Design IT Art Institute - March 7 - 11, 2005

The set up for this particular week of work with the ALA Design IT students was as follows: We had nine kids the started the week, with a tenth that came the last day to get involved. The ideas of exploring visual art, design, and drawing were integrated with the opportunity to create new sound sculptures for a display at Radio Shack's STORE ONE in downtown Fort Worth. We were able to acquire the expertise of some of our designers and artists here at the museum to come and talk with the students about their work, show them some of the designs and artwork in progress for new exhibits, and gain insight into the building and designing of their own scupltures. We were able to explore interesting art activities such as free form painting and drawing, as well as photography during this week. The painting and drawing included exercises where the students were asked to paint from their emotions felt during certain forms of music playing in the background. They were also given activities to sketch certain emotive ideas from their own thinking, and share them all with the group. All these activities served to get the students thinking about how drawing, sketching, and design might affect their work with the cricket scupltures, and the painting exercises helped to stimulate their thinking about color and the affect it might have on the viewer of the specific piece. The students also took a trip to the Modern Art Museum to gain some inspiration and see new examples of the same ideas - color, design, painting, drawing, sketches, and scuplture. The students id an amazing job of designing and building new sculptures to be put on display, all visually stimulating and exciting, coupled with their original artwork and designs for the actual scuplture. The sturdiness of the sculptures was called into question by tow of the museum's artists, so saafir and jonathon will attempt to help make these works as strong as possible over the next week, but keeping the original intent and design as intact as possible.