Welcome to our Summer 2021 Art Share!
Congratulations to all of our students who, with perseverance, grit, determination and passion have managed to keep making art despite all circumstances. Look around for examples of work from our Visual Arts, Media Arts and Performing Arts classes. Whether they tapped into their emotional landscape or drew inspiration from the actual landscape, our students used what they saw, felt, thought, touched, and imagined to discover new skills or just find shelter from crazy times. Here we honor the work you see and also the work you may not see: the effort, resilience, mindfulness and growth that comes with engaging in the arts.
Congratulations to our 2021 Summer Institutes students for tapping into your greatest resource during this time and for all time: your creativity!
Let's look at some art!
Click on one of the 4 tabs below to explore either our Visual Arts, Media Arts, Performing Arts, or Interdisciplinary classes. Check out your own class or any other class you are curious about!
VISUAL ARTS
Let's Illustrate a Book
MIDDLE & HIGH SCHOOL
Teaching Artist: Cynthia Nava
Students conceived and learned about the design process of bringing a story to life inside of a book. Students had to sketch character explorations and environment designs for their stories. They learned how to create interesting compositions and explore layout designs to illustrate and design the flow of the pages. Other story and design elements we went over were how color choices and typography can tie in and enhance their illustrations. The process we engaged in is similar to other design processes in video game and animation. What you will see in this display is their concept designs for their original book.
Drawing Fundamentals
MIDDLE SCHOOL
Teaching Artist: Eva Perez
Students created drawings from three creative sources throughout the session: direct observation, imagination, and memory. They also learned various drawing techniques, from simple to complex two-dimensional works and simple art materials. Students observed, focused, and developed their fine motor skills through the art-making process as they were empowered to take risks and make artistic choices. During their culmination, students were asked to share their most successful drawing and their most challenging work. They all shared their work and provided feedback.
HIGH SCHOOL
Teaching Artist: Eva Perez
Experimental Embellishments in Fashion
HIGH SCHOOL
Teaching Artist: Marissa Sykes & Gladis Munguia
Designed as a building block course in fashion embellishments, students built on their existing experience with needlework. Students explored and developed their understandings of needlework and design through the practices of embroidery, cross-stitching, beading, sequins, and design.
Intermediate Drawing
HIGH SCHOOL
Teaching Artist: Samantha Longman
With an emphasis on drawing from observation, students in this class developed their technical skills to create carefully rendered still-life drawings. Previous drawing experience was built upon as students used charcoal, graphite, and colored pencils to create object studies and sketches of natural subjects.
Creativity Through Mixed Media
MIDDLE & HIGH SCHOOL
Teaching Artist: Rebecca Tager
This slideshow represents some of the projects the students created over the course of our 2-week class. The emphasis was on creative process and exploration. Students experienced a wide range of materials and techniques—from air dry clay to collage—while developing their own personal style.
MEDIA ARTS
Graphic Design: Logos & Typography
HIGH SCHOOL
Teaching Artist: Ashley Margo
Students developed personal expression through typography and logo explorations! In this graphic design workshop, students explored visual communication design, developed an understanding of the relationship of contemporary to classic graphic production techniques, examined logos of significant LA sports teams, movie studios, and more! Students experimented with handmade and digital techniques.
Typography Explorations
During the first week of class, students focused on typography. They explored multiple mediums designing single glyphs (letters) that reflected their personalities, experimented with collage, used the building blocks of design to create unique typography, and explored how fonts can express emotion.
Logo Explorations
During the second week of class, students explored logos. They learned about logo typologies, collectively researching logos, designing the ‘A’ for ‘LA28’, thinking about colors, and designing pieces that related color & symbolism to emotions.
Logo Designs
During the final few days of class, students designed a logo for a topic of their choice!
Photo 101
HIGH SCHOOL
Teaching Artist: Karina Mata
Students strengthened their relationship with their digital cameras by learning the fundamentals of photography. They learned to set appropriate shutter speeds and aperture values. Students practiced guidelines for strong photo composition, such as following the rule of thirds, incorporating symmetry, and using interesting camera angles and camera shot sizes. Students used shadow photography and reflective photography to differentiate between shape and form. Here you will see students exploration of each art skill objective as well as a share of students favorite work!
