Finished works from an 8th grade Digital Art unit I led with @NewYork564 at @The_School. #artsed

I love collaborating with Yoshiko Maruiwa (@NewYork564) every year on a variety of projects. Yoshiko is a wonderful artist and teacher, and she introduces me and our students to art and artists that put our units in a larger context, from Cindy Sherman to Robert Frank to Louise Bourgeois.

Yoshiko and I just led a Digital Arts mini-course that lasted for 8 sessions. (Other courses offered were mixed media, batik, and ceramics.) Our small group of students completed three photo manipulation projects. Below is their description of each project and the resulting images:

Project 1: InsideOut Collage
Inspired by the artist, JR, the 8th grade artists from Digital Art course created our own interpretations of his classic “InsideOut” artwork. During this assignment, we created a collage of images to represent our inside stories, using images that are important to us. Through the following slides you will see different representations of who the students are and what inspires us.

Project 2: InsideOut Photo
The INSIDE OUT project by the French artist JR gives everyone the opportunity to share their portrait and make a statement for what they stand for.  It is a global platform for people to share their untold stories and transform messages of personal identity into works of public art. Inspired by his project, we took black and white photos that conveyed our social action project.

Project 3: Social Action Digital Collage
For this project we took our Social Action Projects (SAP) and turned them into digital art. We collaged and layered pictures until they came together to represent the injustice we are focusing on for our SAP. One requirement was that we had to be in the picture, so it was a challenge to include ourselves in pictures that we found on the internet.

Hoping to encourage more members of @The_School community to participate in #InsideOutNYC

On Friday afternoon, I participated in #InsideOutNYC with some other teachers from The School at Columbia University. More photos in my Flickr set here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/specialkrb/sets/72157633360741423

The Inside Out Project’s mobile photobooth is parked in Times Square daily from 12pm-8pm through May 10th. The truck has a large-scale printer inside, so you receive a 3′ x 5′ printout of your photo. Then, you can either take your giant face home with you or have it pasted on the plaza in front of the TKTS red steps. More info about #InsideOutNYC here: http://www.insideoutproject.net/en

The artist JR used his TED Prize winnings to launch the InsideOut project in 2011 to reinforce how art can change the world. Since then, I’ve helped two groups of 8th grade participate in InsideOut initiatives, and I’m hoping to bring this year’s group of 8th graders down to Times Square next week to participate! I’ve previously posted about my student projects here and here and here.

I recommend visiting the installation and participating if possible. I’m also thinking about how we can do something similar in-house…

Using Cindy Sherman’s self-portraits to inspire an 8th grade Photoshop project

For the second year in a row, Yoshiko Maruiwa and I are collaborating on a 10-week Art Elective inspired by JR’s InsideOut Project. Our first project was an InsideOut Collage. This second project was an OutsideIn Collage. To inspire them, kids were shown slides of Cindy Sherman‘s self-portraits. Sherman used costumes, props, and backgrounds to tell a story, dispel/reinforce a stereotype, or communicate something to her audience. Students took pictures, located physical and virtual props, chose background images, and started manipulating their scene. I’m excited to see the results!

Starting the InsideOut Project with 8th graders

For the second year in a row, Yoshiko Maruiwa and I are collaborating on a 10-week Art Elective inspired by JR’s InsideOut Project. The first assignment was to create an InsideOut Collage where students were asked to communicate what was inside of them – things that you couldn’t necessarily guess just by looking. They took photos of each other, edited them with the magic wand, magnetic lasso, and eraser tools to distill their silhouette and filled either the inside or the outside of their silhouette with symbols and images that they chose to represented them.