Introduction

Let’s look at examples of artists’ work used as a tool for memory, remembrance, identity, or a symbol for a larger message. We can look at two artists: Adebuni Gbadebo, a mixed media artist working out in Philadelphia, and William Edmonson, a limestone artist known for his cultural and community contributions to Black figuration.

We can also consider work like ‘face jugs’ as a way that expression can be literal in terms of figuration but have cultural foundations that speak to ethnicity, tradition, spirituality, and more. This is where the abstraction of a concept and the method of storytelling can echo creative decisions, like in the colors, assemblage, and scale you use. This allows us to think broadly about how we honor our dead in formal or informal traditions, sometimes with historical practices like leaving goods and food as an offering. Memory jugs are vessels with personal items inside them left on the burial site or place of remembrance like a mantel.

We are paying attention to the materials being used and their level of access to the average person, education, and purpose. This all highlights how we represent ourselves as artists and loved ones in terms of burial practices and examples of how to model the body in a readable way, as most students participating in this activity might be using clay for the first time or are working through the concepts in their head to manage things like scale, texture, color (of the clay body) or navigating structural integrity of their piece.

Instruction

How do you want to be remembered?

Before you air dry clay, beads, shells, pipe cleaners, and different ways of hanging or displaying your work like string and magnets, as I have introduced you to the two artists in this workshop, Adebunmi Gbadebo or ‘Bumni’ and William Edmonson, I want you to consider how you would be remembered.

Is it your sports, dancing, writing, love of animals, wanting to play soccer, a musician, or do you want to be remembered as you are for things like fashion, your glasses, or shoes? Think about this as you can build different forms that have different functions. Students may sculpt trinket trays, window charms, ornaments, characters, people, jewelry organizers or more. The idea is that whether you represent yourself or a loved one in this activity, you are (1) identifying a cultural or personal symbol to a person and (2) considering the form and function to be displayed, used, or gifted to the person.

Goal

The goal of this is to get students active and connect to an artist and their work in a personal way. This encourages a projected self onto art, a language of universal expression, and practicing the use of observation and narrative visually. This also fosters the idea of living with artwork- we make a lot of work as kids in art class or holiday activities the younger we are, and some things last- what if we curate our homes with homemade art but with a function in mind that creates an expression of comfort in one’s environment and a way to exercise a little autonomy and decision making.

You can make this work and workshop your own as an educator to host a small pop-up gallery of student work or find a way to encourage a manageable way for families to hang new masterpieces in their home as a project + writing element about where they hang their work and how they framed it.

[Attaching a template for a gallery plate]