Cut and Paste

Students can make personal connections when learning about artists who are working with subjects relevant to their lives. Learning about art history is essential, but this distance of time can create a disconnect. Including contemporary artists can provide a current perspective and offer reassurance that personal experiences are important for building artworks.

Studentsʼ artistic experiences can be made more authentic by starting with issues that are important to them while providing an opportunity to form a closer bond with the work. While teaching techniques and concepts is important, tying students’ life experiences to the work contemporary artists are creating can be a map leading them forward.

Historical Inspiration
In this lesson, students make connections to topics that are important to them while focusing on the collage work of historical and contemporary artists. We start with the historical by exploring the collages of Hannah Höch, Pablo Picasso, Richard Hamilton, and Max Ernst.

We continue with the Harlem Renaissance and explore works by Romare Bearden. Students investigate Beardenʼs approach and inspirations, and they realize that he was responding to his own world and culture.

Contemporary Inspiration
After that historical look, we explore the works of contemporary artists who are fairly local to us, such as Della Wells (Milwaukee, Wisconsin), and Natalie Egress (Madison, Wisconsin). Both of these artists offer their own approach to the art of collage.
Students then focus on the work and life of Della Wells. This investigation leads to a close reading of her use of images, symbolism, and the context of the stories she narrates through her works. The use of personal narrative drives her work as it did for Romare Bearden—an approach students can use to explore their own worlds visually.

Planning
Next, students collaborate to brainstorm a list of a dozen topics that are important to them. Some include newsworthy events like climate change, war, politics, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Others are personal like anxiety, schoolwork, music, and fashion. Students then narrow their twelve topics to six as they consider what is truly important to them. From there, they choose two topics and do an open-ended writing exercise to decide on one final topic on which they would like to create social commentary through collage.

Creating
After planning their works, students begin cutting and tearing, painting color fields, forming grattage, frottage, decalcomania, and using other methods to assemble a collection of images, textures, and colors to build their collages. Students explore challenging processes of cutting, tearing, and gluing, and building, disassembling, repositioning, and reassembling their social and personal compositions.

Hurdles they might encounter include navigating the process of working from the general to the specific to develop an environment, coming to understand that images don’t have to be proportionate or fit perfectly with one another, or being aware of the entire picture plane while keeping the social commentary they are working to communicate in mind.

Reflecting
When finished, students reflect and write a full description of their work, considering the formal elements and principles of their collage and describing the narrative they hoped to express. From these paragraphs, students deconstruct their writings and work their ideas into poetry. All of this then comes together collaboratively into a digital group presentation that can be appreciated by everyone who contributed.

Contemporize
Exploring the artists who fill art history textbooks will always play an important role in the development of young artists. But connections that can be made through learning about contemporary artists can help students see the importance of the work they are creating now.