The "Rainbow Fence Project" - Community Beautification with Young Artists

This "rainbow fence project" is the culmination of an ongoing community art project I led in afterschool this semester. The city park behind the school is... unpretty. So, we did a lot of brainstorming about ways to make it lovelier (some more of those ideas will hopefully come to life as well!). Once we settled on this idea, the first step was to get fabric donated, then to sort through the bags of donated fabric and cut it all into strips. Once all the fabric was cut, we sorted the strips into bags by color. After that, we did some planning sketches and scouted the park to chose the panel of chain link fence we would beautify. Then we finally began installation! Here are some photos of getting started...

The rainbow spread quickly with so many little hands installing it!

We got beautiful 75 degree weather on installation day!

We worked all afternoon...

And the finished piece is totally rad.

The kids want to do more projects like this, and came up with a name for their new community art group - they are calling themselves "PEACE" - an acronym for Project for the Enrichment of Arts in the Community Environment. Check out the vocabulary on these kids! The kids took most of the photos, too. I'm so proud.

Group Mandala

I use mandalas in art therapy a lot, but recently I did a giant one with some afterschool kids. Each kid in the group did their own section, and I did the middle (because all the kids wanted to do it and that was "the only way to keep it fair". They worked so hard on it! We hung it in the "big room" - the central space of the school. 

I think it's just beautiful.

Autumn Mobiles

Just another example of adorable kid art from afterschool...

Happy Halloween!

Googley eye invasion

The students in after school seriously love googley eyes. It started with a group of 5th grade girls making these little creatures...

But it soon evolved into boys and girls of all ages rushing to the art cabinet to pillage for eyes, then grabbing at glue guns and attaching eyes to various random objects from the "useful junk" shelf. In addition to the puff-ball creatures that started it all, the students have made plastic bottles with eyes, toilet paper rolls with eyes, glass jars with eyes, and on and on.

Seriously, we can't buy enough googley eyes.
I've been thinking about how exciting it seems to be for the kids to anthropomorphise regular objects by adding these eyes - even trash is suddenly precious when it can look back at you. What is it about adding eyes that is so powerful to these kids? Is it particular to this group of kids? Or is there something in all of us that wants to humanize our surroundings?

It's giving me lots of ideas for future, larger scale projects...

Recyceled Paper Banner Project

I made this banner for the After School Room and then helped a bunch of kiddos make their own. Lots of kids spelled their names, a group of girls spelled out the name of a play they were working on, and one spelled out "Ice Cream!". Love it.

Texture mobile

A sensory activity with some of my kiddos - we used air-dry clay and pressed it into different found textures (a favorite texture: the bottoms of your shoes!).

Art camp round up

Art camp was such a success!

(Giant  potato-printed poster)

(Paper mache ladybug)

(Tissue paper picture frames)

(Salt dough creatures)

...and there was so much more! It was a great week.

Linking us together - the giant paper chain project

It goes on and on... So many people have added their own links! A metaphor for the many individuals who are so strongly connected here at CPSC...

No parking on this muffin!

We had a cooking adventure this afternoon at CPSFC, making cornbread muffins and silly decorations. After all the measuring and mixing and pouring, we put them in the oven to cook, and worked on making some mini flags to go on top. You can see that some of the kids were pretty territorial over their muffins:

"DO NOT EAT IT!"

 "nooooo parking!" (at penalty of pirate takeover)

Finger puppets!

The older kids made some fabulous finger puppets today!

Painting cheeks

Here are a few photos I took at the Durham Earth Day festival at Central Park with my partner, Eli. We saw a lot of kids we knew from CPSFC and Schoolhouse of Wonder (where Eli is the Program Director) and painted well over a hundred faces! We were pretty tired afterwards.

...and this tiny screech owl was right behind us:

 Also, I ate a hot dog from a food truck, which I have to seriously not recommend.