Advanced Photography
HIGH SCHOOL
Teaching Artist: Karina Mata
Students used photography to explore their Connections to Roots, Community, and Self. They defined what a Connection is, what it feels like, and what it can look like by incorporating cyanotype photogram printing, traditional and digital collaging, and portraiture.
Photo Explorations
MIDDLE SCHOOL
Teaching Artist: Karina Mata
Students learned the fundamental basics of photography by conducting a series of photography experiments. They explored the differences in a photo's point of view while using a variety of camera angles, camera shot sizes, camera lenses, and light gels. Students noted the distinction between two-dimensional shapes and three-dimensional forms through a series of shadow and reflection assignments. Students followed a photo editing order to further improve their photography skills.
Editing with Adobe Premiere
HIGH SCHOOL
Teaching Artist: Kristy Messer
Students explored the basics of editing on Adobe Premiere, including importing footage, creating bins, cutting footage, and exporting projects. Students also learned more advanced techniques including designing titles, using a variety of video effects, and audio mixing. For our final project, students display their mastery of these skills in "All About Me" short films. A selection of these films can be seen here.
BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE: Select one of the tabs above to explore more art shares!
PERFORMING ARTS
Eamon Cannon Comedy Project Stand-Up and Improv
MIDDLE & HIGH SCHOOL
Teaching Artists: Susanna Spies & Jerami Monreal
This class provided the opportunity to speak, share, and laugh together within improvisational games and individual topics shared within stand-up. The culminating class share shows how improvisation and stand-up comedy are both gateways to connect, express, create, and share our voices around matters that means something to us individually and how to create imaginary circumstances with our peers within improvisational games...each welcoming expression, creativity, and tons of fun along the way!
Livestream Lab
HIGH SCHOOL
Teaching Artists: Kristy Messer & Latrice Postell
Students from both dance and acting tracks came together to create a variety performance pieces around the theme of "transition." As an group, students explored the theme and landed on three phases of life to unpack through acting and dance. Students wrote, rehearsed, choreographed, and filmed on Zoom and sometimes in person to create a short film livestreamed on YouTube on July 31st.
Dance Technique
HIGH SCHOOL
Teaching Artist: Latrice Postell
In this class, students chose two styles that they would like to explore during our two weeks together: Jazz and Hip Hop. Our exploration included the historical significance as well as past and present cultural significance. Students also gained an understanding of each dance style through the lenses of vernacular movement and social dance. They experienced different approaches to develop choreography (shapes, cannons, space, counts, rhythm and style) and how the styles relate to each other. We fused it all together to create our own short pieces.
INTERDISCIPLINARY
Leveraging Our Power: Social Justice in the Arts
HIGH SCHOOL
Teaching Artist: Tiffany Owens
In this workshop-based survey class, students examined the direct and indirect ways that social justice lives in the arts both in the past and today. The objectives of this class were to both lay a foundation for even greater understanding of social justice as well as build a toolkit to use when students want to improve and increase justice in their own day-to-day lives and the larger world. This class was interactive with a lot of discussion. Students looked at social justice through many different art forms, not just one. They did create in visual and performing arts, but the goal was not to get to the end of the two weeks with a bunch of polished, finished products. The goal was to have the experience of thinking through and experimenting with ideas around justice and how the arts have been, and can be, used to further those concepts.
BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE: Select one of the tabs above to explore more art shares!
With special thanks to our supporters who make this program possible:
AT&T Aspire, Bank of America, BCM Foundation, The Eisner Foundation, Ella Fitzgerald Foundation, The Getty Foundation, Max H. Gluck Foundation, Harman Family Foundation, Audrey & Sydney Irmas Charitable Foundation, Sherry Lansing Foundation, Music Man Foundation, Dwight Stuart Youth Fund, and Kathryn Wanlass Charitable Foundation.