The $99 sale at The Soap Factory attracts a mass of egalitarian participants, and I am one of them.

Being someone who firmly believes in the barter system, I favor the exchange of services without the green back. So, it’s apropos that I create an artwork and donate it to The Soap Factory for the sale on September 11th and 12th this year.

Just a word about the works for the sale; they must be created on 5″ x 7″ paper without any signatures. There are many top notch artists in this pool, and this standardization levels the playing field. All the artists who participate in this event are united by their support of The Soap Factory. Last year, when all the works were installed in the gallery, they read like cells on a storyboard to me. What a kick to be part of this community that backs The Soap Factory cover to cover.

There’s a lot of glass in the Walker Art Center building. Opposites attract, right? Heat makes glass and cold makes ice. Why not combine these two materials in one experience?

Family Programs had a great idea, why not celebrate winter by vicariously embracing ice?

The theme for Free First Saturday, February 7, 2009, was showcasing Minnesota Artists and Arts Organizations, and there were interactive activities for families set up throughout the building.

 Well, not everyone….

Rain or shinestart practicing your putting. Zoran Mojsilovis installingPig’s Eye Landfill on the course of Walker on the Green. The large wooden assemblage was trucked in this morning with the assistance of an imposing crane. It’s mostly made of elm branches and trunks that were salvaged from a wood recycling site in town. Zoran says, “The mouse hole lines up with the cup just right. Now onto finishing the green.”

For more information on Walker on the Green: Artist-Designed Mini Golf visit http://blogs.walkerart.org/ecp/2008/05/13/artists-green-makers-mini-golf/

It’s a curiosity cabinet of sorts that displays an array of projects. These are art works that have been made by people who have attended an After Hours party, a school tour, or a workshop.

This project was all about wrapping, Cassidy ran out of time and materials, but she could have worked all afternoon on her assemblage. Notice how her layering included her name tag. Like a cyclone, she explored her tactile sensibility, emphasizing her love of the process.

Yes, anyone can participate in an art lab. Just come with an intention to play with the materials set out for you. You’d be surprised by your ability to invent and build stuff. For those people who love to learn by doing, I suggest you take a look at the Walker’s permanent collection or a special exhibition after you’ve done the art making. You might experience the galleries in a new way.

Next time, you’re at a Walker event, try out the art lab. Look for the Kiki Smith inspired doll parts sculpture, Object with a Cause, or just marvel at the playful creativity of our local talent.

photos by: Gene Pittman

This summer I facilitated 3 art-making workshops with children through Free Arts Minnesota. This is a wonderful nonprofit organization dedicated to bringing the healing powers of artistic expression into the lives of at-risk children and their families. www.freeartsminnesota.org. Free Arts Minnesota partnered with the Walker Art Center at an opportune time to visit the Picasso and American Art exhibition.

Picasso’s drawings, paintings, and sculptures attracted many American artists and were excellent models for our workshops. My goal was to highlight each young artist’s unique perceptions of self and observations of the world around him or her.

The young artists started with a kaleidoscope pointed at a still-life. They named basic shapes and rolled their Cubistic inspired observations into still-life collages.

The second theme was simplified portraiture. We referred to Picasso’s unconventional portraits and the way he reoriented facial features. The young artists painted a face in acrylics and added cut-out features from magazines.

The third project was an assemblage sculpture. Remembering the freedom experienced by changing a face around, students sampled found materials to build an animal or abstract sculpture.

Over the three sessions, every participant deepened his or her creative process, taking more chances along the way.

Interspersed with the art-making lessons was a field trip to the Walker Art Center, where several kids from the Amherst H. Wilder Foundation’s Bush Children’s Center received a tour of the Picasso and American Art exhibition given by Susan Rotilie, the Walker’s Program Manager of School Tours. During the tour, kids carefully looked at several Cubist paintings and sculptures and identified subjects in the abstract works. Taking inspiration from the artworks, the students developed great ideas for stories, wrote them down, and then read them aloud in the gallery.

I’d like to thank the staff of Free Arts Minnesota and the Bush Children’s Center, and all the wonderful volunteers who helped out with the Artist Like Me workshops.

The culminating exhibit, Artist Like Me, included work by students at the Bush Children’s Center and Delta Place. It took placein the Walker Art Center’s Star Tribune Foundation Art Lab on September 7, 2007.

Ilene Krug Mojsilov, teaching artist and Art Lab Coordinator at the Walker Art Center.

The Walker’s exhibition Picasso and American Art is closing in four weeks, so plan a visit, and after seeing the show, you may want to try your own Deep-fried Picasso on a Stick.

Check out the portraits by Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, and Jasper Johns among others and note the way they processed Picasso’s imagery. Many of their painted, drawn, and sculpted faces were treated cubistically, so the viewer sees several planes of the face simultaneously. With this concept in mind, combined with an eye on popular culture, the twirled portrait was born.

Yesterday, August 9, 2007, some dynamic young artists (ages 5 and 6) from Minneapolis Kids made some bold portraits. These students played with the features of a face and worked on four sides to simulate a 360 degree portrait.

If you’d like to do this kitchen lab at your table, here is the recipe.

