When is an Exhibition Actually an Exhibition?!
Seventh and eighth grade students present eight academic exhibitions over the course of two years as a part of their graduation requirement. The eight domains of the exhibitions consist of visual arts, music, leadership and service, language and literature, history, science, mathematics, and an area of choice.
For past art exhibitions students have created art work in the style of different artists, written and illustrated a picture book, given oral presentations, and written comparative essays. As I sat down to plan the first exhibition of the year, I knew I wanted this year’s art exhibition to actually be an art exhibition, a public display of works of art. This decision challenged all of us - the students to produce their best work for public consumption, and myself to construct an exhibit in such a short time.
I settled on book illustration as our theme. The students’ summer read was the Coretta Scott King winner book, Dark Sons, by Nikki Grimes. Grimes uses free-verse poetry to powerfully tell the story of two boys, living in different times and lands, who both struggle with their faith as they watch their families fall apart. Since teenagerhood is a time of questioning our place in the world and, at Mustard Seed School, we believe in creating unity as we embrace diversity, I thought this book a great place to start.
Students looked for personal connections to the characters and events in the book during reader’s workshop and chose passages from the book to illustrate. They made choices in their use of the principles of design, media, and subject matter, to illustrate the idea and convey the mood of the passage. The principles of design: contrast, emphasis, balance, movement, proportion and scale, unity and variety, are used to effectively communicate a message to the audience.
Over seven weeks students moved through the drafting process, from thumbnail sketches to final designs. Seventh graders illustrated three passages from the book, including one from each narrator’s point of view. Eighth grade illustrated one passage from each narrator and designed a book jacket.
On the final day of the project, students completed an on-demand written assignment. This writing was an opportunity for students to explain their use of the principles of design to illustrate the emotions of the passage, and their reasoning behind their choice of media, eg. charcoal, watercolor paint, collage, etc. Eighth grade also wrote a summary of part of the book to show their understanding of the characters and context. These summaries were so thoughtful that many became part of the exhibition text.
What better place to exhibit the students’ book illustrations than at our local library and local bookstore? Mustard Seed middle school took over the Hoboken Library Annex for one evening for families to view the exhibition. The book jackets created by eighth grade are proudly on display in the windows of Symposia Bookstore on Washington Street. The work will remain in both locations until December.
