By Megan Strawther, Advancement Associate
At P.S. ARTS, we are big on working together as a team. Whether it’s tackling fundraising events, helping out at Family Art Nights, proofreading grant proposals, or even pitching in to get a coworker their favorite cake for their birthday, our staff likes to do things together to accomplish any given task. Which is why during the summer we convene every other week for my most favorite of days: Staff Craft Day!
The purpose of Staff Craft Day is to join forces and create really awesome art projects that we plan on using at Family Art Nights during the upcoming school year. We get to learn about a specific artist and the type of art they’re known for, and then we have the chance to create our very own masterpieces (kind of… if one can even consider my mediocre art a masterpiece!).
I especially enjoy these projects because, as a member of our Advancement team, I do not always have the opportunity to be as involved in our programs and the services we provide as an organization. Despite my lack of artistic abilities, I find this staff activity to be refreshing because it’s a reminder of what we provide our 12,000 students and parents with every day. Not to mention, I always enjoy the company of my fellow staff AND art is fun!
The first project we worked on this summer was a Pointillism painting, a style made famous by Georges Pierre Seurat. His most well-known painting, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, is entirely made up of small dots of pure, unmixed primary colors. So if he ever wanted to create green, he would paint blue and yellow dots close together.
For our project, we cheated a little and used all sorts of colors. However, everyone’s Pointillism paintings turned out fantastic! We had paintings that ranged from sunsets to ocean waves to peacocks to windmills to family pets! We definitely have some crafty staff members here at P.S. ARTS.
Artist Silvio Alvarez, whose work seeks to combine art and sustainability, inspired another one of our Staff Craft Day projects. Alvarez produces images cut from magazines or discarded wood that are dedicated to expressing imagination and dreams or nightmares that do not always make sense.
We had a lot of fun with this one. Give our staff some old newspapers, glue sticks, and then watch out! We all decided to create trees for this project to replicate one of Alvarez’s most famous pieces.
Last week our new Education & Programs Assistant, Amy Knutson, lead our third Staff Craft Day, which was inspired by one of the most recognizable Impressionistic artists: Claude Monet. We used watercolors (my personal favorite!) to create birch trees and in the process we learned about the foundational elements of art: color, brush strokes, and lighting.
Not only were all of these projects fun, but I also enjoyed creating them in the company of my coworkers. That is our goal for Family Art Nights: for children and their parents to have that same experience when creating something wonderful with one another. It really is so important that we help families in the communities that we serve find ways to work and accomplish things together.
While I’m sad the summer is ending and Staff Craft Days are few and far between, I look forward to seeing the countless masterpieces (and yes, they truly will be masterpieces) that are yet to be created by the thousands of P.S. ARTS children and parents at our Family Art Nights!
To find projects you can do at home with your family, check out our P.S. ARTS Projects To Go!