Materials: Tagboard, oil pastels, colored tape, 1 chop stick, and a pair of scissors

• Draw a wacky profile
• Cut it out
• Trace around it on a second piece of tagboard
• Cut that one out
• Put the 2 profiles together (one on top of the other – both noses on the same side)
• Fold nearly in half and crease
• Make 2 pairs of 1/2 inch cuts into the folded side of both heads
• Separate the heads
• Draw features on all 4 sides (add them anywhere)
• Fill in with any colors
• Line up the faces on the creases (noses point in opposite directions)
• Insert stick into the 2 slots leaving enough stick at the bottom to hold onto
• Secure the faces at the bottom and top of the stick with colored tape

Congratulations you’ve made a Deep-fried Picasso on a Stick!

All photos: Ilene K. Mojsilov

Photo: Ilene K Mojsilov

On Wednesday March 28^th, I had a small group of students from City Inc, an alternative Minneapolis

High School, in the Art Lab. They came to see the exhibition Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love. High school teachers may ask how do we engage our students who are viewing this work for the first time?The show brings up a host of questions about racial stereotypes today. For a profound conversation about Kara Walker, I suggest that teachers consider doing this art activity Skin Deep before their tour of the exhibition. This has proven to be a good way for students to consider their own assumptions about color and race.

Skin Deep is a painting activity that explores color as a metaphor for racial stereotypes and classifications. I demonstrate how to mix a universal brown using the primary colors. Next, I add black and/or white to make a myriad of skin tones. Students then mix their own skin tones and collect samples of other people’s skin tones, paint them on canvas, and add a phrase that responds to their notions of black and white.

Photo: Ilene K Mojsilov

When the students from City Inc came to the Art Lab, we spent an absorbing hour previewing a few works from the show. Kara Walker has a series titled Do You Like Crème in Your Coffee and Chocolate in Your Milk? We looked at one of her watercolors that features a nude woman outlined in green with brown, black, ochre, and peach circles covering the upper torso and head of the figure. These samples refer to skin tones, and remind me of my own experience testing make-up.

Since the City Inc group had only women, we talked about this experience at the make-up counter. The way these products on the market try so hard to approximate our skin tones, and we realized how subtle our skin tones really are and how many variations exist. This theme of human variation is also current in the Science Museum of Minnesota’s Race: Are We So Different? http://www.smm.org/race/. By the way, the students from City Inc had viewed this exhibition before coming to the Walker Art Center. It was opportune to pair these two field trips.

Photo: Ilene K Mojsilov

If you get to the Science Museum for this show, don’t miss the label that introduces the artwork of Byron Kim. He did a project called Synecdoche that is composed of 400 smaller panels that match an actual person’s skin. Although I hadn’t heard of his project before, I think that it really gets at the important questions of racial politics and encourages a frank dialogue about stereotypes, classifications, and civil rights.

So, if you can take in both exhibitions, I encourage you to do so, and keep the activity Skin Deep in mind for your group here at the Walker Art Center.

For one of the projects at Free First Saturday in January 2007, we combined the theme of recycling with the artwork of Eva Hesse. The Walker is currently showing Eva Hesse Drawing until February 19, 2007. Here’s what we did.

Each person got a piece of screen cut into a 4” by 10” strip, a plastic top from a yogurt or deli container, and a page or two of the phone book. These materials reflect my mania for recycling, and I bet we gave out 400 plastic lids that day, which ended my 3 year collection. Those phone books are in your household too, so unclog the kitchen drawers.

Now that you have an idea about the materials, let’s look for some inspiration from the artist Eva Hesse. I was interested in 2 of her ink wash and line drawings of cylinders that are in the exhibition. They are easy to recognize even if their labels say No Title 1967. What I like about them is Hesse’s distinctive rendering of each cylinder, as if each one had its own body language. Both of these drawings were studies for a work called Repetition Nineteen I.

Eva Hesse experimented with all kinds of materials latex, fiberglass, and resins, but she started with papier-mché. This project blends papier-mché techniques with acrylic matt medium. The acrylic medium was chosen for it strength and flexibility. I preferred the matt medium because it’s more pliable. Please note that you can buy the acrylic matt medium at any art supply store. By the way, the acrylic medium could be glossy instead of matt; that’s for you to decide.

Ok if you’d like to have the recipe, here’s what I recommend.

• Lay the screen flat
• Tear up the phone book pages into small pieces (approximately 2” x 2” and they can be irregular)
• Brush matt medium on the pieces of paper
• Collage the pieces on the screen
• Fill the entire screen with paper
• Repeat this technique using the paper on the top of the plastic lid
• Roll the screen into a cylinder
• Seal it with more paper like a band aid
• Set on plastic lid
• Apply smaller strips like a band aid to attach to the lid
• Brush the cylinder and lid with matt medium
• Add words found in the phone book
• Touch up with yellow or tan paint
• Set out to dry
• (It takes about an hour to dry!)

Ilene K. Mojsilov, Art Lab Coordinator

If you come to the Walker Art Center for a tour and an art lab or drop in for an exhibition opening, you’ll see me in the Star Tribune Foundation Art Lab; I concoct these activities for you. So, tell me what you think.