Who are you? What are the important ideas and symbols that express your wishes, dreams, and everyday life? From Ancient Egypt to modern times, man has used art to record his identity through portraits, self-portraits, and symbols. In this workshop, students use a mixed-media approach, including monoprint, chine colle, collage, and stamping, to construct a self-portrait that captures their identity and puts it on display. No drawing experience necessary!
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Mobile Glass Studio
Share the unique experience of glass blowing — even add an educational component to exhibitions —with this mobile hot-glass studio, created by artist Ryan Gothrup. This studio can be used for lectures, demonstrations, workshops, or multiple-day residencies.
Due to the special nature of this workshop, please contact Jeffrey Allison, Paul Mellon Collection Educator and Statewide Programs Coordinator for more information on additional fees and site requirements.
Looking at Our Lives: A Tile Mural Workshop
In the venerable tradition of landscape, farm, and animal paintings that are featured prominently in the Mellon collection, artist Beryl Solla encourages students to think about the people and things that give their own lives meaning and value. Students identify common ideas and develop images that best represent them. Using broken tile and quick-setting thin set, students design and install a small broken tile mural (approx. 3′ x 4′) in their school or community center. The installation includes designing the mural, drawing it on the wall, breaking the tile (using protective glasses), and placing the tile on the wall. The tile is then grouted and cleaned. A highly decorative and imaginative frame (also made from broken tile) that reflects the aesthetics of the Mellon collection and supports their own concepts surrounds the image(s). The mural is permanent, beautiful, and maintenance-free.
Clay Animation Moviemakers
This workshop is for anyone who has ever wanted to make a movie! Students learn the steps used by the pros to go from character creation to construction — and sometimes destruction. Using real animator’s clay, students sculpt original characters, design sets, and work together in small groups to make a three-minute animated movie with sound character voices. Who says a movie can’t be made in a day?
A one-hour optional lecture is offered to the community and workshop participants. The lecture begins with a short tape of student animation, including footage of a workshop. There is also a demonstration of character construction, set building, and different techniques of animation. Audience members have the opportunity to participate in these steps with a short video is produced. The basic processes of clay animation are discussed and demonstrated, followed by a question-and-answer session.
Abstract Mixed Media
Looking to the “father of modern art,” Wassily Kandinsky, and comparing him to 21st-century artists Julie Mehretu, and “Stadia III,” students explore lyrical expression and measured marks as they apply to abstract art. Using a variety of traditional and nontraditional materials as well as a mini-psychological profile and music, students create large-scale works of geometric and organic origin.
The Sound of Sound: Experiments in the Art of Sound
Dive into the sound of sound: Break the boundaries of art, music, and performance, and discover a wide range of possibilities that are right before your ears. This workshop begins with a series of experiments that immerse participants in the world of sound. Students participate in a sound scavenger hunt and improvisational sounding as well as make sound with found objects. The workshop reaches a crescendo with participants creating sound events that may take many forms, such as a performance using found objects or an interactive sound sculpture.
Environmental Art
Rediscover and re-enchant your world. This workshop begins with a series of exercises that heighten awareness and appreciation of the environment. Building on this awareness, participants are encouraged to develop a playful interaction with their surroundings and create art installations using only materials found in the environment. Past art installations have taken many forms, including interactive installations, sound sculptures, art performances, and (where there’s water) floating sculptures. This outdoor workshop can be held in a park, on school grounds, or in any other such public space.
The People’s Library
The People’s Library is a highly collaborative, sustainable and interactive public art project. We work with communities to make handmade paper from discarded books, invasive plants, and countless other recycled materials. These sheets of handmade paper are then sewn together to create beautiful, one-of-a-kind books. Participants then fill their books with writing, photographs, family histories and much more.
Workshop participants will learn a variety of sustainable art forms, while working together to create unique, collaborative, and generative archives that make room for all of our diverse histories
Politics and Painting: French Art Movements of the 19th Century
France was the most advanced and most prosperous country in the world during the 19th century. It was also dynamic and politically unstable, undergoing four changes of constitution before 1900. The visual arts, and in particular painting, played an important role in the social turmoil of the French republic. Controversies about social class, gender, and economic equity played out in art as much as in the press. This lecture explores many of these topics and the painters who alternately championed or turned their backs on the great causes of their time — including David, Delacroix, Courbet and Manet.
Big Top Art
The circus is coming to town! Toulouse-Lautrec’s Le Tandem, part of the Paul Mellon Collection of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, ignites this visual presentation of art inspired by a trip to the circus. From masterpieces by Pablo Picasso and Georges Seurat to vintage circus posters, no clowning around for this exploration of portraiture, graphic design, and more.