Using Warhol’s architectural prints as inspiration and photographs taken by Neal Warren, students created multiple layered prints of Wheeling landmarks.

Click below to view images!

In a previous blog post I had written about surviving high school the second time around.  I, along with my colleague Leah Morelli, entered the parallel universe of my alma mater, Perry High School, and worked with two of their art classes.  I did indeed survive and am even willing to do it again next school year.  Over the course of 8 weeks the students learned about Andy Warhol, Pop Art, Warhol’s Wallpaper series, silk screening, composition, and collage.  We also looked at the work of Shepard Fairey and Ludovica Gioscia for their use of silkscreening, repetition, and large wallpaper pieces in their contemporary artwork, as well as their art making processes.

MUSEUM VISIT: 

After sitting through several PowerPoint presentations and surviving, the students were invited to the museum and take part in a Warhol Workshop.  During this 3 hour workshop, students were given a museum tour and the opportunity to get their creative juices flowing in our studio.  It was nice to have the students finally SEE what I had been talking about in their classroom.  During their studio time, students learned about Andy Warhol’s underpainting and silk screening process to make their own celebrity Pop Portraits.

Click the photo to view the gallery.

 

ART MAKING PROCESS 

The students were broken up into groups and assigned a subject matter that Andy Warhol had used in his artwork - celebrities, shoes, animals, food, and cars.  We asked students: “If Andy Warhol were alive today and still making art, what popular images would he turn into Pop Art?”  Through several brainstorming sessions and library research days, each group found 3 images that they felt best represented their subject and they were made into silkscreens.  Students spent a few class periods printing their images in different colors and layers.  The students then cut up and arranged their prints to create a large collage with wallpaper paste.

Click the photo to view the gallery.

Hi! My name is Emily Jaworski and I have been working as an Artist Educator at the Andy Warhol Museum since January of 2010.

Myself and fellow Artist Educators serve an exciting and unique role here. We are encouraged to bring our own perspective to work as part of an active, collaborative, and creative Education Team. We give tours of the museum to visitors of all ages, teach workshops in our art studio, develop educational curriculum, collaborate with teachers locally, nationally, and internationally, and participate in outreach programs at local community events.

The Pittsburgh International Children’s Festival was one of such outreach programs. This festival is a 5 day art-extravaganza that takes place yearly in Schenley Plaza, an outdoor park in Pittsburgh’s Oakland Neighborhood. On May 14^th and 15^th 2011, our Education Staff set up a table with an acetate collage project for guests of all ages to make. The images on the acetates included; Andy Warhol, Campbell’s Soup, Marilyn Monroe, Mickey Mouse, and many others. We also brought some of our Andy Warhol Coloring Books to hand out.

It is greatly rewarding to participate in outreach programming for children. It allows us to engage with large numbers of people, promote intergenerational learning, and talk about the importance of art education in the life of a child. 

A month prior I had met with the race director Patrice Matamoros of the Dick’s Sporting Goods Pittsburgh Marathon, in hopes of collaborating on one of my projects, a series of lesson plans looking at the intersecting themes in Sports and Art. Patrice was looking for help to bring the Toyota Kids Marathon of Pittsburgh event in some way to patients at Children’s hospital. In one hour, with her talented staff, we conceived of the event Art in Action. The fun and educational event brought both the marathon and the museum to kids who could not attend these programs in the community due to illness.

At Children’s Hospital of UPMC, on May 9^th, from 2 to 4 pm, patients from toddlers to teens came through the atrium aided by parents or ChildLife staff — getting a break from their rooms, to move and make art. Children completed laps around the labyrinth and got their pictures taken with their newly earned medals. Children were able to silkscreen print their own pop portraits of local athletes and fun characters; Tinkerbell and Troy Polamalu were most popular. Collage pop portraits were also distributed to patients who couldn’t attend the event through the hospital’s bedside cart program. The volunteers, ChildLife staff, and administrators were incredibly gracious and endlessly helpful to the Warhol crew of artists who have never had to sanitize our tools before between each use.  Silkscreen printing is always sort of magical as the prints are revealed—to bring this delight to patients and families, whose days in the hospital may not have been so easy, was infinitely gratifying.

