Exploring Mass, Void, and Line
These workshops introduce students from elementary through high school grades to shape and form through the art and architecture of Donald Judd, and Chinati’s collection. Students are encouraged to think about the connections between their own ideas and the spaces they visit through drawing, sewing, collage or casting.
Drawing
Chinati Education emphasizes the importance of actively seeing. Our hands-on projects introduce the student to the importance and uniqueness of their perception and how to interpret these thoughts thorough mark making, graphic illustration and traditional drawing workshops.
Seeing and Making Line
These workshops focus on drawing and examine the infinite quality of line. This work is innately experimental and the use of unconventional or unexpected media is encouraged and explored. What happens when you draw with wire? Can you draw with iron filings? What about drawing with your left hand or using tape to draw? Can a sculpture also be a drawing?
Students are challenged to actively see and think about line as a voice and are urged to consider the space that a line does, and does not, occupy.
Light Drawing
Light is everywhere and we sometimes forget the impact it holds. This simple and fun project allows students to use light as a drawing tool. It also challenges the student to think about how we privilege an idea over an object. Using long digital exposures, participants make large, loose drawings that are free of preciousness, materiality or exactitude.
Perspective Drawing
Children love to draw representationally, and they often want what they draw to look like the object they’re drawing. Perspective drawing projects investigate the concept of perspective by first drawing onto a piece of Plexiglass, then using that drawing to find and define the horizon and vanishing points. From there, the students are able to take their newly learned skills and make plein air perspective drawings as they begin to understand proportion and perspective by describing space two-dimensionally.
Objects in Space
Chinati Educators work to create rich programming that inspires and challenges young artists to consider our collection from multiple perspectives. Ilya Kabakov’s School no. 6 and Roni Horn’s Things that Happen Again are unique works that may initially appear to have little in common. A closer look, however, reveals each to contain aspects of permanence, nostalgia, memory, materiality and a sense of place, all of which inform and impact the viewer in different ways. By using Chinati works such as these as departure points, educators lead students through discussions and investigations about the pieces. Next, the group returns to the museum’s Art Lab to create fantastic three-dimensional works of their own using a range of conventional and unconventional materials, including wood, cardboard, screen, plaster, paint and found media.
Printmaking
Monoprints, Linoleum and Screen Printing
Printmaking is a blast! It can combine drawing, color theory, photography and complex critical thinking skills in a single project. Printmaking is remarkably adaptable and our projects can accommodate all ages and grade levels.
Monoprinting is this genre’s most direct form, in which students add and remove ink on a blank plate. When that plate is sent through the press, the artist is rewarded with an opposite image of the plate. Monoprinting is an inexact process that allows for plenty of surprise in its exploration of technique.
Linoleum prints are also reversal-based. Students gouge lines and marks into a linoleum sheet, then roll ink onto the surface. Paper is pressed to that surface and when it is lifted away, the resulting image is defined by the student’s choices in what did, or did not, get gouged in the linoleum.
Screen printing is typically the most complex of the three processes, as it involves creating a stencil that can be printed repeatedly onto paper or fabric. In this process, students use tape and paper to create images on a transparency. They could also draw onto the transparency, or incorporate photos or computer scans. The image is next burned onto a screen via light sensitive emulsion, making a stencil of sorts. Ink is then placed on the screen and pushed through its pores with a squeegee onto the printing surface. Students love this multi-step technique, which yields amazing, satisfying work whether we’re dealing with very simple images or quite ambitious prints with multiple colors.
