Education
NEWS
Spring/Summer 2011
The month of May was a busy month for The Prairie Art Gallery’s Artist in the Classroom program. There was an Artist in Residency program at Aspen Grove, where our art instructors gave art lessons to all 21 classes. That’s all 454 students learning a range of art media from felting to exploring Haida art. This was a first time residency for Aspen Grove and everyone involved was very excited. Everything went fantastic!
The monthly homeschool groups in both Grande Prairie and Sexsmith wrapped up after another successful year and we look forward to seeing them again in September for another exciting year of art making.
Winter 2011
The Prairie Art Gallery’s Artist in the Classroom program is as strong as ever! In January, we provided fun and educational art programs to 419 students within Grande Prairie and area.
Our January programs included what has become a yearly Artist in Residence program at Avondale Elementary School. Five of our artist instructors offered 14 different programs to 313 students in kindergarten to grade 5, and projects ranged from mask making to Batik. We had a great time working with the eager students at Avondale while they expressed themselves creatively through their wonderful art work!
Spring/Summer 2010
A Year In Review: Since the collapse of the Gallery in 2007, we have been without adequate facilities in the gallery to offer hands on activities to school classes, so we have taken those activities to the students’ own classrooms. Between April 2009 and March 2010, we visited 115 classrooms where we worked with 2206 students. 75% of Grande Prairie Public School District Schools received a program from us, as did 100% of Grande Prairie Catholic School District Schools. We have also provided numerous programs to the Grande Prairie Home School Group.
Home School Program
The Grande Prairie and Sexsmith home school groups continue to grow and request monthly programming to supplement their art curriculum. We now have 4 separate home school groups that we offer outreach programming to through our Artist in the Classroom program. This year a new initiative was started with a separate Jr./Sr. high school group in order to offer them more challenging art lessons. The three other groups target a 6 – 12 year audience.
Visiting Artist, Fall 2009
Artist Nicole Bauberger visited the Prairie Art Gallery again to offer encaustic workshops in the schools on Nov. 5 & 6, 2009. Nicole Bauberger is from the Yukon and she specializes in encaustics and oil painting. Nicole has been working on a series titled ‘100 Dresses’ where she travels to various cities across Canada observing each city’s uniqueness and responding to it through her encaustic ‘dress’ theme. She gave a short performance and a slide presentation to the students on this series. She had the students giggling with her humorous creations and titles. Nicole visited both the Gr. 5’s and 6’s at Harry Balfour School and the Gr. 4’s at St. Patrick’s School and gave a short presentation before unleashing the students’ creativity in hot wax.
Summer 2009
For a third year in a row, the Summer Art Camps were held at the Grande Prairie Regional College in Art Studio A for July and August. It was another successful summer with 75 students registered over 6 weeks, in a variety of fine art programs such as drawing, painting, sculpture, mixed media, cartooning and a new preschool program was introduced. Cortney Dickson and Miranda Hebert were the Summer Art Camp coordinators and they both brought their own unique talents to the program to help make it a fun and creative experience for the students.
This summer, the gallery started a new initiative by including a co-op student from the College visual arts program to gain work experience in the arts. Dalen Landis received credit for his work experience as a visiting instructor for the program and coordinating the Summers End art exhibit. He also had the opportunity to develop and instruct an art workshop in conjunction with the Library’s summer program. ‘Art Caper’s was a short 1 hour class designed to turn students into art detectives by solving art mysteries and doing art puzzles. This theme was inspired by the Library’s Summer Reading program’s detective theme.
Spring 2009
This spring and summer, The Prairie Art Gallery mentored Rhonda Wiebe a practicum student from May until August 2009. She came as an intern from the Museum and Gallery Practice program from Western University and has a Bachelors degree in Education. Rhonda assisted in many roles at the gallery including instructing for our Artist in the Classroom program. It was a successful internship and she is now employed part-time at the gallery and continues as an instructor in our Artist in the Classroom program.
Winter 2009
The Artist in the Classroom program was at Avondale Elementary School for an artist residency for the month of January 2009. Students created mixed media masks for their “Who am I?” Project. Click here to see the art work from the Grade 6 class.
View more photos from the Artist in the Classroom program when instructors visited Avondale Elementary, St. Gerard Catholic School, Swanavon Elementary, and the local homeschool class.
Fall 2008
Artist in the Classroom
The fall season began with 14 programs booked from Sept. - Dec. (283 students). There are 23 programs booked including the home school groups and one Brownie group (with 488 students total). It has been a bit of a slow season, but there are bookings for winter and spring. Avondale School is requesting us to do another Artist in Residency for January.
We invited Nicole Bauberger back as a visiting artist for our program on Nov. 12 & 13. During the two days, St. Patrick School invited her to do encaustic painting for two grade 4 classes and Nicole visited the Composite High School to do encaustic painting for the Art 20 and 30 level students. They were all inspired to paint dresses, in response to Nicole’s 100 Dresses for Grande Prairie exhibition, Inukshuks or their own creations with hot wax.
Home School Program
Bringing the Artist in the Classroom program to Sexsmith last year for the home school students was such a success that they requested us again for this year. However, the group grew to an interested party of 55 students. Last year the Sexsmith group was 29. We divided the group into two: 29 Sexsmith students and 26 Grande Prairie home school students. The home school students range in age from 6 – 16 years.
Each group found a rent-free space in which to run the program on a monthly basis for the duration of the school year. We meet at the Civic Centre in Sexsmith every second Wednesday of the month, and at the McLaurin Church in Grande Prairie every third Wednesday of the month.
Spring 2008
For Education Week, Kateri Mission School invited the Artist in the Classroom program to do an Artist in Residency for the whole school. The Prairie Art Gallery offered art lessons for all classes, kindergarten to grade 8 during the weeks of April 28 – May 9, 2008. It took two weeks to provide 21 lessons to over 396 students.
All the artists were involed in delivering quality, hands-on art experiences and the feedback from both teachers and students was very positive. Darlene Dautel taught Batik to one group of grade 6′s, and Sabine Schneider gave the other grade 6 class a workshop in mask making with plaster bandages.
This was a two-part lesson, with Sabine returning to help students finish their individual masks in paint. Vivian Farnsworth taught native symbolism with a project titled ‘House Poles’ in which grade 4 and 8 students represented their family in their artwork. Dale Syrota taught watercolour landscape painting to grade 3 and 4. Clay sculptures were created by grade 5′s with Helena Mulligan.
Helena also had kindergarteners cast their hands in plaster to create a plaster relief. Lynn LeCorre-Dallaire taught grade 7′s how to draw trees in conte and graphite, while teaching portraits to grade 5′s using plastercine in a plastercine relief project. Funky Fish watercolours were popular for all the lower grades including kindergarten, grades 1, 2, and 3.