Floating into the Holiday season!

    Hope everyone enjoyed the Thanksgiving holiday! This season I am so grateful for my beautiful boys! 

 I am so fortunate to have such curious and clever children. They warm my heart everyday with their silly antics!

Interactions

 This week we kicked off our Emerging Visions partnership with the Greater Reston Arts Center!

 The exhibition for inspiration is exhilarating and the students really enjoyed the experience and the artwork of Shih Cheih Huang.

 Our students will explore the idea of Interactions through their preferred media. They will work through idea generation, the process of building/creating their response to exhibit in the Spring at 

GRACE.

     

#22...Gaining Inspiration..

As I prepared to begin another school year, nice even year 22,  I had the total pleasure of taking off to NYC for a day trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. I went with my clever and intrepid studio art department friends! 

   It was awesome to see the work of Diane Arbus: In The Beginning in the new Met Breuer as well as the Thoughts Left Unfinished a thorough and beautiful exhibition of artwork that remain unfinished by their makers beginning from the Renaissance to now.

Our studio art department has grown this year! We are so lucky to have four in our little department!

To celebrate we headed down to Richmond to enjoy the Kehinde Wiley A New Republic as well as the Gordon Parks: Back to Fort Scott exhibitions.

If these short inspirational jaunts are any indication, it is destined to be fabulous school year!

Happy 4th of July!

                               Workhouse Arts Center               July 2016

There are many opportunities to celebrate the 4th of July in our neck of the woods! 

This year we chose to

head over the the Workhouse on Saturday night.

The Workhouse has been repurposed into artist studios! 

Each cell block features a variety of media, genre and local artisans.

It is a first class facility with incredible artists.

My sons and I have participated in animation classes, pottery classes, art exhibitions and even performances!

Cell Block 8: Ceramics Studio

There are continuous opportunities for community engagement. This coming weekend, July 9th, the Workhouse will host it's 8th Annual Ice Cream Social! Patrons can purchase a beautifully crafted bowl created by the artists at the Workhouse to load up with tasty ice cream treats! All the proceeds benefit the ceramics program.

We are so fortunate to have such an incredible multi-purposed community arts center nearby!

A great choice for a celebration our nation

and the freedoms we enjoy this July 4th.

It was a lovely weather night, perfect for fireworks!

Spotlight on Education

      ABC Spotlight on Education 

came to school to interview Razan! 

This was such a cool experience! 

Rich captured this screen shot of me from the interview,  

so much fun to have 15 minutes of fame! 

I am so lucky that I get to teach what I love and spend time with amazing young creative and curious people!

I am especially looking forward to attending the awards ceremony in June at 

Carnegie Hall in New York City to celebrate all of the amazing young artists and writers!

In a Word

       
Recently, I was given the pleasure to jury the first high school art show for the new gallery space housed at the Public Education Foundation in Las Vegas, NV. The artwork was stunning and it was no easy task to select the art to curate the In A Word show! The following is my juror statement with just a small sampling of the talent from these incredible teenagers!

                                                       Cracked Track                 Chappelle Kent

  It has been said that a picture is worth a thousand words, but it can also be worth just one. Whether resulting from a visceral reaction to a powerful image or the pure emotion of a fading memory, In a Word represents the profound impact a piece of artwork can have on its viewer. 

                                               Fear the Darkness                  Savannah Pessin

    Our current visual culture engages the viewer beyond words using a treasure trove of images -- created with a camera, an artist’s hands or simple brushstrokes. The selected artworks feature a concise efficiency, an ability to give you a single word, if any at all, to define what you are experiencing when interacting with the work. 

                                         Unwritten            Chelsea Suarez

     Using their surroundings or layering the words to create subtle undertones and meanings, the young visual artists chosen for In a Word used their voices to create a feast for the eyes. A feast our society increasingly responds to with visual answers – in some cases superseding the necessity for any words at all.

                                             Greyeyeskid                        Kristina Johnson     

Wild times at the National Zoo

     It has become a tradition to take the Photography One students to the National Zoo in the Spring! This year marks the fourth year. It was by far the best!

  This year we began our journey to the National Zoo via the Vienna Metro with 112 students and 11 fearless chaperones. 

The weather was perfect and the enthusiasm was outstanding!

Students searched the Zoo high and low for their doppelgangers,  the ambiguities of man interacting with beast, inspired by Garry Winogrand, animals in their surroundings and also free of their enclosures, and finally textures and patterns that are found in abundance when you have such magnificent beasts!

Wild times were had by all!