"A Canvas of Opportunities" Exhibition
Smack Mellon
This event has ended.
A Canvas of Opportunities is an exhibition of work created by students during Smack Mellon’s Summer Arts Intensive arts education program. Through this program, every August, Smack Mellon’s 6,000 square foot gallery is transformed into a giant art studio—a “blank canvas”-- where young people aged 12-15 can create in diverse media, including drawing, painting, photography, video, sculpture, installation, and motion painting. The works in A Canvas of Opportunities reflect the young artists’ creative uses of, and responses to, the Smack Mellon space, as well as their reflections on their daily lives, personalities, and surroundings. The accompanying catalogue gives insight into their art and their experience in the program.
Smack Mellon’s Summer Arts Intensive program runs Monday through Friday from 10 am to 3 pm for the month of August. Guided by artists who are experts in their field, the students delve into a different medium each week. Video artists Michael Paul Britto and Jessica Ann Peavy taught photography and video in the first week as a means of exploring place and persona. The kids took photographs around DUMBO through a “scavenger hunt,” and designed costumes and struck poses for mixed media portrait photos and stop-motion animations. Smack Mellon’s state-of- the art Media Room served as a laboratory for printing professional quality photographs and editing videos. In the second week, installation artist Sonya Blesofsky began by teaching basic drawing techniques—using charcoal and pencils—and then moved on to still life and landscape paintings of the gallery and nearby park. The following week, the students used Smack Mellon as a backdrop for innovative, large-scale sculptures and installations made from stuffed cloth, cardboard, and found materials from nature. In the final week of the program, renowned artist David Ellis taught the students the process of creating a “motion painting,” painting onto a large sheet of linoleum on the gallery floor, while a camera above took photos every few seconds, ultimately producing a video.
The students also benefited from exposure to other New York City museums and art spaces through weekly field trips. This summer the kids visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Art and Design, the Modern Art Foundry, and the public art project FIGMENT on Governors Island.
Media
Schedule
from August 28, 2010 to August 29, 2010
Opening Reception on 2010-08-27 from 18:00 to 20:00