CHILDREN'S MUSEUM OF ART NYC – VALERIE KHARCHENKO – 8 HOURS
As time goes on, I am starting to realized that I have to much on my plate. Moving to New York has been really difficult to adapt to, and with everything from school, to working two jobs, and working at CMA, I have been having a hard time managing my time. So this week I notified Val that I will be needing to cut down my hours at CMA. Within the next few weeks I will no longer be working with the YAK program.
This week in YAK we continued to work on our collaborative community project. Last week, we got somewhere with the idea of what we would be doing for our final project. This week we started class out by fine tuning all the details about our idea, and made sure that everyone had a part in the final piece. Our idea for the piece is to create a scene of community taken place in outer space. There will be two silhouette face on each side of the landscape, and in between them, a hallway leading to outer space. There are lots of galaxies involved and lots of bright colors. I definitely am blown away by how the students interpreted this assignment and where their imaginations lead them. After discussing our ideas, we broke of into groups and individuals to start working on assigned parts of the final piece. I was working with a girl who is painting a galaxy that will stand as the background. It was really great painting with sa student, this is the first time I have even been exposed to paint at CMA, it was really exciting.
Because of President's Day, there was no Exploring Media Lab class. So instead of helping in that class, I helped prepare and supervise an Art Slam. Art Slam is basically a party for middle school and high school kids where they can come and hang out at the museum, eat pizza, and work on various artistic activities. I was in charge of making examples for some of the activities. One was a gridded portrait. Kids were provided an outline of a face, which also had gridded lines covering the entire sheet. They then were to draw facial features and make every square a different color or design. Here is a picture of the example that I created.
I also created instructions, and set up the table for this activity. The other activity that I was responsible for was the hat making center. I make a few examples of different kinds of hats that kids could make. It was a crazy experience working with the kids while they were making their hats. It was really amazing the things that they were coming up with. Here are some pictures from the hat making party.
This week was a huge learning experience for me. Throughout dealing with the struggles and stress created by school and work, it was great knowing that I could be in a space surrounded by non-judgemental, insanely creative, passionate and loving individuals.