Dia de Los Muertos Field Trip

We went on a tour of the annual Day of the Dead Exhibit at the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago. After touring an excellent display of installations, ofrendas, sculptures and prints, we had a fortunate opportunity to work with the father & son Paredes artists from Puebla, Mexico, who create miniature scenes with calacas. Students were given boxes, clay, wire, & other media to construct a skeleton scene of their own in the art lab.

Daniel & Miguel Paredes

Students getting ready to make art

A variety of craft artists were offering demonstrations in the main hall. 

 Juana Gomez Martinez Ceramic Vessels & Animals

Jacobo Angeles Ojeda Wood Carvings

No trip to Pilsen would be complete without touring the neighborhood murals, then stopping by an authentic Mexican restaurant, bakery, and candy shop.  

Stenciled Cups

When the cups were leather hard, students cut out paper stencil designs from paper with utility knives, then dampened them with sponges to stick to the work. Once the edges adhered, underglaze was applied to create positive and negative images.

Ravenswood Artwalk Demonstrations & Exhibit

Students from Lane Tech demonstrated their talent at the Ravenswood ArtWalk.

Clay & Arts Festival - Friday, May 17th

Save the date for this year's Clay & Arts Festival! It's sure to be a wild evening with dozens of ways to get your hands dirty making art, from ceramics to tie-dye and more.  Also enjoy hilarious clay competitions, great music from violin to punk, deans and teachers in a clay slip dunk tank, an art equipment raffle, student exhibits, food, and more! Fun for all ages, young children to seniors; open to the public.

To cap off the night at 8 pm, Ghanaian artist Nani Agbeli will lead a drumming & dance performance that is not to be missed! We will drum and march our way from the festival into the Lane auditorium for an interactive performance - tickets only $5!

More Information about the Events at the Clay & Arts Festival:

ART ACTIVITIES

Try your hand at screen printed t-shirts, spray paint art and stenciling, tie-dye, the potters wheel, photo booths, air brush tattoos, face painting, mosaics, beaded earrings, doodling, sculpture, painting, printmaking, henna painting, hair dye, make a mug, clay faces, pop-up books, sidewalk chalk & kids’ art booths! 

RAFFLE

Great art prizes will be raffled off to lucky winners at the end of the night.

CLAY OLYMPICS

Watch students compete in crazy mud competitions! Tallest cylinder, left/right-handed duo, blind throwing, cylinder stacks, portrait look-a-likes, foot throwing, teapot teams, mud arm wrestling, and giant coil pots! Competitions every half hour with gold, silver, and bronze medals.

SLIP DUNK TANK

Sink administrators, teachers, and students in a clay slip pit! Featured guest Mr. Wendorf!

ENTERTAINMENT

An awesome array of Lane Tech musicians and performers!

FOOD

Kiln-baked cookies & mud pies, drinks, and pizza

ART SALE

Professional, teacher, and student work for sale

EXHIBIT

View the amazing talent of Lane Tech art students, including a senior show of art majors and advanced placement students.

Wheel-Thrown Drums!

Today we began an exciting collaboration with visiting artist Heather McQueen, a local ceramicist and drummer who stopped in to teach us the basics of constructing a traditional Middle-Eastern doumbek drum on the wheel. Over the next month or so, we will be creating drums on the potters' wheel in our throwing class, collaborating with Mr. Flygt's percussion class to learn drumming, and we will finish the collaboration by hosting visiting drummer and artist from Ghana - Nani Agbeli. Join us for the Clay & Arts Festival on May 17th to hear students play their drums along with Nani!

It's been a dream of mine for about a decade to make drums on the wheel, so this year it was exciting to finally have everything come together. I was walking around Andy's music shop on Belmont one day this past fall, and came upon some ceramic drums in the front space, by none other than Heather McQueen. Andy's led me to Heather. Shortly after I contacted her, I turned on the radio one day and heard her speaking about drumming in Morrocco on Worldview with Jerome McDonnell. That all happened around the same time I found out my colleague, Mr. Flygt, had also traveled to Ghana several times. Our inspiration from Ghanaian music and art led us to make plans for a wheel-percussion collaboration, beginning with Heather's introduction to making drums from clay, and ending with Nani putting together a performance with our students in May.

Here are some pictures from Heather McQueen's inspiring presentation to our ceramics and percussion classes:

 

Playing her handmade drum

 

Throwing a small drum (upside down) on the wheel

 

Making a larger drum with two parts, like a goblet

 

  Shaping a comfortable curve on the corner of the drum head

 

Mr. Flygt and Heather playing a rhythm

Students trying out the drum

Poem Jugs

While looking at the history of Edgefield pottery, one potter stands out from the rest: Dave the Potter. Dave was unusual because he wrote couplets on his vases and pots. At the time, slaves were forbidden to be literate, so writing poems was risky activity. Many scholars have suggested that this should be considered an act of sedition toward the cause of civil rights. Dave's pottery now sells for over $40,000 a piece! Here are some of his pots:

One of Dave's most famous couplets:

"I wonder where is all my relations

Friendship to all - and every nation."

 There is a wonderful new children's book about Dave called "Dave the Potter: Artist, Poet, Slave" by Laban Carrick Hill & Bryan Collier:

My students created some thoughtful couplets of their own, which they inscribed into their pottery:

Face Jugs

We recently studied some famous pottery history from slaves in the Antebellum South.  Among some of the most curious traditions were face jugs made in the Edgefield Pottery Studios in South Carolina. Edgefield employed slaves in their pottery industries, where the tradition of face jugs, aka grotesque jugs, or ugly jugs. There are quite a few theories about these distorted face bottles. One is that slaves, who were forbidden to have tombstones, used these as graves, as was done in Africa to mark a burial site. Another theory is that the faces were meant to scare children away from the contents, such as alcohol. 

These are some Edgefield pots created by slaves that survived the past century and a half or so:

My students in wheel throwing created some unique face jugs:

Jessica R

 

 Sara C

Sculptural Rings

Garrett A

Steph M

Jezzah A

Nicole H

Amanda A

Sara G

 Bianca R

India A

Alicia W

Agnes S

Special thanks to Lane alum Alex Agudo for sharing his time, knowledge, and enthusiasm for metalsmithing and jewelry making.