Fifth-graders get lesson in abstract art
May 16, 2018
On Wednesday, Crabbe Elementary School fifth-graders learned art doesn’t have
to be about recognizable pictures and images. All you need is some color and imagination.
For the past three years, Ashland Community and Technical College has visited students
at Crabbe Elementary on a monthly basis to teach them about famous artists and their
particular forms of expression.
Wendy Fosterwelsh, ACTC art professor, designed the program to enhance what the
students were learning in their art class at school.
“My main goal when I designed the program was to get more art into the lives
of young students,” she said. “Although Crabbe has a great art teacher, she also only
sees them once a week. So I thought I would help a little by adding an artist of the
month to the fifth grade classrooms.”
This year, for the first time, ACTC hosted an end-of-year smART Blast and Bash
to learn about five abstract artists. The outdoor activity led students through five
stations, one dedicated to each abstract artist, where they learned about the styles
and techniques of Wassily Kandinsky, Jackson Pollock, Helen Frankenthaler, Alma Thomas
and Josef Albers. Then, students made their own art pieces in those styles.
Fosterwelsh led the station on Albers, whose most famous works made up the series
“Homage to the Square,” in which he painted solid colored squares nested within one
another. The students used colored squared construction paper to create their own
works.
ACTC librarian Bettie George Frye lead a station about Kandinsky, reading “The
Noisy Paint Box.”
Crabbe Elementary teachers led stations on Alma Thomas, who painted bright colors
in irregular mosaic patterns, and Helen Frankenthaler, who used a soak-stain technique
to create color-field paintings. Students recreated their own works in these styles
as well.
At the Jackson Pollock station, led by ACTC education professor Warren Howard,
the students worked on one large collaborative piece. Howard rolled kickballs in pans
of paint and let the students push them around a giant canvas on the ground. Each
group of students worked with a different color to add layers that mimicked Pollock’s
drip style.
“We had never done a big end-of-the-year thing before, and I think it worked
out pretty well,” Fosterwelsh said. “We gave out T-shirts to all the students and
a gift bag with art supplies.”