Nasher Sculpture Center: Design Detectives

The Nasher Sculpture Center is our other favorite museum!  It is one of the first museums to offer home schooling workshops.  How great is that, kids can attend art classes at a world class museum in Dallas! 

 

Today was a class specifically for teens centering on great questions at the heart of design.  The kids studies works by architect and designer Thomas Heatherwick.  Heatherwick is a contemporary designer that can look at the world around and challenges the design. 

 

One of our favorites today were the Heatherwick chairs.  They were a completely reimagined way of designing a chair, perfectly balanced, comfortable, and crazy fun!  The kids and I spun around in the chairs laughing and fascinated that 'someone' hadn't thought of this before.  Heatherwick's designs are brilliant! If you love smart design or have an appreciation for genius, check out the Heatherwick Exhibit! 

 

For my homeschooling friends, click HERE to check out their home school workshops!

 

Check out some of the other visits to the Nasher on our blog by clicking HERE. 

One of his disciples said to him, “Look, Teacher! What massive stones! What magnificent buildings!”  “Do you see all these great buildings?” replied Jesus. “Not one stone here will be left on another; every one will be thrown down.” Mark 13:1-2 

Nasher Sculpture Center Home School Class

There are a few places in Dallas that are just a must see in my book.  One is the Dallas Museum of Art; I am fascinated by God given talent.  My love of art is more for the 2 dimensional art, beautiful landscapes and still art; I have grown a fondness for 3 dimensional art. 

The Nasher Sculpture Center has a fantastic collection of sculptures.  The Nasher, like many other fine arts in Dallas has a great program for home educated children.  It is fun to look back at the kids from their first visit in 2008, 2009, 2010, to 2011. 

Today we toured the Nasher with our homeschool group PEACH.  The docents broke us up into smaller groups and led us into multidimensional conversation about the relationship between paintings and sculptures. 

You have many workers: stonecutters, masons and carpenters,

as well as those skilled in every kind of work

¹⁶ in gold and silver, bronze and iron—craftsmen beyond number.

Now begin the work, and the LORD be with you.”

I Chronicles 22:15-16

Nasher Sculpture Center Home School Class

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Today was another great homeschool class at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas. Ms. Anna was our docent. We took in several of the new exhibits and revisited some old favorites. One of my favorites is outside in the garden and it looks like an army of men without heads. The artist wanted to depict how in a group setting often people lose the ability to think for themselves. In what was probably the only art we’ve been permitted to touch was the installation by British artist Martin Creed. Downstairs there is a room that is filled almost to the ceiling with approximately 9,000 yellow balloons. A docent lets you slide into the room sideways hoping to displace the least amount of balloons possible. This is not for the claustrophobic! It is like walking thru abnormally tall grass. The kids found this to be a lot of fun; I was freaked out by all the balloons pulling on my long hair.

Nasher Sculpture Center Home School Class

Today was another great class at the Nasher Sculpture Center. It was a continuation of the February class, just focusing on different pieces of Jaume Plensa. Very modern art, with various mediums, but all carrying the theme of language and people. The class is concluded with a hands on activity utilizing some of the aspects learned during the class.

Nasher Sculpture Center Home School Class

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The homeschool classes at the Nasher Sculpture Center have become so popular that this year they have doubled the number of class offerings and still have waiting lists! Anna, the Assistant Curator of Education is absolutely wonderful with the children.

Today’s class was The Language of Art, looking at the latest exhibit by Spanish sculptor Jaume Plensa. We looked at several exhibitions featuring large-scale sculptures completed by Plensa between 2004 and 2009.

The main gallery featured a curtain of metal letters forming excerpts from various renowned authors. Alone the letters hang cold and silent, but once you interact with them they make noise, they move, they become warmer.

Another gallery featured Twins I and II, it is Plensa’s latest work and features figures composed of letters from seven distinct alphabets: Arabic, Chinese, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi and Latin. The letters are randomly juxtaposed, illustrating that letters lead to words, leading to sentences then paragraphs, next stories and eventually an idea.

