Fleisher: Portraits and Identity

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Community Partnerships > Public School Residencies >

Portraits and Identity

7th Grade literacy classes

Teacher Partners: Dr. Barbara J. Marshall, teacher
Teaching Artist: Pauline Houston-McCall

The students were involved in an intensive mixed media collaboration in which they are challenged to make connections between visual arts and creative language arts. The students created a montage assemblage meditation box that encompasses many objects, cloths, photographs, written word, and collage words that connects them to their identity, community and their culture.

The classes went to see Body Maps at the Painted Bride Art Center, a traveling exhibition of life-size figurative outlined body paintings and stories created by South African women who are infected with the HIV virus. The culminating project for each McCall’s student was the creation of a life-size self-portrait painting. The portraits include poems, stories and journal entries that address the question "WHO AM I?"

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