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Spring 2011 News
Holiday Elementary Montessori School Programming
Holiday Elementary Montessori School is 97% African American and is located in the heart of the traditional African-American Community in Kansas City. Chameleon artist/educator and professor at the Kansas City Art Institute, Asma Kasmi, led a group of KCAI community arts and service learning students and artists to use the arts to teach science to 6th graders at the school.
The project was divided into three classes, with 30 children in each. We used theatre games and creative movement to studying the properties of matter, gas/solid/liquid, solubility, mixture, solution, and volume. Visual arts and sculpture were used to teach the students about heat, chemical, solar, thermal, and mechanical energy. The students made robots with light-up eyes to teach about electricity and circuits.
The outcome of the project was multiple layered, the student developed the precursors of learning, self-esteem, confidence, and the will to participate fully in the class. The students learned and retained the subject matter through their participation in physical and creative activity. The students also developed creative thinking and artistic skills. Chameleon will return to the school in May to provide 6 weeks of artistic and creative workshops for the students.
America Now and Here
Chameleon has been invited to brainstorm and provide community arts programming for America Now and Here, a national dialogue on the arts and society initiated by artist Eric Fischl and arts administrator Dorothy Dunn Director of Education for the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. Now and Here asks what can art do to help us create a better vision of our society and provide a new process for critical dialogue by passing the extremes of political discussion. Eric Fischl is joined by Chuck Close, Susan Rothenberg, Ed Rushka, Alex Katz, and other amazing internationally known artists in producing an exhibition concerning America. Here and Now, which will travel across the country over the next several years, involves local artists, filmmakers, poets, and other creatives in the exhibition.
Community arts programming will be facilitated in conjunction with America Now and Here and is a major component of creating the national dialogue through the arts. The exhibition and programming will take place at the Leedy-Voulkos Art Center, opening May 6th, and community arts programming will run May 14, 21,and 28.
Chameleon will be providing three arts actions for the exhibition in Kansas City:
- The American Family: A Community Portrait
An opportunity to use photography to discuss the make-up of the new American Family and family values. - America Drawing/Collage Workshop
What is your vision of America? What does the future hold? We are asking people from all walks of life, from children to their grandparents, to join us for a visual arts collage-making workshop and discussion on what makes us America and Americans. - Urban Dance: An American Revelation (tentative and underconstruction)
Chameleon artists and performers will conduct dance and creative movement workshops based on themes of freedom, beauty, nature, culture, and oppression.
Financial assistance for this project provided by the Missouri Arts Council, a state agency.
RA2K: Random Acts of Kindness
A group of students at the Kansas City Art Institute have created RA2K: Random Acts of Art Kindness, an artists collective that brings the arts to the streets of Kansas City to foster tolerance, joy, and beauty.
The 31st and Troost Initiative provides acts of arts kindness to people waiting for buses, living, working, and shopping along 31st and Troost Avenue. RA2K artists have set up a weekly street photography studio Thursdays between 12:30 and 2:00 to take portraits of commuters while providing them with various items of enjoyment (past items have included: apples, bottled water, coffee, toys, art bags, etc). Over the course of the next few weeks RA2K will be facilitating (but not limited to) the following actions on Thursdays from 12:30-2:00: drive-by compliments, distribution of free coffee/drinks, poetry readings, improvised musical performances, and other activities yet to be determined. We will also be handing out art travel lunch bags with poems, children’s toys, kazoos, drawing paper, crayons, and healthy snacks.
On April 7th RA2K will install the portraits and other artworks produced during the course of our community outreach in the windows of Best Deal Office and Appliance store on the east side of Troost Avenue. The street studio will be open to the public until May 13th 2011.
KC Urban Youth Center: Chameleon’s New Programming Partner
Chameleon begins weekly programming with KC Urban Youth’s 28th and Troost Avenue facility beginning Tuesday, March 22. The mission of the Kansas City Urban Youth Center is to offer Christian hope, community, and wholeness to urban youth. They empower youth with resources to develop faith, character, knowledge, and skills.
Chameleon will begin working with 20 students, providing creative arts activities that reinforce the precursors of learning and support academic skills. We hope to grow the partnership to reach 70 children in their three urban centers and add value to their upcoming summer program. Brennan Ponder and Krystal Kuhn, Chameleon interns and students at the Kansas City Art Institute, will lead the arts programming under the supervision of Professor Hugh Merrill. Funding from the Muriel Mcbrien Kauffman, Francis Families, and R.A Long Foundations supports the program.
Phoenix Families Housing
Chameleon artists and students from KCAI are making masks for Phoenix Family Housing. PFH provides services in 32 low-income housing communities, serving more than 5,600 residents throughout 13 cities in Missouri and Kansas. On April 21, 2011 PFH will be having their 8th annual donor event, the Masquer8, and they have asked Chameleon to make the masks. Chameleon has provided arts programming to several Phoenix Families housing communities over the past 4 years and we wish them the best of luck for a successful benefit.
New Book Featuring Chameleon & Hugh Merrill’s Community Arts Projects
Chameleon is proud to announce the release of Divergent Consistencies, a book charting the studio and community artwork of Hugh Merrill, 1968-2011 (edited by Adelia Ganson, design by Amanda Rehagen). Merrill’s 40 year career of art-making was formed by a range of experiences, from his early years as a printmaker through his recent community work with disadvantaged children in Kansas City.
Merrill’s studio art includes a wide scope of emphasis, from the conceptual deconstruction of the modernist grid to the physical destruction of the etching plate. He is perhaps best known for his sequential etching prints that explore abstraction of landscape and reference human emotion. An established commitment to the excavation and reversal of traditional form, place and value extend to his community work as well.
The artist’s work with the general public is firmly rooted in the civil rights movement of the American South in the 1960’s, where personal experience led him to desire social justice for marginalized populations. Currently, Merrill is designing arts programming for Eric Fischl’s national community arts project America Now and Here, focusing on the idea of America in 2011. This project was designed to subvert extreme political dialogue and to help the national population connect with each other through the arts.
A sense of social justice and a unique vision of Americana extend far beyond Merrill’s home in Kansas City, Missouri. He will visit Guanlan Printmaking Base in Shenzhen, China in the fall of 2012, where his Capital series of digital mixed media prints are now on view. These works reflect an examination of changing political viewpoints in the United States.
A selected exhibition of his Birds of America series, which reinterprets eight John James Audubon prints, can been seen through April 30, 2011 at the Leedy-Voulkos Art Center in Kansas City, Missouri. Later this year Merrill will show his Power and Consequence pieces at the LVAC. Informed by the Chinese Cultural Revolution, this exhibit opens June 3 and continues through July 31.
You can order a copy of the book direct from Lulu, and copies will soon be available on Amazon.