery.  Below are a few examples of what the students created. The process involved tracing the hand and drawing patterns within patterns within patterns inside and outside the traced hand. 

Visit the 3D Art portfolio page to view more images of these incredible works of art.

Elgin High School 2D Visual Art  Mixed Media "Selfies" in a Book Spring 2022

As the final project for the spring semester I had the students create a mixed media self-portrait based upon selfies. Each student chose an old book, inside of which they carved out two pockets where they placed a self-portrait and a found object. The found objects served to symbolically represent their identity or something that was important to them. The artworks also incorporated applying a print from one of their lino plates from the previous lesson about printmaking.  

Elgin High School - Elgin, IL 3D Visual Art    Text as Art Relief Sculpture    Spring 2022

I like it when artists use text in their artwork. Text provides two kinds of meaning: the meaning expressed by the literal definition of words, and the meaning associated with the text as an image. In this project I had the students develop a relief sculpture based on a single word. I asked them to explore how a word presented as an image affects its meaning, and when combined with other shapes, forms and colors as a three-dimensional object can expand, deepen, or change that meaning even further.   Below are some examples of my students' work. More can be seen on the 3D portfolio page.

Elgin High School - Elgin, IL 2D Visual Art    Mixed Media Portrait with Text     Spring 2022   

In this mixed media project below I had the students select a photo of a person who is important to them, and develop a theme about that person using images and text. Most of the students chose a celebrity they follow and admire. Some chose a family member or a friend. The media they used included watercolor, marker, colored pencils, black Sharpees, tracing paper, mylar and paper. To see more of these please visit the portfolio page for 2D art.

Elgin High School - Elgin, IL 2D Visual Art    Linocut Printmaking Project    Spring 2022

Three weeks ago I introduced the linocut printmaking process to my 2D art classes.  This was a few weeks after Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine with his Russian military. This tragedy has been the subject of many conversations in class. In response to our preoccupation with these events, I asked the students to develop a theme for their printmaking project that deals with the issue of people suffering great loss and endless struggle. After engaging in a class inquiry into the subject, we determined that human suffering comes in many forms and affects many types of people globally. For their themes, many students chose the war in Ukraine as their subject. Some students chose the suffering associated with homelessness, poverty, and violence. Others chose the Me-Too movement and Black Lives Matter as their subjects. Below are some examples of their work. I find them very powerful expressions of not-forgetting and of protest.

Elgin High School - Elgin, IL  2D and 3D Visual Art                     Figure Drawing/Right Brain Engagement         Spring 2022

The following is a documentation of my students' work from the spring semester of 2022. The classes I taught are part of my student teaching experience with cooperating teachers Lisa Welch and Tim Vaulato.

February 8, 2022

These selected images are photos of some of my 2D students' work related to right brain engagement using the "upside-down" drawing method. The students were instructed to copy Picasso's portrait of Igor Stravinsky first right-side-up and then again but upside-down. 

The left images were drawn right-side-up. The right images were drawn upside-down. Drawing upside-down often gives better results because the student is focusing on copying lines and forms exactly as they see them rather than drawing what they "think" a hand or head is supposed to look like. Upside-down drawing exercises engage the right side of the brain which is associated with creativity. The activity also has the effect of producing a feeling of calm and reducing stress.

This set of images features some of the work my beginning 2D high school students completed during our lessons about value and modeling, and more right brain engagement.

This next set of images shows my process of cutting and assembling a "text as art" relief sculpture inspired by graffiti and urban art. This was done in preparation for the "text as art" unit of spring semester.

CAPE (Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education) After-School Art Program at Gary Elementary School, West Chicago, IL

February 2, 2022

K-5th Grade mixed media 2D visual arts. These projects experiment with combining various dry and wet media, with subject matter that explores the things most important to our young students (home, family, friendships, school). 

Lincoln Elementary School River Forest, IL

Third grade "inspired" animal drawings with decorative spiral backgrounds. A lesson I taught as part of my clinical observations experience with cooperating teacher Marta Kozbur (an amazing art teacher by the way).

 November, 2021

The students were introduced to the vibrantly colored artwork of Native American artist John Nieto and the importance of spirit animals to Native American folklore. They also explored the artistic traditions of spiral designs, which spans many cultures globally, going back thousands of years. These drawings represent a reflection on those traditions and the artwork of John Nieto.  

