As we work our way through February, we have also been finding ourselves working through some pretty heavy subject matter as we tackle the meat of Kara Walker's incredible work. The students are inspired not only to step up their creative game, but they have been noticing other areas of life where they have the ability to step up their social, moral, and ethical games as well.
Kara Walker is a contemporary artist who typically works in the medium of cut paper. She is most well known for her life size Victorian-esque silhouettes that explore issues of racial relations and gender identities steeped heavily in history from the American pre-civil war south.
We watched a few videos of her speaking about her work, and went through a slideshow detailing all the intricate pieces that go into creating a successful narrative using only cut paper outlines (way harder than it sounds!)
Bullying is an issue that comes up constantly with this age of students, so I found Walker's work to not only be educational and cross-curricular, but also extremely relevant to dealing with all types of adversity (in a positive way), whether it be through an artistic outlet, or just social commentary.
For kids, seeing artwork that shocks and humbles them will help them to grasp the horrific affects that stereotyping and bullying can have on people, and as a result, it will hopefully engrain in them the better judgment to treat EVERYONE with love and respect.
Some of my young artists worked individually on a smaller scale to tell their own silhouette story (as you can see Breanna's massive paper mess!), while others chose to 'go big or .... ' creating life size cut outs inspired by the larger scale work of Kara Walker ....
"Educating the mind without educating the HEART is no education at all"
- Aristotle