What’s an artist residency? How do you select an artist for a residency? How do you decide what the artist will do once he or she is there?
Plan to use at least two 45-minute sessions to complete this workshop. Finishing coloring or drawing can be assigned as homework.

Objective: Students will learn how art museums bring together artists and the community while creating their own fantasy residency plans for an invitee of their choice.

Grades K–4

Brainstorm specific places an artist should know about before he or she visits the students’ community. Ask each student, What would you like to show the artist about:

1. Yourself? (Your room? Your house? Your family?)

2. Your school (Specific places? Classes? Teachers? The gym? The cafeteria? Outdoor spaces?)

3. Your Western New York community (Favorite destinations? Restaurants? Sports stadiums? Museums? Train tracks?)

After you have generated a list, collect images of these places. Students can draw places familiar to them (their room, for example), take photos, or collect images online.

Each student can choose an artist (younger students could instead choose a character from a story they are reading) to invite for a residency. Students can explain their choices. Find or create images of each character chosen or real person.

Making a Fantasy Residency Box!
Use this template for your students.
Fantasy Residency template inside of box
Fantasy Residency template outside of box

Use these instructions.
Fantasy Residency instructions outside of box
Fantasy Residency instructions inside of box

For your students, print the inside of box template on one side of paper and the outside of box template on the reverse.

It’s a good idea to make a box of your own as an exemplar, not only to help students, but also to make sure you understand how the box is made. Fill in the areas indicated in the instructions with images the students have cut out or drawn: (click for examples)

Note that copy machines can reduce student drawings of places so they are available to other students!

After the images are in place, cut on the dotted lines. Glue tabs so that the Xs do not show.

After the box is done, place each artist in the box! Photos of artists can be glued so they stand in the center of the box, or wherever there is room.

Each student can present his or her residency, explaining whom they chose and what they would show that person in the community.

Grades 5–8
Choose an historical figure or an artist, and have students research that person’s life. Students can still construct a Fantasy Residency Box, but would choose what to show the figure in their community based on what they think would be of interest based on knowledge of that person’s life and accomplishments. Presentations would be altered to explain who their choice is, why they chose that individual, what they would show the individual in their homes, communities, and the region, and why they think that person would be interested in our community, supporting their choices with knowledge of the figure’s life and achievements.

In a residency, after the artist has been to the community and learned about the issues that face it, the next step is for the artist to decide what he or she will do. Ask students which problems the artist could help solve or help educate people about. For example, an artist could design a new cafeteria if the current one is too small, or design a project to collect empty plastic water bottles and turn them into sculptures to decorate a public building.

Grades 9–12 Research artist residencies at museums throughout the world. Report on the projects and the outcomes.
 
AND/OR

Ask students to act as an artist and propose a residency project for a place of their choice (or assign them a location, topic, or population). What would their research need to cover? How would they include the community? What information would they collect, and what form would their final work take? It could be any art form—a performance, a group of paintings or sculptures, etc.

Plan to use at least two 45-minute class sessions to complete this workshop.

Objectives: Students will learn to create creative blueprints or maps on their own.
Students will learn about Ingrid Calame’s process.

Ingrid Calame uses the floor plans of buildings to create a basis for her work. Learn about her process and create the basis for your own artwork using floor plans as source material.

A PowerPoint slideshow of Calame’s work in Buffalo and around the country is titled Ingrid Calame:Step on a Crack . . . . This presentation provides details about the Buffalo project, other projects Calame has executed, and information about her studio methods. This can de done before, during, or after your workshops.

A Creative Blueprint or Bird’s-Eye Map
If students are to work alone for the final project, use an 8 1/2 x 11 sheet of paper. If they are to work in groups, have each group work on a six-foot section of butcher paper, each drawing his or her own floor plan.
(Hint: If time is a factor for your class, you could skip this workshop and use blueprints donated by a local architectural firm—many firms are willing to provide old ones.)

Grades K–4
Help students to draw bird’s-eye views of their rooms.
What is in there, and where? How do things look from the top? Beds? Dressers? Lamps? Bring in some common everyday objects and have the children look down on them to draw them from above. Ask them to imagine the shapes of things they would see from above—beds, dressers, chairs, etc.

Grades 5–8
Have students work in a group to make a (bird’s-eye) floor plan of a place in their school—each group can be assigned a different location. You can use the cafeteria, the gym, a stairwell—whatever location seems to interest the groups.

Grades 9–12
Select an actual area and have students measure it and make a footprint of the space on a 1:1 scale. If the space is very large, you could have them reduce the scale to 1:2 or 1:4 or 1:8. (Divide all measurements by the second number to create a scaled drawing.) It could be at your school or another space that interests them: a church, a government building, the post office, or a playground, for instance.