I take for granted that I live in a city with the prettiest skyline, with three rivers, a city of bridges, a city with some of the best doctors in the world, a city with incredible museums, a city with culture and history, a place that is easy to raise children, and lastly a place with big-hearted people who work together to make good things possible. Remembering my afternoon on May 9 makes all this clear.

Through the museum’s Artist In-school Partnerships, I have been asked to go back to my Alma Mater, Perry High School, and work with a couple of the Visual Arts classes.  For the past couple of weeks, I have been visiting Perry along with Leah, our School Programs Coordinator here at the Warhol.  We are working on a unit that introduces the students to the life and work of Andy Warhol while comparing him to more contemporary artists like Shepard Fairey and Ludovica Gioscia.  Essentially the students will be designing their own silkscreens and print on wallpaper that will be used to create an installation in the school.

Going back to Perry was like entering some sort of parallel universe.  The classes I'm visiting start well before I normally start work at the Warhol and it makes me wonder how I ever got up that early for school.  Granted that I was rarely on time for first period, it is still super early in my opinion.  Not to my surprise, Perry essentially looked the same and yes, it even smelled the same.  Some of the administration and faculty recognized me and gave me a warm welcoming (although I have a feeling that they are actually thinking I am my younger sister that was way more involved in school than I was) while others mistaken me as a student roaming the halls instead of being in class .  There were some familiar faces from my graduating class that have also taken the educator route in life.  They too have been thrown back into this parallel universe.

I give my high school teachers (and any teacher really) alot of credit for what they do day in and day out.  High school students are a tough crowd and they take a while to warm up to you.  I always wonder "is this what I was like when I was younger?!?".  Here I am, interrupting their daily routine with a PowerPoint about some man that they've never heard of, that has a museum that they had no idea existed in their city and top it off by asking them to do an art project.  I can see how it can get frustrating for them, but like any teacher, I hope that they will eventually understand why I'm putting such an effort into getting my point across.

All in all, I'm pretty excited to share my knowledge and excitement for the wonderful world of art and Andy Warhol.  Here are some examples of the small projects we have done so far:

Students created colorful collages underneath acetate prints of popular celebritities.  We discussed Warhol's use of bright colors that "Pop Art" was known for as well as his fascination with the rich and famous.  We asked students: "If Warhol were alive today, what celebrities do you think he would make a portrait of?"

Students were given magnet boards and a collection of different images.  They were then asked to create different examples of composition.

 

 

A week later on February 1st our Education Department hosted about 100 teachers from CAPA High School for a day of professional development. Now between you and I (I'm talking to the one guy who reads my blog posts) teachers don't always like to be taught. I think it can be hard to change roles and be a student when you spend most of your year being an instructor, mentor, disciplinarian, role model, etc. My assignment was to emphasize 'play' in a workshop teaching them the principles of stop motion animation because that's what I do. I have my own animation and puppetry company that provides all ages workshops so we brought in my business partner to help out. So working with my department and my animation partner we came up with an activity that would be fun, informative, and offer a new educational tool that the teachers could incorporate into their classes.

We decided to use pixilation, stop motion technique where live actors are used as a frame-by-frame subject repeatedly posing while one frame is taken and then changing that pose slightly before the next frame. The actor becomes a kind of living stop motion puppet. A few concerns that I had were that maybe the teachers wouldn't find the workshop applicable to their classroom, maybe they wouldn't be in the mood to be a puppet, and worst of all maybe not have fun. Of course I wouldn't be writing this blog post if it had turned out poorly so let's jump to the results: They had a blast as evidenced in the attached video, they loved being puppets, and since then we've had more than one of the participating teachers contact us about developing partnerships using animation as a teaching strategy. Good job, new guy.

When I think back to how much trouble I got into for 'playing' while I was in high school I can't help but consider my current state as somewhat cathartic. Here I am as an adult making my living by teaching teachers how to play and furthermore how to play in their classrooms. Like I said it's a beautifully volatile, reactive, and creative place to work.