CAPE 2021 Summer Session District 33, West Chicago, IL

Below are some examples of collaborative artwork my second and third grade classes produced over the summer. Throughout the summer we explored ideas about community, home, and school. The students also learned about abstract expressionism and what could be done with very ordinary household materials.

Community organizations that bring arts and culture, and arts education to the underprivileged.  

By Buddy Plumlee, April 20, 2021.

Part One:

People Made Visible  A grassroots organization in West Chicago, IL      

What Is People Made Visible?

As the name implies, People Made Visible (PMV) is a community organization located in West Chicago, Illinois that seeks to make visible that part of the community that is less noticed, less heard, and often times ignored.  Its mission statement is simple and straight forward:  People Made Visible provides support to individuals and organizations that seek to grow community in West Chicago. 

Formed in 2009 by executive director Sara Phalen, and community curator Anni Holm, PMV has become the principal initiator of local programs that bring accessible arts and cultural events to the community, and arts education experiences for young people, with a special focus on an artist residency program. In addition to the arts and arts education, PMV also facilitates and provides support for the PMV Community Garden and the promotion of organic suburban agriculture, and Healthy West Chicago, which is a city-wide collaborative effort to improve the health and well-being of its residents by teaching healthy lifestyles, healthy diet, and exercise.  PMV works closely with the city's government, its cultural arts commission, and several other commissions, in many of these programs and activities.  PMV also collaborates with other local entities, such as the school district, the park district, the city museum, and the library (Phalen, 2019).  

PMV's Goals

In a recent discussion with Sara Phalen, PMV's executive director, I asked her to elaborate on their mission statement, and describe what their immediate and long-term goals are.  As related by Sara, PMV was originally created to provide a platform for artists, and to utilize that platform as a means to share artistic experiences with people from all social-economic backgrounds.  Since then, that initial goal has evolved into a broader effort to bring the community together, create connections between residents and the municipality, and  serve as a voice for people to communicate their needs, interests, and concerns.  Most of what PMV does, according to Sara, still focuses on bringing the arts to the community through collaborative efforts with the local school district and other organizations.  In the short term, PMV will continue the existing initiatives which have proven to be successful, such as the artist-residency collaboration with after-school arts programs, and annual arts and cultural events.  In the long term, PMV hopes to grow as a more effective agent for positive change and development within the community, with a focus on providing more equity to the less privileged.    

Whom Does PMV Serve?

According to Sara Phalen, the people they see as having the greatest need in the community are the economically disadvantaged and socially marginalized, which tend to be persons of color, and persons who have limited access to arts and cultural experiences due to their economic conditions.  West Chicago is an ethnically diverse suburb located in western DuPage County. Over 55% of the population is Hispanic, most of whom have roots in the Mexican state of Michoacan.  Many families with ties to Michoacan have been in West Chicago going back four generations to a time when the railroads needed migrant labor. There are several Mayan-speaking families who have settled in West Chicago as well. The city is also home to a significant number of immigrants from other parts of Latin America, Africa, south Asia, and southeast Asia.  In recent years, West Chicago has welcomed many Syrian refugees who have found homes thanks in large part to the World Relief organization, which has been at the forefront of assisting refugees and immigrants for several decades. Sara believes the main goal of PMV is to bridge the gaps between the various ethnic communities in the city, and provide connections between those communities and the resources available to them.

What Are the Needs?

For Sara Phalen, the greatest under-met needs in the community that PMV  has identified are communication, and equitably provided resources. Like many other municipalities, West Chicago has several separate governmental and public entities that provide resources and services for residents, but that often compete with one another for their own resources to the detriment of the residents they are there to serve. Among the casualties of this is a lack of sharing and communication between those entities, and a lack of communication with the residents.  The problem of competing entities within a single municipality is experienced by towns and cities all over the country.  The end result is a lack of willingness to share information, share limited resources, and the absence of a collaborative effort to provide equitable services and resources to residents of the community.  Sara believes one effect of this lack of coordination and communication is that resource providers do not know what the real needs are of the residents, and consequently, the residents  do not always get the resources they actually need. 

