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A lot has happened since our last blog update in October. We celebrated Thanksgiving, the Holiday Season, the New Year, and launched our Winter Showcase in partnership with The Design Museum of Chicago. We also saw many of our Advanced Arts Seniors exhibit work in the All City Senior Portfolio Show, and even had two of our own Advanced Arts Students; Abby Moon-Sarudi of Animation & Sequential Arts, and Victoria Mac of Drawing & Painting help introduce the exhibition on Youtube Live. After the Holiday Break, everyone hit the ground running to finish the second quarter of the year off on a high note! Let's check in, and see what has happened in our classrooms this past month... Animation & Sequential Arts January has been a busy month for Animation & Sequential Arts. First Year students have been working on world creation concept art, focusing specifically on background art. First year students have been learning to create worlds that feel real, fleshed out, and lived in; while also learning illustrative techniques to utilize in Adobe Photoshop. Second Year students have been working the entire month on a long term, large scale project to independently publish a large-scale Zine. Each Zine will be at least 20 pages upon completion, and students were asked to focus on multi-frame page formatting. The first year students are now finishing up their background art creations, and will be joining the second year students in learning about Zines and Mini-Comics. Second year students will act as class leaders to help instructors teach the very physical concept of Zines remotely.
Creative Arts & Ceramics
Culinary Arts The students in Advanced Culinary Arts continue to amaze us with not just their culinary skills, but with their creative talents, their care and integrity towards how they treat each other, their willingness to share, their ability to go with the flow, and their intense wisdom, for being so young. This quarter, we eased back in and did a mix of creative culinary activities to spark new understandings of old culinary terminology and technique, as well as the introduction of a little more. We also explored topics in social justice in the food world and spent a few weeks really having great conversations about how the farming and food industry can do better, and what we can do. We’ve also had a few “Chopped Challenges”, including a Ramen Challenge, a Historical Menu Challenge that a few teens brought to life, and an Eggcelent challenge using...you guessed it...eggs. This class is an absolute pleasure to teach!
Dance What began as a sprint has become a marathon of on-line teaching, blended with authentic learning and creativity from around the globe. AAP Dance students are learning new technologies and connecting them with authentic learning through their recent creation: “Exquisite Corpse.” This was originally a pick-up game or practice where one person picks up where the previous one left off. Inspired by filmmaker and dance professor Mitchell Rose, AAP’s dance students created their own version of, “Exquisite Corps”, where the dancers became contemporary choreographers, passing the dance along to each other. Each dancer began their movement with an action or position that ended the previous dance. The dances are just a few seconds in length and happen in different locations. The editing and camera create a seamless connection between each choreographer. The AAP Dance students, now choreographers, join a global group of revered choreographers who have been part of their own,“Exquisite Corps.” Check out the final results here: Drawing & Painting "Coming back from a restful break, we jumped right into work again! The students created a self portrait from life (looking in a mirror) by first darkening their page with charcoal, and using the eraser to find the highlights. This was both to practice seeing highlights, but also moving away from defining everything in outline. The students did not disappoint!
From there, we kept in the spirit of working from a darker surface by switching to black paper. In a project that had the students focus on highlight, color, and texture, we each found pictures from our own lives to recreate with those concepts in mind. What happened is that we got to see a lot of pictures of students' pets! Again, we were not disappointed by the results! See below:
Modern Rock Band After a well needed Holiday Break, the Modern Band students returned and are ready to COMPOSE! Our class is going to participate in the Deep Dish Festival curated by the Columbia College of Chicago in which their works will be showcased and workshopped by professionals. Said festival is curated by the Grammy-winning guitarist Isaiah Sharkey (John Mayer, D’Angelo, and Paul Simon). Our Modern Band students received professional recording equipment to be able to pursue their compositional projects for this Festival thanks to our AAP administrators Brian and Melisa! Their studio bundles included a microphone and an interface that you can see in the pictures below. We can’t wait to share with everyone all the creativity of our students! They are all hard at work writing lyrics, learning chords, coming up with beats, and practicing the parts to their very original songs. This unit segues into future composition and music tech units that will guide the students to our Spring Showcase and Original Music Exposition. 
Music Theory Students came back from our winter break and hit the ground running, creating some wonderful, sophisticated 4 part chorales. We’ve dug deep into the rules of creating a captivating and interesting melody as well as the intricacies of harmonizing using alto, tenor, and bass. We’ve also been spending more time training our ears! Part of music theory is also aural skills, the ability to hear music and immediately dictate and analyze. It’s a skill musicians practice their entire careers, but we are becoming more and more advanced by the day. Through sight singing, melodic dictation, and harmonic dictation, advanced analysis of music is becoming easier each class. Photography WE’RE BACK... And we are so happy to be back in class, everyone was super ready and excited to get back into talking about photography. We started the first week back into critique based on the Homage assignment we gave out during break. And the students did an excellent job of interpreting homage in their own way many of the students paid homage to family/important people in their life or a subject that means the world to them.It was beautiful hearing how this homage assignment meant to them and how personal it was. They each did and try so many things, like still life photography and a combination of portrait photography to illustrate an homage. Video Production We returned from our much needed break to continue and complete the experimental film where we explored different themes developed from emotions. Students shared footage they all shot individually into a crowdsourced project. We developed editing skills including motion graphics effects and titles. Students continue to work on expressionistic, layered soundscapes. During our screenings, students worked on their critiquing skills. We started our screenplay project where students are taking ideas from a log line through a treatment to a finished short narrative screenplay. We are focusing on developing character using locations and finding dramatic moments. Come back next MONTH for more updates from our Advanced Arts Classrooms!
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June 2021
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CPS Advanced Arts Program Gallery 37 Center for the Arts 66 East Randolph Street, Chicago, IL 60601 p. 312.578.9485 - f. 312.578.9487 AdvancedArts@cps.edu |
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