Teaching Artist Workshops

I have been a teaching artist with Arts for Learning since 2018, facilitating crankie and mural workshops across Maryland.

For each residency or workshop, students and teachers select the theme, and we spend the first part of each residency learning about visual metaphor and design principals in order to co-design the piece.  Once the design is finalized, we break it up into sections, and each student contributes to the final piece, which is then installed in the school.

Locations:

• Baltimore Youth Arts, Baltimore, MD - Western High School, Baltimore, MD - The Childrens Guild Monarch Academy Schools, Annapolis, Baltimore, and Laurel, MD - Summer Arts Learning Academy, Baltimore, MD - Summer Lit Program through Arts for Learning - Fallston Highschool, Fallston, MD - Harford Day School, Harford, MD - Thomas Jefferson Elementary/Middle, Baltimore, MD - Running Brook Elementary School, Columbia, MD - Bay Brook Elementary School, Brooklyn, MD - City Spring Elementary/Middle, Baltimore, MD - Hamilton Elementary/Middle

Crankie Workshops for Summer Lit 2021

In the summer of 2021, I participated in a 6-week program with Arts For Learning called Summer Lit, where each week I traveled to a different elementary school to teach students about the history of crankies, or illustrated panoramas, and create a collaborative crankie together. We worked with a poem to start, brainstormed visual metaphors that could represent the meaning of the poem, and each student chose a line of the poem to illustrate for one panel of the crankie. At the end of the week, we attached all the panels together and performed the crankie with students reciting the poem, or operating the box.

The end result was a short film to share with teachers and parents. Towards the end of the summer, students began writing their own poems to use as the script for the crankie with a few simple prompts. They were truly the authors of the project from start to finish!

Crankie workshop at opequon summer camp 2022

At camp, 12 students ages 11 - 14 created a collaborative crankie using a devised poetry method. The first few days students responded to prompts, edited each others’ writing, and devised a poem with input from each student. Then, students did a visual brainstorm to connect their sketches to their words, and spent two days illustrating the crankie before they performed in for the camp!

Thomas Jefferson Elementary Middle

I was invited to do a Mural Residency at Thomas Jefferson Elementary/Middle in 2019 and 2021 (virtually). In 2019, I worked with a 6th grade English Teacher to design a mural that aligned with the core theme of the book they were currently reading that diagnosed the meaning of equality.

Each student was asked to define was equality meant to them, and we narrowed down a collaborative definition for the class that became the inspiration for the visuals in the final mural. Students designed visual metaphors and brought in personal references to share with classmates.

The virtual residency in 2021 was done with a 6th grade Social Studies teacher, who was working with his students to create profiles on historic Black figures of their choosing in science, art, culture, industry, technology, and medicine. To build on this curriculum, each student created a collaged visual portrait of their chosen person, with selected quotes and iconic imagery and designs that represent each person’s story. Students were then asked to identify why they chose the person they did, and make a connection to themselves or present times. Then, the portraits were installed within a tree mural we painted in the schools’s library to signify that these figures were part of the school community’s ancestral tree. Most of the residency was done virtually, with support from staff to collect the collaged portraits.

FALLSTON HIGH SCHOOL

In 2019 I was invited to Fallston High School to work with their art teacher and senior art class to create a school mural in the front lobby. In the beginning of the residency, we did several exercises to narrow down a meaningful theme, starting with a question posed to each class: What message do you want to share with your peers and the broader school community that you think needs to be heard right now, and still be relevant for several years? For seniors, I asked them what message they wanted to leave behind to help welcome a new cohort of students each year.

After brainstorming ideas and voting on a collaborative message, the seniors decided to focus on celebrating identities that were marginalized in the school to make them feel more seen and embraced in a very public space in the school lobby. Students from those identities were included in the co-design phase and visual research to determine how they should be represented. Students decided to use natural imagery as a metaphor for interconnection and cross-cultural references. These were highly skilled artists who took on an ambitious mural with an incredibly beautiful result!

Running Brook Elementary

In 2018, I was invited to Running Brook Elementary in Columbia, MD to work with ESL (English as a second language) students and their teacher to create a mural that celebrated Latin American heritage. We studied Mexican painters and muralists like Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, and brainstormed imagery that students connected to their heritage like food, flowers, patterns, colors, and music. We looked at Spanish influences and investigated Indigenous art practices to incorporate into the mural’s design. After our research, we created a collage with paper cut outs that led to our final composition, and drew it out using a grid system. The final piece was installed in the school’s cafeteria.