Cake Contest 2011:Contestants

Kentler celebrated its Birthday this year with lots and lots of cake!  Our neighbors at Baked (an award winning bakery) made gorgeous cakes and we ate it with glee, joy and multi-generational-sugar-heaven spirit.

The kids drew pictures of their ideal cakes as part of our first ever cake design contest for kids.  The winning cake design will have their cake baked by Baked and the winning designer will get a free slice.  You can have a slice too but you have to check in here to find out when it will be made and then you have get on down to Red Hook.  Oh, and unless you're the winning designer, you'll have to pay for your slice (or two-Baked cakes are DELICIOUS).  

These are the contestants.  Which one would you vote for?

K.I.D.S. Art Education NEWSLETTER - Fall 2011

Dear K.I.D.S. Art Education Friends and Supporters,

Kentler International Drawing Space sees Art Education as part of its mission to make art a vital and integral part of our local community life. Our K.I.D.S. Art Ed program is designed around the gallery's contemporary art exhibitions. We bring art and art-making experiences to students, youth, adults and families; cultivating the vibrant creative potential of our neighborhood.  

  

Kentler's 2010-2011 season has been an especially exciting one! Many of you know that we were the recipient of a grant made possible by Congresswoman Nydia Velazquez.  These funds allowed us to deepen and extend our work in Red Hook, Brooklyn.  We not only garnered new partnerships with three Red Hook community organizations to provide after school art programs (Red Hook Community Justice Center, Red Hook Initiative, and Good Shepherds Services), we also continued to provide our school programs to 40 teachers from three local schools (PS 15, PS 676 and PS 146 Brooklyn New School) and we continued to offer our popular weekend Drawing Together workshops for families.  We were able to reach over 1000 children, youth and families. All of these programs were free of charge for participants. With budget cuts deeply effecting underserved communities like Red Hook we were extremely proud to be able to provide these rich creative opportunities to our neighbors. 

UPCOMING EVENT:

To celebrate the successes of the past year you are invited to attend a celebration: 

Sunday, December 11, 2-4 pm.

We will be highlighting the amazing work of our K.I.D.S. Art Ed team and their students whose art will be installed in the gallery for you to enjoy firsthand. We want to thank our many supporters and celebrate the spirit of creativity, collaboration,and community in Red Hook.   SAVE THE DATE!

SPREAD THE WORD

Finally, please help us share our successes and dedication to art in education with others. With our K.I.D.S. Art Ed federal grant ending we need to spread the word to garner new sources of support. The kids need us.  Budget cuts have compromised the presence of the arts in schools. We strive to fill that void but we can't do it without your help. Help us turn our efforts to bring rich art experiences into the lives of any and all children a reality.  Spread the word about these events and bring friends.

 
And for those who haven't been following our blog regularly please check it out!
Make comments. Give feedback. Spread the word!

  

Mollie McQuarrie

K.I.D.S. Art Ed Director

Rubbings and Giant Pencils-Wall Drawings and Sounds: K.I.D.S. Fall Program Highlights!

This fall, Kentler educators worked with local k-5th grade students from P.S. 15 and Brooklyn New School (P.S. 146) to explore the collaborative sound/wall drawing installation by artists Lezli Rubin Kunda and Ellen Moffat.

 In the "big room," teaching artist Meghan Keane led students in experiments with how sound can inspire different types of lines: jagged, scribbly, curvy, broken, straight...the list was endless! Students created "line libraries" to record their experiments.

They also experimented with new ways to create lines (with tape, giant drawing implements, and by erasing)...

 

...and by drawing directly on the gallery wall (!). 

Each of our 14 classes added to the wall drawing. After the first couple of classes it looked like this:

After the last couple of classes it looked like this:

How cool is that??

In the "small room" teaching artist Lance Paladino and Mollie McQuarrie explored Lezli's installation where she rubbed graphite into the wall exposing and responding to imperfections in the wall's surface.

Similarly, students worked to "discover" shapes and textures hidden under fabric by rubbing with crayon and oil pastel.

Finally switching to graphite and compressed charcoal the empty areas ("negative spaces") were filled in or outlined.  These black materials made the colors in the positive spaces "pop out."

