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Welcome to the 2020 Kinder Art Exhibition! 

This Kinder Art Exhibit highlights work made by kindergarteners at IV Elementary as part of a partnership between IVYP and UCSB's AD&A Museum.  Once a week, undergraduate interns taught students about art from around the world and across time. Students then did crafts based on the lessons they learned, which are featured in this exhibit.

This exhibit explains the art history lessons the kids learned throughout the school year, and presents the crafts corresponding to each lesson. Due to space, we're only  highlighting a select number of works by each student with the names of each artist on the composition. 

Cave Paintings

For our first lesson, we taught the students about cave paintings, which are some of the earliest works of art. Cave paintings can be found all over the world, and are sometimes over 15,000 years old. People used their hands, sticks, and other objects from nature to draw pictures that told a story about prehistoric life. The kindergarteners created their own cave paintings to tell stories about the lives they live now. 

​Indigenous Art and Story Telling

This lesson introduced the concepts of rituals and storytelling by looking at two different societies and their use of storytelling. The two societies include indigenous tribes in California, and Mesoamerican societies. The activity was a partner craft in which the kids told each other a story, and their partner had to draw the story as they heard it. Students then learned more about how stories look and evolve differently through time, as well as based on who told the story.

​Sculptures of People

In this lesson, the teachers explained that sculptures are three-dimensional objects often made of some type of clay, rock, or metal. Many sculptures are made to show how a person looked, as well as the importance and power of the person through sculpture. Our art historians looked at examples from China, Egypt, and Rome, and then got to make a sculpture of their own faces!

Tombs in Egypt 

This week, the kindergarteners had a special Halloween lesson! In order to introduce the idea of the afterlife, the students saw examples of Egyptian tombs and funerary objects. Although death may seem like a somber concept, the incredible art produced solely for use in the afterlife, such as in Egypt, certainly presents it in a different light. Students created paper sarcophagi and decorated them with drawings and glitter glue. The kids were also invited to draw or write down some items they might want to bring into their tomb with them.

​Mosaics 

Mosaics are a type of art that uses individually placed tiles in order to make a larger picture. The interns taught the students about the Byzantine Empire, and the ways the Empire made art in the form of mosaics. Rulers during the Byzantine Empire often made big mosaics either on the floor or the wall of important buildings as a large piece of decoration to send a political or religious message. After the lesson, the kids made their own mosaics using outlines of fish, flowers, and hearts with small tiles.

​Greek Pottery

Drawing inspiration from the theatrical narratives depicted on Ancient Greek amphorae (a kind of vase), the enthusiastic young artists illustrated stories of their own on terracotta flower pots. The act of recording a story through imagery allowed the students to subtly explore the complex interplay of oral history and visual arts in Ancient Greece. In addition to working with pottery, the students had the option of creating red-figure drawings with red pastel and black paper. ​

​Domes & Architecture

This week, the students learned about domes as one architectural form used to make new kinds of buildings. The future art historians learned about the difficult process of creating domes, and saw some of the world's most beautiful examples of domed architecture. The kindergarteners then used a paper mache technique to create designs inside their own domes, which were inside paper bowls. ​

​Illuminated Manuscripts

The kids learned about illuminated manuscripts by focusing on calligraphy, or beautiful letters, specifically in England and Flanders (the Netherlands) during the Middle Ages. The interns introduced key words such as illuminated, referring to a text that has been illustrated, and calligraphy. The kids learned the purpose of manuscripts, why people would own them, as well as how they were made. These manuscripts took a long time to make. As their craft, the kids practiced their cursive letters, and then colored their initials as a way to work on their calligraphy, which they later decorated with glitter glue.

Chinese Calligraphy

This week, we moved from calligraphy in Europe to calligraphy from the other side of the world -- East Asia. Chinese is a language that uses a logogram, meaning it applies the characters’ shapes to represent meanings. Chinese calligraphy began with the development of Chinese scripts and the invention of paper in the 2nd century. The tools needed include brushes, ink, paper, and inkstone. For this week’s activity, the interns provided the outline of Chinese character “Fu,” meaning fortune, for the kindergarteners to fill in with ink. 

​Weaving

The future artists and art historians learned about weaving as both a practical skill and as a beautiful art form. Examples include textiles, baskets, and clothing production. The students also saw some different ways people weave both with looms and by hand. As a craft, students then made their own paper weaved masterpieces.

Royalty & Crowns

This week, the interns described the different functions of crowns from around the world from the 5th century to the 20th century, as well as what it means to be royal. The lesson focused on showing the kids the differences in shape, color, size, and way the crowns were made, specifically as it relates to where and when they were made. For this week’s activity, the kids made their own crowns using glitter and jewels.

​The Planets

After giving the students a brief explanation of the difference between the celestial (things in the sky) and terrestrial (things on earth), students learned about thinkers like Copernicus and Galileo. These astronomers, their theories, and their tools (like the telescope) were used as a way to show the kindergarteners that people have always been, and still are interested in the mysteries that the planets hold. The kids created paper mache versions of the celestial realm for the craft. While working, there were images of the eleven planets in the solar system, which students used as both inspiration and a point of reference for their craft.

Triptychs in the Renaissance

The students received an introduction to the Renaissance era through these three-part paintings called triptychs. Many times, these triptychs would be seen in churches. The triptychs would also open and close to tell multiple stories. The future art historians created their own triptychs by choosing one of their favorite things in each of the four seasons, and showing how it changed across the different seasons.

Frescoes and the Renaissance

To build on our lesson about Renaissance triptychs, the kindergarteners also learned about frescoes in the Renaissance. Frescoes offered artists during the Renaissance the ability to paint stories on ceilings and walls in new ways. Artists working with frescoes would often lay on their backs to paint on the ceiling. The kindergarteners then practiced laying on their backs and drawing with pastels, as if they were drawing on the ceiling. 

​Animals in Baroque Art

Baroque art flourished in Europe from about 1550 CE to 1750 CE, which was not long after the Renaissance. Art from the Baroque period often shows strong emotions, dramatic colors, and broad gestures through a use of paint that created intense and dramatic scenes. Animals were a common feature in Baroque art to emphasize the feeling of movement. Baroque art also included some creatures that did not actually exist, like mermaids and unicorns, which added more drama. For the craft, students used colorful, air-dry clay to build their own creatures.

​Dutch Still Life Painting

Our final lesson looked at Dutch still life painting, which allowed the students to both practice their drawing, and to build their own scenes that would inspire their works. A Dutch still life is a type of painting that comes from the Netherlands. Still life paintings often showed parts of nature and treasures from trading with other places, as well as images of everyday life. The kindergarteners and the interns worked together to stage their own still life in the classroom with flowers, toys, and knick knacks to paint our own Isla Vista Still-Lifes.
All crafts will be returned to through families through IVYP. 

This after school program is made possible thanks to the support of the Art, Design & Architecture (AD&A) Museum at UCSB, and IVYP. For more information about the partnership, see: https://www.museum.ucsb.edu/visit/teaching. To learn more about the AD&A Museum, visit: ​https://www.museum.ucsb.edu.