Self Portraits After Kehinde Wiley

Kehinde Wiley was born in California in 1977. His father is from Nigeria and his mother is African-American. For most of Kehinde Wiley’s very successful career, he has created large, vibrant, highly patterned paintings of young African American men wearing the latest in hip hop street fashion. The theatrical poses and objects in the portraits are based on well-known images of powerful figures drawn from seventeenth through nineteenth-century Western art. Wiley gives the authority of those historical sitters to his twenty-first-century subjects. He (mostly) finds models from the street, strangers who don’t necessarily fit into the typical portrait sitting set, which is to say that most great portraits from the past have to do with people who are very powerful and wealthy and use the portrait as a social occasion. In his work, Wiley does the opposite; he juxtaposes the high status of those shown in traditional portraits with the everyday people he represents. In his work, he addresses the image and status of young African-American men in contemporary culture and his paintings often blur the boundaries between traditional and contemporary.

To create their own powerful, Wiley-inspired portraits, seventh grade students used the grid method over a photograph to accurately draw the contours of their head and shoulders on a large scale. After erasing the grid lines, they used various graphite pencils to add a range of values (shading) to their portrait, which creates a sense of depth and makes it look “real.” After a class critique and lots of hard work, portraits were cut out and placed on their highly patterned, painted backgrounds. Students painted their background using complementary colors, just like Kehinde Wiley often does, and, also like Wiley, some of the background shapes creep onto the shoulders and body of the portrait. I know I say this all of the time, but these photos truly do NOT do this work justice... the real things are 18" x 24" and are simply AMAZING. As usual, my kids just blow me away! Don't you agree?

4th Quarter Warm/Cool Portraits with Tessellations

Here are the lovely sixth grade portraits from the 4th quarter. You can read about the project on this post from the fall!

 

Glass Cups and Bowls

Here are the gorgeous final products on display from last week's 8th grade glassblowing trip!

Glassblowing Trip

On Tuesday, my 8th grade class took our field trip to McFadden Art Glass in Baltimore where we had an amazing time making blown glass bowls and cups. The kids were involved in every step of the creation process and they had a terrific experience. We will be able to pickup the cooled pieces later (check back for pictures!), but here are some pics of the process...

After molten glass was collected on the blow pipe from a giant furnace, the pipe was cooled in this nifty fountain to make handling it a little more comfortable: 

After a second gathering of glass, students gently rolled the glass onto colored glass frit of their choice (the pipe has to be turning the entire time so the glass doesn't plop off the end like dripping honey!): 
 The glass is heated again so that the color can melt into the glass...:

and then Tim, the owner of the studio helped blow the first bit of air into the piece, before we rolled against this metal table to get it to a nice even shape.  

Students then worked at the bench with Tim to shape the piece further using these big tweezers (called 'jacks') to pinch the top and other various shaping tools depending on if they were making bowls or cups:

 Meanwhile, a friend is helping out at the end of the pipe by blowing additional air into it to make the piece larger (not as easy as it looks- you have to blow pretty hard and move from side to side while blowing since the pipe is constantly twirling):

At the same time, a new bit of glass has been gathered on the end of a solid pipe, which is called a "punty". The punty is stuck onto the bottom of the glass piece so that it can be detached from the blow pipe and then worked with further from the open end:

Students then used the tweezers to open and shape the mouth of their bowl or cup. Occasionally the glass needed to be reheated to make it more flexible/workable. If they wanted to create a wavy rim, the bowl was heated and then twirled really FAST, which causes the glass to spread out; then students used the tweezers to create a wavy edge:

The last step is to detach the piece from the pipe and put it in an annealing oven overnight so they can slowly cool (cooling too fast = shattering glass!). A friend helped out with this step too, catching the piece in these gigantic oven mitts! 

What a great group of kids! We had a wonderful experience!