The mission of Boston Children’s Museum’s visiting artist program is to bring in local artists to share their art and process with our visitors each month. These visiting artists transform their passion for their own art form and motivate our museum visitors to push their own aesthetic experience. They also provide an authentic model for the power of artistic thinking, creating, perceiving, and reflecting.
The Arizona Commission on the Arts writes the following about the importance of teaching artists: “Artists are exemplary problem-solvers and life-long learners, constantly striving to improve, deepen and refine their artistic expression. They work specifically with the skills of creativity: discovery, wonder, and recombining the stuff of the world into new knowledge. If human beings have managed to survive through the development of skills that allow us to collaborate: language pictures, gestures, movement, it follows that the art originate deep in our intelligence, in our ability to survive by means of creating and understanding metaphor. Education in the arts is an irreplaceable medium for developing this intelligence. Successful teaching artists help provide a tangible link between the creative process and all kinds of learning, and they make manifest in classroom and community settings the human drive to survive by making meaning of the world.”
In January 2013 we have two very different artist workshops planned back to back. Watercolor artist Imadiel Ariel is coming to lead – It feels like play, it’s art! on Sunday, January 20th from 11-2pm. The focus of the workshop is experimenting with water and pigments, sand, salt, and lemon juice. Visitors will discover the many amazing properties of watercolor as the water and pigment cover the paper. They will discover the many ways of creating shapes with watery paint, discover how intense or soft the color can be and how they blend together, or not. And visitors will discover the beauty and subtlety of watercolor while creating imaginary paintings or real stories.
Imadiel Ariel is a painter and photographer. She is known for her enthusiastic and multi-faceted approach to teaching and her artistic expertise in the fields of color, painting techniques, design, textiles, and photography and world art history. Imadiel has participated in many juried and solo shows in New England. For five years Imadiel taught in the museum galleries at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She is currently developing written materials about technical aspects of watercolor painting for her students and for later publication. Imadiel who grew up in Paris, France and later in Israel holds a BFA from the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem, and a MA from Tufts University in Medford, MA. Imadiel who also instructs groups and private classes in her Natick studio has been a painting teacher for over ten years.
On Sunday, January 27th from 11-4pm Sandrine Schaefer will be leading – Adventures in Being in Space. In this workshop, visitors are invited to learn about different ways that contemporary artists are using their bodies in a variety of spaces to communicate their ideas. Visitors will use their own bodies to explore the various spaces in the Children’s Museum. Participants should come prepared to move and to use their imagination!
Sandrine Schaefer is a Boston-based Artist, Writer, and Curator. She is a co-founder of The Present Tense, an art initiative that produces and archives live art events and exchanges in transient spaces. She has been actively showing her own work and the work of others internationally since 2003.
Sandrine’s ephemeral artwork explores cycles of the invisible becoming visible. Sandrine is inspired by site sensitivity, the relationship between accumulative action and endurance, manipulating duration to challenge the parameters of real time, and the promise of collaborative imagination. Her work playfully addresses the shared human experience of fitting in, both corporally and conceptually.
The Power of Play 