Content and photos for this blog post provided by Eliot-Hine MS parent, Suzanne Wells. She also leads the Junk Art Club at Eliot-Hine MS!
This summer, Eliot-Hine’s Junk Art Club is having an exhibit of its art work at the Hill Center in the Young Artists Gallery. The exhibit will be on display through the end of August. The Junk Art Club is an afterschool activity that was started two years ago. Club members hope visitors to One Person’s Trash is a Student’s Art will be inspired to find ways to reduce waste, and think about how something might be reused before it is thrown in the trash. The Hill Center is located at 921 Pennsylvania Ave. SE. The Young Artists Gallery is on the ground floor, east of the main staircase. Eliot-Hine MS will also host a new principal meet and greet at the Hill Center on Monday, 7/30 at 5:30 PM.
Last year, the students created a bottle cap reproduction of a Jacob Lawrence painting from his Migration Series (Panel #58 In the North the African American had more education opportunities). Club members saved bottle caps from home, and scored a big bag of them from the Indian restaurant, Indigo. In the words of 7th grader Malia Weedon, “I care about the environment, and this is a fun way to help the environment. Projects tend to be more inventive when you use trash. When you work with trash you work with what you find, and you have to be creative with how you use it.”
The discovery of a cache of Ikea bed slats set out for garbage inspired an “eye project” that was modeled after a community art project done at North Park University in Chicago. Students paired up to paint each other’s eyes on the slats, creating mini-portraits. Sixth grader Annika Crawford observed: “I decided to be in the Junk Art Club because I like art. Art is my imagination. I take creations from my mind, and put them on paper. The eye project was great because you got to look at different people, and draw them the way you see them.”
Yet another use of found materials is the collection of painted hubcaps, originally gleaned from gutters and sidewalks on Capitol Hill. Rust-Oleum spray paint was used as a base coat on the hubcaps, and the students painted with a liquid metal acrylic paint on top of the base coat.
Want to learn more about Eliot-Hine’s Junk Art Club? Check out these previous posts:
DCPS School Planning 