Field Trip

All of the Summrs-Knoll students visited an invitational collage exhibition on the fourth floor of The Rackham Graduate School, which served as inspiration for the collage work they will begin this coming week. Many different materials were used to create the art work we saw including magazine and photographic pictures, maps, fur, metal, wood, paint, encaustic wax, string, paper, etc. Rackham also has five beautiful mosaic pieces by Gerome Kamrowski.

The collage show began with a house-like image:

Since this month's theme is the human body, I am going to encourage the children to use symbolic thinking to create faces and humans with their collage materials. I was happy to see this piece:

Many students especially admired this piece:

Isobel and I both favored this one:

All the students were intrigued with what Kai called "an old timey drinking fountain".

Next we headed over to the U-M Institute for the Humanities Gallery to see a show called Loops which is viewed with 3-D glasses. Amanda Krugliak, the curator, graciously greeted each class and explained that the images on the screen were created after a photographer took 10,000 photographs of Merce Cunningham's hands and then digitally animated them. The dance of the 80 year old man's hands looked like stars in outer space or fireworks, and he read his diary as we watched the beautiful images. It was very moving to hear him read words that he had written as a young man, and to see his hands dance, even though his arthritic body was no longer able to do so. 

This piece in the Humanities building was the grand finale to a wonderful field trip!

 I am grateful to Amanda and to the parents who accompanied us. Thank you!