Guggenheim

PS 8, Brooklyn
3rd grade
Teaching Artist: Jenny Bevill

“Why does change happen, and what do we want to change?” This question was the connecting thread for a series of explorations in clay, paint, and collaborative works in PS 8’s third-grade classes. Tied to their studies of Native American cultures and rooted in an effort to build social skills and encourage risk-taking, students were asked to think about their own values and personalities before coming together to brainstorm big ideas for the transformations they wanted to see in the world. Each student chose a central concept of change and spent several sessions building a mixed-media work to illustrate this idea. As students added collage and paint to their original drawings, each stage in the process was documented so that students could consider how their work was changing over time.

PS 8, Brooklyn
4th grade
Teaching Artist: Jenny Bevill

The fourth graders at PS 8 spent the year thinking about “How are we connected or divided?” Students thought about this question in their social studies curriculum and in their relationships with others. As a result of these investigations, students identified characteristics of their own personalities and explored them. Inspired by Shaun Tan’s graphic story The Arrival, students used printmaking, clay, and drawing to allegorically depict their characteristics as creatures. After developing their individual creatures, students worked collaboratively to connect and merge their ideas into larger installations for the school stairwells.

PS 9, Brooklyn
3rd grade
Teaching Artist: James Reynolds

Thousands of years ago the Great Wall of China was built to protect the Chinese kingdom from its neighbors and preserve its unique identity. Today, third graders at PS 9 are exploring what is behind their wall? What makes each student unique? Through deep analysis of their individual tastes, behavior, appearance, and personality traits, students developed ways to represent their complex identities visually. Ultimately, each student created a multi-layered photograph depicting varied aspects of themselves realistically, abstractly, and symbolically.

PS 9, Brooklyn
4th grade
Teaching Artist: Emily Gibson

Connected to the social studies and English language arts curricula, fourth graders at PS 9 explored characters in history, literature, and art. Students discovered how artists like Joan Miró (1893–1983) and Trenton Doyle Hancock (b. 1974) represented internal character traits with line, shape, and color. Students then created superheroes, revealing information about their characters through visual elements, body language, and facial expression. For the final project, students worked in groups to create mixed-media movie posters representing a scene of personal significance in their lives

PS 28, Manhattan
2nd grade
Teaching Artist: Ellie Irons

Relating to the 2nd grade social studies curriculum, students at PS 28 spent the year analyzing the people and places that make up a community. Students investigated the qualities of these community members and their contributions to society. For their final project students used watercolor, pen, and crayon to explore the question, “What kind of community member will you be?” Surrounding each watercolor is a quilt-like border inspired by Faith Ringgold’s work Tar Beach. Students created their own patterns and traded them with their classmates to make a colorful collaborative border.

PS 42, Manhattan
5th grade
Teaching Artist: Jen Cecere

Throughout the school year, fifth graders at PS 42 experimented with a variety of materials and techniques for creating portraits, ranging from watercolor paintings to paper silhouettes. Focusing on the social studies and English language arts curricula, students worked in groups of four to research a central figure in history and develop multiple interpretations of this person. Inspired by the exhibition Maurizio Cattelan: All, which hung in the center of the Guggenheim’s rotunda, students created mobiles using different art techniques to represent their historical figure.

PS 48, Staten Island
3rd grade
Teaching Artist: Ardina Greco

“When options are given how many outcomes are possible?” was the essential question for third graders at PS 48. Individual and collaborative projects were created out of exercises with varying sets of options and constraints that pushed students to explore math concepts such as scale, pattern, measurement, and additive and subtractive processes. After testing the limits of materials, students created models, blueprints, installation drawings, and written proposals for site specific artworks. Students voted and chose three designs to construct from wood, plastic, wire, and found materials. All classes collaborated on sawing, hammering, and gluing together sculptures that were installed at their school garden and here at the Guggenheim Museum.

PS 48, Staten Island
4th grade
Teaching Artist: Mark Dzula

“How do we make the strange familiar? How do we make the familiar strange?” While learning about exploration and colonization in social studies, fourth graders at PS 48 looked at how artists deal with strangeness through repurposing, juxtaposing, and appropriating images. In groups, students explored the potential of everyday objects and printed with these to create compositions based on color, shape, and aesthetic choices. Each week, students exchanged and made adjustments to their classmates’ pieces, gradually cropping and building up the surfaces with collage. The result was a collection of artworks in which ownership of each artwork belonged to the entire class. Students also created audio compositions inspired by everyday objects, traces of which can be seen in the first layer of the creations.

