For the majority of June, I participated as a teaching artist at the Missouri Fine Arts Academy. Here is what the academy is about as stated on the about page:
The Missouri Fine Arts Academy (MFAA) is a three-week summer residential program for highly motivated student artists in visual arts, theatre, dance, creative writing, and music. The Academy offers an intensive schedule of classes in interdisciplinary and discipline-specific arts, and a wide range of co-curricular activities.
This was my third year and each year I am blown away by the talent, enthusiasm, and fearlessness of the students and staff. I taught a few workshops revolving around printmaking, sketchbooks/idea process, and flip books for the art oriented classes. It was fantastic to watch the high school kids immerse themselves into the activities with little hesitation and just make art.
IDS- Interdisciplinary Studies
One of the classes the kids take at the academy is the interdisciplinary studies class. Since the Fine Arts Academy is cross disciplined with music, theater, dance, writing and art, the kids take one class that mashes them all together and that allows them to create works that weave together their talents. It usually ends up being a lot of performance art and installations, but the exercises that lead up to those final classes can be fun. Here are the art days where the students worked with black out poetry and automatic drawing.
POD- Principles of Design workshop
The art students take discipline specific classes called POD for short. Since there are so many visual artists that attend the academy, all the art faculty take a small number of students from the whole and employ a three day workshop to exercise core principles before the students rotate to the next teacher for the next workshop. This year I worked with flip books and focused on time, sequence, narrative, and economy. Some of the results were quite fantastic, I wish I had recorded all of the stories.
Process/Play – sketchbook class
Outside of the above classes, I also had two electives of my own creation to teach. I devised a sketchbook and ideation process class during my first year at MFAA and have been tweaking it since. This year I shared my own sketchbooks when I was their age during the first class (yikes, that was scary) and then allowed them to direct the course of the class to their needs. The class wanted to play with lots of different media, but also figure out ways to avoid creative blocks. We only have seven classes to cover as much material as possible. The class explored life drawing, visited the art section of the campus library, invaded a music and song writing class, and worked with some brainstorming strategies. Overall, I think the class had a lot of fun.
(^ There is a sketch of me on this page, ha!)
DIY Print – printmaking class
My other elective was a printmaking class. My first year, there was already a teacher working with a printmaking class and my second year I taught printmaking for my POD class. This year was my first year teaching a full length print class for the academy. The kids learned various techniques: silkscreen, relief, mono printing, wall decals, and spray paint stenciling. I’ll admit, I thought it would be disastrous, but it worked out! This class is a keeper for next year.
