TEACHING VISUAL ARTS ON SECONDARY / MYP : GRADE 10.

Imagine that being placed at the North of the Andres, you as teacher do not have museums (those with nice collections), do not have galleries, do not have an active artistic movement...being isolated far from Art galleries as all the big cities...Could be a nightmare..isn't it??How to manage that lack of permanent contact and direct information?
On Summer 2009 I attended the Connecting Collections Workshop, for Art teachers in New York. I met so many teachers and of course could visit the permanents exhibition son Metropolitan , Moma, Guggnheim and Withney. I learned something: all this places have amazing web sites with the necessary information for teachers and students, overall when as teachers we need to provide information and encourage our students for an independent search.
Back in Peru I run this activity: Re-Designing the Guggenheim. I encouraged my studnets, after showing them pictures taken form the main museum , to redesign or interpretate a new structure based on Guggenheim New York Museum. The resul was very interesting. Actually, for almos all of my studnets, the Guggenheim NY was something completely new...what was that?? Who was the architect???What was he inspired for?

After beginning a search, My students began to draw several sketches trying to catch the essence of this constrcution. First drafts reminded shells, ramps, spirals, cup cakes....and then my 10 graders were ready to strat the construction.
The most interesting was that little by little, despite no one in the class saw the building before, each one of my tallented pupils built a very personal constrcution based on Frank Lloyd Wright building.
Below you will see some pictures of the construction sdesigned by my students.

Who said that inspiration comes from things that we could see??
I discovered  that we can look for inspiration based on research.
The main mistake when doing a sketch is to ask to our pupils for a 2D design...when they must develop an sculpture!! First step: design a 3D sketch, where students could be able to visualize which spaces, shapes and global form will be built. A small scale sketch is more that enough to have a clear idea of how would be the construction.

After having ready the sketch, the next step is to cut the cardboard taking on count the design. The most difficult part for pupils is to keep balance on the sculpture.Thay will learn to manage the distribution of all teh pieces along the project.

One of the main shapes, comon in all my students, was the spiral. The museum has this shape, an ascending spiral ramp, that organizes the whole construction. For my studnets the challenge was to get balance and to keep still this shape.

Another option was to place the spiral on a pyramid, looking for stability. New materials were appearing, new resources and technique discoveries.

Of course, the Guggenheim NY building was always there as inspiration.Showing us how the architect resolved many problems on it's construction, inspired on natural shapes and forms.

Little by little my students were incluiding new material, recycling materials, and integrating this new resources in the project. Some of this plastics, got some shapes that increase the design in the project.At the Guggenheim I could see Frnak Lloyd Wright models, I took the idea from that. As teacher we must see a lot, read a lot, and experiment more!! The frst ones on taking risks are, of course, the teachers!!