Art Syntax

My students are making art based on several historic events: D-Day, 1776, the Vietnam War, etc.

After seven years of making collage "posters" in school, these 7th graders are working to make collage art. There is much to unlearn in making this cut & paste distinction. They are coming around.

Their classroom posters have always been informational; with various success at making them informationally coherent. Our collages need to be more like poetry. The images need to create or reinforce a meaning through their design; how they arrange and relate iconic images.

They are getting the idea: stripes on the flag become the rows for crosses (Memorial Day), the repeated but varied images of 9/11 take on an overall appearance of a broken flag, and the white streets on the central map of the Warsaw ghetto become the reason for the shapes of fractured images of the Holocaust.

It has been a day-to-day challenge to keep them from pasting their first inclination to the poster (they are well-trained "to get done" with a project), rather than trying what-ifs that are grounded in an aesthetics and the process of making/evolving.

It has been a real teaching and learning experience for us all.