However you have obtained the floor plans, place the finished ones under sheets of Mylar and trace the drawings using Sharpies—black ones are nice, but other dark colors work as well. Certain kinds of Mylar, both in 8 1/2 x 11 sheets and in rolls, works wonderfully with Sharpies and tempera paint. We used Clear Grafix Dura-Lar, thickness .004. (It costs around twenty dollars for a fifty-foot roll.)

You’ll find these drawings are beautiful in their own right, but you can continue to the second stage of the process in Air Calame 103. You will need them when it is time to trace your dried stains.

Plan to use at least three 45-minute class sessions to complete this workshop.

Objectives:
Students will learn what kinds of visual evidence human activity leaves in the form of stains, marks on the ground, etc.
Students will learn more about Ingrid Calame’s artmaking process.
Students will learn how to design color schemes for painting.
Students will learn another way of thinking about the terms abstract and realistic.

Ingrid Calame traces stains, spills, paint marks, and other evidence of human presence to create energetic paintings that look entirely abstract.

Find your own marks and create a drawing or painting using Calame’s process.

All Grades

There are many ways to make stains! Be creative! Students can make their own stains on large pieces of butcher paper with any of the following:

Ketchup, mustard, and grape juice
Hint: Use squeeze bottles of ketchup and mustard.

Paint drips
Hint: Make a painting using the handle end of the brush dipped in paint.

Muddy footprints or bicycle wheels in paint or mud (This may be best done outdoors—but one class we worked with set the paper up and made muddy footprints in the school hallway outside the art class!
Hint 1: Buy a big bag of potting soil and mix it with water in small batches in a large tub to make the mud.
Hint 2: If you want to keep shoes on while making muddy footprints, put plastic bags over shoes and affix with rubber bands.
Hint 3: Time the students and let them walk in groups. It can get a little frenzied and messy with younger students if you don’t have rules!

Alternately, find a place with stains or marks—even tire marks, or sidewalk stains—or the markings for street or asphalt repair. Spend a day scouting your school and grounds for marks and stains on the ground or floor. You could trace them in place or photograph them to use in class.

Do a demonstration on a sample floor plan or blueprint drawing already on Mylar, tracing only the contour lines of the stains. It’s okay for lines to overlap. What kinds of decisions do you have to make about how you will trace each stain?

For individual works: Using the drawing on the clear Mylar 8 1/2 x 11 sheet that you made in Workshop 102, trace an interesting part of the dried, completed stain with a Sharpie. It’s okay to let lines overlap.
For group work: Place each drawing of a floor plan from group work in Workshop 102 on top of traced stains. It’s okay to let lines overlap. If parts of the stains don’t get traced because the paper is too wide, the end product still works out fine. However, to avoid this you could make sure to start with paper that is the same width as your Mylar!

Painting the work:
Once all the tracing is done, select three or four colors that work together for each individual work. Here you can teach traditional ways of choosing colors that work together, or you can ask students to make notes about the colors in the environment of either the architectural space they chose, or the environment in which they found their stains.
Hint: Tempera paints works fine with the Dura-Lar product we used! To make it even more permanent, add a little white school glue to each color.

Once the color scheme is selected, each student can use one color. They can work separately or in groups, intuitively painting the insides and outsides of the shapes created by the Sharpie lines. Choosing which shapes to paint each color can be done in many ways, and almost no matter what you do, the results will be wonderful. Look at Calame’s paintings in the PowerPoint Presentation for ideas.

If you have time to let the paint dry and then start again in the next class, it will be easier to finish the painting without smears. It isn’t necessary to paint all areas of the painting. Back up and take a look every now and then to decide when a work is done. (And don’t worry—for very young students, the work even looks good if students paint outside the lines—especially when you turn over the Mylar and look at it from the “wrong” side!)

Discussion for Grades 5–12
Are Calame’s finished works really abstract, or are they exact representations of things found in the real world?

Variations
Calame layers lots of stain tracings to come up with many varied drawings and paintings. Experiment with layering all of your Mylar drawings and creating new works from the layers.

Older students can do many individual works on 8 1/2 x 11 sheets and then put them in a binder. Experiment with placing opaque paper or photos of the students working between pages. As you page through the book, watch the designs layer upon each other. When you get to an opaque page, another work begins to form!

Students can make a class book in the same way.

You can also display the group works and afterwards cut them into pieces to make a book for each child or for the class.

CONGRATULATIONS!
You have gone through Ingrid Calame’s process and have an AIR Calame degree! Print a certificate for each student if you like!

What did you think about while you were painting your work? What did you hear, or smell? Calame often titles her work based on what she thought about while she painted, not on what stains or places she used. For example, she noticed the sounds that were made by her pencils and paint when she traced some of her stains and made them into words that became the titles for her paintings:

“Zap-GLUNK,” “FWEP,” “Lup Bup shir - POW, ” “Bb-AAghch!,” “ffwsptffwsptffwspt”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Based on what you thought about while you were painting, title your work.

How did you decide when a painting was done?

Do you notice marks on the ground more than you did before you made this work?

Now come see the exhibition!

Schedule a tour.