These awesome murals each represent the collective creativity of half of each class that came to Kentler.  Its been suggested that we use these to raise some money for K.I.D.S. Art Education.  We are currently working on that.  If you're interested, please contact me: we have 26 and they all need homes!! Place a bid!

Wow team Kentler!  Thanks to Meghan and Lance for all their input and effort!  And thanks to teachers and students for all their cooperation and creativity.

Stay tuned for news about the follow up post visit.

Architecture Appreciation Comes to Kentler!

This video is the result of our once-a-month family DRAWING TOGETHER workshop co-hosted today by Open House New York: everyone's drawing was lined up to create a new "built environment" based on Red Hook architectural inspiration and suffused with each artist's individual creativity and imagination!

Today, as a warm up, kids and parents explored their local built environment by drawing from memory a map or floor plan of their apartment.  Families next expanded their exploration to include the gallery's local built environment in the historic neighborhood of Red Hook, Brooklyn.

Families created booklets to fill with drawings of architectural details they noticed walking along Van Brunt Street, right outside the gallery. Then, back in the gallery both drawings and floor plans were cut up and each artist, ages ranging from 4 to 60+, worked on connecting their parts to create a larger, imaginary skyscraper / building / skyline!

Thanks all for your eye for detail and your enthusiasm for testing out new ways to make drawings! And thanks to Open House New York for co-hosting. 

Drawing Together at Red Hook Flea!!

K.I.D.S. Art Education kicked off our 2011-12 season with a Drawing Together program at Red Hook Flea- a fundraiser for P.S. 15, our neighbor and partnering school.  Teaching artist Meghan Keane invited participants to "Draw big. Draw Colorful." 

Using handmade stencils designed by Meghan and using all recycled materials, children and their care givers worked together to explore colors, shapes, and textures.  Surrounding the students there was music, dancing, food, crafts and dreamy ephemera as folks from the neighborhood sold their wares in a wonderful collaborative fundraising effort.

Thank you P.S. 15. Thank you participants.  Thank you Red Hook for your vitality, creativity and community spirit.

Next up?  Thoughts and images from our fall program built on our exhibition "MARKING SPACE.
A collaborative drawing, performance and sound project." by visual artist Lezli Rubin-Kunda and sound artist Ellen Moffat.

K.I.D.S. Art Ed at Red Hook Waterfront Arts Festival

Teaching artist Meghan Keane used the Red Hook Waterfront Arts Festival as a chance to explore drawing and sustainability.  Recycling her plastic bag collection as a drawing material she engaged children and their care-givers in yet another exciting Drawing Together exploration.  Participants had the option to experiment with sailors knots to attach the plastic bags to one another or to simply create their own silly, make-up-their-own knots.  Participants came and went, tying and experimenting, and slowly our plastic bag drawing grew and grew:

March School Programs : with Beverly Ress

Our March school programs not only look at Moseni's work but also at the works on paper by artist Beverly Ress.
In the front part of the gallery, students have been looking at Ress' large drawings on canvas-backed paper. They have noticed that she is drawing from nature (trees, birds, grasses) and makes cuts in the paper in very linear, almost mechanical ways. One portion in particular of these 2-d to 3-d reconstructions is especially compelling and reminded students of a nest, a t-rex head, and a skull; another work's cut outs reminded students of a visual map of dance steps. Ress's process of cutting into her drawings and then constructing new forms with the paper is key to our central theme, "how does a drawing grow?"

Ruth's still lives

To help the students understand and appreciate Ress's attention to detail, teaching artist Ruth Wetzel constructed a variety of carefully arranged still-lifes using objects from nature she collected. With the still life of their choice students were first encouraged to look closely before drawing anything.  Then they were encouraged to draw either parts of the still life or the whole thing, to start with large shapes and then work to the smaller ones, to notice the ways the shapes related to other shapes and even to notice shadows.  Drawing with colored pencil, students noticed that there are shapes in flowers that are "roundish," that an ostrich egg has a "bumpy" texture and that one of the branches looks like a "perfect rainbow arch." 

Fifth graders from Brooklyn New School

Kindergartners from PS 676

Back in the classroom students continued to explore the question, "how can a drawing grow?"  Kentler's teaching artists provided new the students with new materials that inspired students to build.  Going from 2-d to 3-d, just like Ress's drawing, the students' work grew and grew...

Installation at PS 15