Memo 1-

Jenn Brannigan

I am actively pursuing a large community project with my drawing and painting class. We are going to visit four artist/businesses in Mid-Town Kingston in hope to create community through the arts. My class is teaming up with an upper level class to create large cyanotypes that will be on display for the Unity in the Community event happening April 29, 2017. My class is contributing to this event by traveling and gathering information to create data visualization’s in the form of cyanotypes, which an upper level class (Chemistry for Artists) will help to facilitate. These cyanotypes will be displayed either as flags or as large wall installments in some of the local galleries. The hopes for this event is to spark the community to explore and visit these small art businesses within mid-town to generate awareness and business.
I have narrowed down my visits two 3-4 places that I would like to go. I am going to start to contact these businesses next week and the field trips are tentatively planned for sometime at the end of February or the beginning of March. That way, we have 2 months to create, and collect information for our drawings. I just started my first lessons for this experience. In class we learned the basics of two-point perspective, and putting things in space on a 2D surface. I checked for understanding with a post-it note wrap up activity. I will post pictures later. It was an easy way to chart students understanding. I would like to think of it as my first data collection for a possible visualization.
All of this is possible through the Mad-Workshop series, and a grant project that two of my colleagues started. This grant project is called “ The Work of Art” cleverly named to connect the art businesses in the community, with the community. Mad workshops are hosting workshops in the spaces that I am visiting to promote these businesses and make people aware that they are here in Mid-Town Kingston. This event that we are a part of, circulates around Ben Wigfall. He is an African American artist who is in his 90’s. During the 1970’s he had a printmaking studio in Kingston where he hosted open studios for the community to come and use his facilities. He created community through art making. This is the same goal that this entire event is modeled around.All of the sites that we will visit are in walking distance of the high school. I became really excited about this project when one of my students said to me “There is all this stuff in walking distance? That’s so cool”. I am not a member of this community, but I am excited to collect data and explore these spaces with my students.
In the next couple of weeks my students and I are going to explore spaces within the high school to draw in order to become familiar with and practice drawing from observation and, how to place objects correctly in a two dimensional space. This will help students become comfortable with the idea of drawing and collecting information when we go on our two half-day field trips.