In one example, some parents wanted to enroll their children in an after-school program, but did not have a means of transporting their children to the park district building across town where it was being held. The after-school program at their local school was not offering at the time the kind of activities the children wanted or needed, whereas the park district was offering them. So the parents did not enroll their children in any after-school programs.  Unfortunately, this scenario can appear to be on a perpetual repeat cycle, universally experienced by lower-income communities. It is the kind of situation that PMV could have assisted in resolving if the conflict had been communicated to them.  Many children from low-income households in West Chicago, as in other cities, have inadequate access to services that could be provided to them.  It is possible that some of those activities could have been brought to the school by an outside source, or to another location that was accessible to the children. It is Sara's hope that in the future, by building closer relationships with the city's various public entities, PMV can play a larger role in improving access to those services, such as after-school programs, and communicate to the resource providers what members of the community need from them.

PMV's Initiatives

In their efforts to improve access to resources, and bring the community of West Chicago together, People Made Visible has several initiatives that have proven to be effective towards that end.  With an emphasis on bringing arts and cultural experiences to the residents, especially to the underprivileged, PMV's signature programs and events are arts-centered.  ArtXposium is an annual multimedia art event that is part exhibition, and part symposium where local and regional artists show their work, demonstrate their processes, and exchange ideas, while inviting the public to participate in the making of art. Gallery 200 is an artists coop gallery, managed and partially funded by PMV, that displays the work of member artists. The large coop is part of a space-share program which provides workrooms for residents engaged in the "maker movement".  Once a month, coop artists conduct a children's learning workshop that teaches them about meditation, personal reflection, and "grounding" themselves as part of the art-making process.  PMV provides the funding for these initiatives with the support of numerous grants, donations, and other fund-raising events (Phalen, 2019).

PMV's other initiatives include developing a bilingual, virtual community resource center, calendar and announcement-messaging board through the use of various social media and a website. This would help to improve communication with residents and the city's separate public entities.  PMV is also developing an "asset map" based on community surveys that identify residents with special talents and skills that can be of benefit to the city at large (Phalen, 2019).

Collaboration with Educators

People Made Visible believes that collaborating with the local school district, teachers, and other after-school education programs is essential to the overall purpose of PMV.  Given that challenges exist concerning coordination between various entities (school district, library, park district, and city government), it is all the more important that PMV step in as the agent of communication and coordination. But, according to Sara Phalen, that is a not an easy task, and their efforts would be much more fruitful if school administrators saw PMV as a resource to help them.   Many local school teachers, in particular art , drama and music, have expressed an interest in working closely together in a concerted effort to bring more arts and cultural learning experiences to their students, especially for the lower-income students who have less access to activities outside of school.  The challenge for them, like most teachers, is that they have little time to devote to after-school activities due to an increasing workload of paperwork, planning, and preparation related to their daily responsibilities as a teacher.   Sara believes that PMV, and organizations like them, can be helpful in bringing those after-school learning experiences to their students while relieving the teachers of the responsibility to plan and coordinate those activities.  She also believes the first step towards that is to form a closer relationship with school administrators. All teachers should be encouraged that organizations like PMV exist, and that there is help available to gain better access to resources for their students.   

Part Two: 

Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education  (CAPE)      

Teaching-Artists Collaborating with Teachers to Bring Arts Experiences to Kids 

What is CAPE?

Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education is a non-profit organization that works with Chicago Public Schools to integrate the arts into classrooms.  Arts integration is central to all of CAPE's programs.  CAPE's teaching-artists collaborate with school teachers to incorporate visual arts, digital media, music, drama, and dance into their regular curriculum in order to help improve academic performance and social-emotional competencies.  CAPE was formed in 1993  when it launched its first after-school program serving low-income, low performing schools in Chicago.  Today CAPE has partnerships with over 100 Chicago public schools, and has recently begun a partnership with suburban West Chicago elementary school district 33, where it will be working with four schools.   