The downstairs gallery featured the Where Are You? I, II and III exhibition. Each of these translucent, polyester resin figures are marked with words indicating geographical locations: one details the earth’s poles and critical longitudes, another names the continents and the other is marked with the oceans.

After looking at the connections between words, letters, sculptures and spaces in the art of Jaume Plensa, the kids then create an artwork based on their favorite stories. Caleb chose the phrase, “For a few seconds Voldemort was visible only as a dark, rippling, faceless figure, shimmering and indistinct upon the plinth, clearly struggling to throw off the suffocating mass.“ from Harry Potter’s Order of the Phoenix. Abigail selected, “’Sorry it took me so long Katie-Cat’” sad her Father,“ from the Mysterious Benedict Society. After selecting their inspiration the used torn paper to depict the scene that the words invoked.

Very cool, the sculptures encourage critical thinking and creativity.

Dallas Museum of Art

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For the last several years we have enjoyed the Homeschool art programs at the Nasher Sculpture Center and the Kimball Art Museum, but now the Dallas Museum of Art has begun their own homeschool program. Our homeschool group broke off into groups by grade levels and then went on docent led tours through different galleries. Abigail's group went through the Arts of the Americas gallery, while Caleb and Frankie visited the Past to Present: Arts of Mexico and Central and South America gallery.

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Abigail's favorite piece in the collection was Frederic Edwin Church's The Icebergs, 1861. Church exhibited it to enthusiastic crowds in New York City and Boston, who paid 25 cents per person to see his spectacular vision of this distant world. He then donated all proceeds to widows and orphans, this would be the beginnings of what is now the Red Cross.

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Caleb's favorite was the Central Mexican god of rain and lightning whom the Aztecs called Tlaloc. Peoples of the time believed that Tlaloc lived in mountain caves, the source of fertility and wealth, and his helpers, the tlaloque, lived on mountaintops, where shrines to the deity were often built.

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Frankie's favorite was a richly decorated cabinet is believed to have been constructed for the Count of Monclova, the viceroy first of New Spain (Mexico) and later of Peru. Intended as a collector’s cabinet to house and display precious objects, it was produced in the former Portuguese colony of Goa, on the west coast of India. It was made of Mahogany, mother-of-pearl, tortoiseshell, pewter, and gilding.

Nasher Sculpture Center Home School Class

Today was another fabulous class at the Nasher Sculpture Center. In case you missed previous posts the Nasher was originally the private collection of Raymond & Patsy Nasher. In 2003 they chose to share their collection with Dallas. They purchased a large parking lot in the Arts District and went about transforming it to a beautiful indoor/outdoor galleria. Today we looked at the process's they went through to create this new home for their collection. The children took photos with them of design styles they enjoy. Caleb took photos of Delphi, Greece and Abigail took Thebes, Egypt. They then went about drawing blue prints, then using building blocks construction their galleries. They took inspiration from the Nasher as they sketched various pieces and looked at the beautiful travertine and marble materials used in the facility.

Nasher Sculpture Center Home School Class

We visited the Nasher Sculpture Center today for a fabulous art class! The Nasher Sculpture Center was the personal collection of Raymond & Patsy Nasher. The Nashers collected over 300 pieces and the museum houses between 80 to 90 of those pieces at any one time.

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One distinguishing feature between the Nasher Sculpture Center and traditional art museums is the sculptures are three dimensional, offering different perspective to each viewer. The Nasher has fantastic pieces by artists, including Henri Matisse (with eleven sculptures), Pablo Picasso (seven), even modern artist like Andy Warhol! Warhol did renderings of Patsy and the Nasher's three daughters. There is also a lovely sculpture garden gallery.

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In the class today, Caleb and Abigail sketched pieces in the collection with Nasher's Education Coordinator, Ms. Anna. They learned great museum terminology like accession (add) and de-accession (remove)! The class also sculpted their own collections using air-dry putty. After all that inspiration, what did they sculpt . . . . drum-roll, please . . . . Star Wars!