My students need a supply of individual ceramic tiles.
$422 goal
Hooray! This project is fully funded
Hooray! This project is fully funded
Celebrating Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month
This project is a part of the Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month celebration because
it supports a Latino teacher or a school where the majority of students are Latino.
I teach art at a K-8 public school in an urban New York neighborhood. Ninety-percent of our students are enrolled in the federal free lunch program, a large portion are English Language Learners, approximately 85% are from the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and various Central/South American countries (the other 15% including the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, and America). We have received an "A" rating from the city for 2 years now, and have been a school in good standing for the 5 years we have been open. While we are a general academic school, we heavily emphasize the arts, have visual and music arts departments, and a school-wide project-based learning enrichment program involving all grades.
Our school suffered a huge $450,000 cut in our funding over the past two years. One result was that our visual art program did not receive secured funding for school-wide supplies.
Our 8th graders participated in a citywide public art project, a community-themed lunch-table sculpture/mural, which will be displayed in our school beginning in September. This has inspired us to create large/permanent art projects within the school. For School Year 2009, we would like to create a large school-community themed ceramic tile mural based on an artist study of Diego Rivera and his mural, Pan-American Unity, 1943, which will take place the first month of school, during Hispanic History Month.
Another objective of this project is to cement the unity within our own school community between the students, the staff, the administration and the parent community. Creating the mural will draw them all in as participants in the art-making process, its installation and the celebration of its completion. While "unity" is a concept we do our best to instill within our students, it has been a struggle with our parents each year. This project will begin our new school year with "unity" as a guiding precept.
We will need a tile for each student, 22 classes total, ~500 children. We will paint the tiles with acrylic paint and apply a heavy-duty gloss to seal and protect the artwork.
This project will benefit the students in the following ways: a) examining the meaning of community; b) learning how history affects communities; c) learning how public art can permanently document this history; d) learning how Diego Rivera accomplished these points in his historic murals of Mexico, the auto industry, and the population of San Francisco; e) evaluating our student body and the ways we form a community within our school, and how we can create an even better supportive community for each other; f) contributing individual and group ideas to a larger inclusive project; and g) experience their own individual contribution within the larger context of a group effort.
Your help will supply our students with the tiles necessary for this project. We cannot afford these on our own, and the project will not be possible without them.
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