A Teaching-Artist's Experience 

In February of this year I began teaching a CAPE after-school art class in West Chicago, along with another artist, Anni Holm.  Anni has been a teaching-artist with CAPE for eleven years, and is the acting director-curator for People Made Visible, as mentioned in the above article.  The class is in partnership with Gary Elementary school. We have been collaborating with art teacher Jackie Niedhardt, who works for district 33.  Because of the covid-19 pandemic, all of the activities have been done remotely in the virtual zoom classroom. I had just become acquainted with zoom meetings, and I was still learning how to navigate this new digital reality. I wasn't sure how effective teaching art in this way would be.  However, I was greatly encouraged when on our first class meeting the young Gary Elementary students, ages six to eight, demonstrated a thorough understanding of the zoom universe, and showed a level of comfort and ease that actually made me a little jealous. Our partner-teacher, Jackie, had also mastered remote teaching, having adapted  it to her teaching method the previous spring. My induction into teaching remotely with digital technology consequently went quicker than I had anticipated. The class meets twice a week for an hour and a half each time. Our first project was for the students to create an art-making space with the materials provided to them. This project was part of an overall theme of exploring the idea of created space and place, and how we relate to that as individuals. From the very beginning, the students showed an enthusiasm that was infectious.  After just one meeting, our students were completely immersed  in the project we had created for them and were ready to explore the theme on a deeper, more expansive level.  Fortunately, we as art teachers were prepared and ready to oblige them, despite the challenges presented by remote learning. Our preparedness was enabled by CAPE's professional development sessions that bring together CAPE teaching-artists and teachers where we examine each other's work and ideas, share successes and explore new possibilities.  The professional development sessions are presided over by Joseph Spilberg, CAPE's associate director of education. Joseph leads the teaching-artists and teachers through a series of idea development exercises that help us to create thorough lesson plans, with the guiding principle being the integration of academic curriculum focused on English language arts. The two-hour sessions are intense and highly productive. 

CAPE's Impact

Since its formation, CAPE's partnership with Chicago Public Schools has provided low-income/low-performing schools with demonstrably effective after-school arts curriculum that shows positive outcomes.  The primary reason CAPE has been successful is its focus on partnering teachers with teaching-artists. Research has shown that arts integration, where teachers and artists work together, increases teacher outcomes by expanding their teaching practices and curriculum development. The integration of art into that curriculum produces higher quality portfolios of work, improved knowledge of art-making processes, and the increased competency of reflection. In turn, that improvement produces increased student academic outcomes (Chicago Arts Partnership in Education, 2015).   

CAPE's founders and current directors believe that artists function as researchers as much as anything else. This belief has been core to their overall doctrine. According to Scott Sikkema, CAPE's director of education, CAPE conceives of teachers, teaching-artists, students and CAPE staff as artists/researchers who engage in collaborative inquiry to explore possibilities of learning and art-making (CAPE, 2016).  Students are encouraged to think as artist/researchers, who inquire, experiment, and collaborate with one another in the making of their art. For artists as researchers, curiosity serves as the catalyst for creating and sustaining an engrossing learning experience for the students and teachers who pursue an inquiry question together. It is CAPE's belief that when teachers and teaching-artists present an inquiry question to the students, and pursue this in unison as artist-researchers, the students discover that much of their academic curriculum outside of art will inform that research, and vice versa. 

The benefits of arts integration, the teacher-artist partnership, and the guiding principle of artists as researchers go beyond the classroom. Arts integration experiences will help improve students' social-emotional competencies, such as self-awareness, social awareness, and self-regulation.  By improving their habits of the mind through research-based art-making processes, students will sharpen their inquiry skills, improve their ability to problem solve, and be better prepared for adulthood in the 21st century. Recent studies have provided evidence that students enrolled in arts-integration curriculum have better ISAT scores, which gradually improve as their program proceeds. By year three of the program, those students' ISAT scores showed significant gains over students not enrolled in an arts integration program (Chicago Arts Partnership in Education, 2015). 

There are benefits to arts integration for teachers as well. Through these experiences they will learn a wide variety of teaching strategies, which will improve their capacity to reach all of their individual students, each of whom learn in different ways and at different speeds.  Research has revealed that teachers who participate in integrated arts partnerships were able to refine their curriculum in the area of arts and student writing.  Teachers were also able to improve the classroom climate, which creates a more conducive social-emotional learning environment for the students (Chicago Arts Partnership in Education, 2015).  

References

CAPE Staff. (2016, June 15). Introducing the CAPE Artist/Researcher | Chicago Arts Partnership in Education. Chicago Arts Partnership in Education. https://capechicago.org/blog/the-cape-artist-researcher/

Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education Portfolio Design Project Final Research Report FINAL REPORT to Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education 1 Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education Portfolio Design Project (PDP) Program Evaluation. (2015). https://capechicago.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/cape-pdp-final-report-smolin.pdf

Phalen, S. (2019, January 6). People Made Visible. Peoplemadevisible.com. http://peoplemadevisible.com/

In This Together, by Anni Holm, 2015.  Image use courtesty of People Made Visible.