PS 58, Brooklyn
3rd grade
Teaching Artist: Kristin Ann Melkin

From ancient temples to the modern architecture of the Guggenheim, third graders at PS 58 examined the relationship between form and function and pondered the question, “What can you tell about people by the things they make?” Students drew from their math and social studies curricula as they looked at tessellations, visionary designs for their school community, and explorations in casting with plaster. For the second half of the residency, students dove into a collaborative process of casting from found plastic containers, working in teams to use their plaster casts as building blocks for reliefs of architectural designs.

PS 86, Bronx
4th grade
Teaching Artist: Mark Dzula

Students at PS 86 explored the question, “How does what we need affect where we live?” Throughout the residency students looked closely at physical spaces—landmark buildings as well as buildings in their neighborhood. They discussed why these particular buildings might have been constructed. These watercolor paintings show where students would envision themselves in New York City. Following this painting project, students created large scale three-dimensional collaborative sculptures of an imagined building in the city.

PS 86, Bronx
6th grade
Teaching Artist: Jeff Hopkins

Graduating sixth graders at PS 86 explored what it means to leave a mark and have a lasting influence on others. In social studies, students discussed how ancient civilizations and modern day leaders impact society. Through printmaking, drawing, painting, and collage, students created a portfolio of works that examine their past, present, and future lives. They used portraiture, mapping, and text/image collages as a means to communicate their ideas. As a culmination, each student created an accordion-style book that serves as a portfolio of work and a record of his or her mark on the world.

PS 88, Queens
3rd grade
Teaching Artist: Antonia Perez

In connection with the English language arts curriculum, third graders at PS 88 considered the question “What is character?” As students investigated the character traits of figures in famous works of art and their own lives, they expanded their vocabulary and descriptive language. Students explored the concept of character traits visually through drawing portraits, making Styrofoam prints, creating clay masks, and ultimately creating a full figure clay sculpture. Each clay figurine represents the internal character traits of a significant person in each student’s life.

PS 88, Queens
5th grade
Teaching Artist: Susan Mayr

“What is my relationship to nature?” Growing up in New York City, this question is often overlooked, but not for the fifth-grade students at PS 88. Students began by engaging in close observation of their natural environment. During neighborhood walks outside they would sketch directly from observation, looking closely at trees, leaves, birds, and bark. As the year continued, students experimented with new materials including charcoal, aqua pastels, and acrylic paint. Using source material from books and magazines to guide their studies, students discovered their own personal connections to the natural world. One class at PS 88 also corresponded with students from the Learning Through Art program of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Spain.

PS 144, Queens
3rd grade
Teaching Artist: Megan Lucas, Molly O'Brien

Inspired by Pop art as well as Japanese and Inuit prints, third graders at PS 144 spent a year exploring printmaking techniques and thinking about the creation and repetition of images. Their process built on key aspects of their social studies curriculum as they considered “How does the individual affect the whole?” After exploring materials and abstract symbols, students worked together to create pictorial messages of change and identity. Students developed individual solutions for conveying their ideas and then worked together to unite their pieces.

PS 145, Brooklyn
2nd and 3rd grade
Teaching Artist: Molly O'Brien

In this 10-week residency in conjunction with the social studies curriculum, students discussed community, both local and global. Students explored their local neighborhood through a walking tour and looked at images of other communities in New York City. They then created individual mosaics that represented a place in the student’s community.

PS 145, Brooklyn
3rd, 4th, and 5th grade
Teaching Artist: Sonya Blesofsky

In connection with the social studies curriculum across all three grades, students explored the question, “How does geographical location influence artists?” Students investigated how artists such as Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) and Ingrid Calame (b. 1965) were influenced by their location and experimented with various art making techniques. For their final project, students used different types of paper, including those they had previously painted and patterned, to create a wall hung relief responding to a geographical location that has personal significance.

PS 676, Brooklyn
4th and 5th grade
Teaching Artist: Jeff Hopkins

People interact daily with the geometric shapes that surround them: in their homes, modes of transportation, and their environments. Students at PS 676 became “shape detectives” by sketching and photographing shapes they found in their school, homes, and neighborhoods. In conjunction with their mathematics curriculum, students identified complex shapes and explored geometric concepts such as symmetry, transformation, and patterns through sketching and painting. Ultimately each student, drawing from their portfolio of shape explorations, designed and then created a sculpture inspired by things in their neighborhood that incorporated shapes in original and unusual ways.