As Meet the Masters enters our 28th year of working with elementary school students, parents and teachers, we are continually blown away by the amount of energy required “year-round” to educate and enrich today’s student.

Many schools are celebrating “Teacher Appreciation Week” which allows for a small celebratory “Great Job!” before the final push to finish the school year. Of course, after the students have left and the room packed up, many of you will allow yourself a “short break” before preparing for another classroom of wide-eyed kids in the Fall.

We can’t wait to be side by side with you. If you are interested in adding new artists this Fall or if you have any questions about implementing Meet the Masters at your school, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

We’re here and ready to help.

Sincerely,

-Bonnie

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Bonnie Steele

President & CEO

ROXBURY, Mass. — The community of Roxbury had high hopes for its newest public school back in 2003. There were art studios, a dance room, even a theater equipped with cushy seating.

A pilot school for grades K-8, Orchard Gardens was built on grand expectations.

But the dream of a school founded in the arts, a school that would give back to the community as it bettered its children, never materialized.

Instead, the dance studio was used for storage and the orchestra’s instruments were locked up and barely touched.

The school was plagued by violence and disorder from the start, and by 2010 it was rank in the bottom five of all public schools in the state of Massachusetts.

That was when Andrew Bott — the sixth principal in seven years — showed up, and everything started to change. “We got rid of the security guards,” said Bott, who reinvested all the money used for security infrastructure into the arts.

Read the entire MSN article and watch the video here.

(CNN) – Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, one of the world’s best-known galleries, reopens April 13 after a massive 10-year rebuild.

At the heart of the “new” museum is its most treasured painting, “The Night Watch,” a group portrait of one of Amsterdam’s local militias, painted by Rembrandt van Rijn in 1642, at the height of the Dutch Golden Age.

Architect Pierre Cuypers designed the building around the massive masterpiece — it measures 11 feet by 14 feet — in 1885, and it is the only work to be returned to its original location in the radically revamped gallery.

“Everything has changed, the only thing that hasn’t is ‘The Night Watch’,” explains Wim Pijbes, the museum’s director. “It is the altarpiece of the Rijksmuseum, the whole place is arranged around this beautiful masterpiece.”

Click here to read the entire CNN story and view the interactive image.

But amid the rain, and the fog, and the rain, and the rain, Seattle was home to the beginning of my journey traversing the fields of technology, art and design.

Eighteen years later on my journey, my foremost conclusion is that there is great power in these fields taken separately, and even more when they are put together. It’s why I believe we need to add an “A” for art to the national STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) education agenda — to turn it to STEAM.

It all began at Graham Hill Elementary School in southeast Seattle, when my third-grade teacher, Ms. Horita, told my parents at a parent-teacher conference that I was good at two things: math and art. My father, a Japanese immigrant, owned and operated a tofu store for 27 years in the Chinatown International District. The day after the meeting, he proudly announced to one of his tofu customers: “John is good at math.”

Read the entire Seattle Times article here.

Watch the videos and learn more here.

Led entirely by approximately 50 parent volunteers known as art docents, the whole school concentrates on seven famous artists per year as part of their adopted “Meet the Masters” curriculum, with the February event a showcase of what’s learned. Artists that inspired this year’s projects included Van Gogh, Georgia O’Keefe, Picasso and Henri Matisse. Studying seven different renowned artists each year, for five years, students “meet” 35 masters before leaving elementary school.

The artists’ lives and works are explored in-depth, and then students apply what they’ve learned to create their own art.

“Our students don’t just do art, they are immersed in Art History,” said parent docent Sel Richard.

This year’s fifth graders got to revisit painter Frida Kahlo; they’d first learned about her back in kindergarten, the first year of a five-year cycle for them. “Kindergartners are taught basic principles like how to look at a painting,” Richard said. “We ask them things like, ‘What colors make this a happy picture?’” Their culminating project after studying Kahlo was to draw an oil and pastel picture of a bird.”

Read the entire Village Life article here.

By Lisa Phillips

1. Creativity – Being able to think on your feet, approach tasks from different perspectives and think ‘outside of the box’ will distinguish your child from others. In an arts program, your child will be asked to recite a monologue in 6 different ways, create a painting that represents a memory, or compose a new rhythm to enhance a piece of music. If children have practice thinking creatively, it will come naturally to them now and in their future career.

2. Confidence – The skills developed through theater, not only train you how to convincingly deliver a message, but also build the confidence you need to take command of the stage. Theater training gives children practice stepping out of their comfort zone and allows them to make mistakes and learn from them in rehearsal. This process gives children the confidence to perform in front of large audiences.

See all 10 skills here.

Picasso could be capricious when it came to authenticating his own work. On one occasion, he refused to sign a canvas he knew he had painted, saying, “I can paint false Picassos just as well as anybody.” On another, he refused to sign an authentic painting, explaining to the woman who had brought it to him, “If I sign it now, I’ll be putting my 1943 signature on a canvas painted in 1922. No, I cannot sign it, madam, I’m sorry.” And on yet another occasion, an irked Picasso angrily covered a work brought to him for authentication with so many signatures that he defaced and effectively ruined it.

Even today, 40 years after Picasso’s death, the question of how his heirs exercise their right under French law to authenticate his work is a knotty one.

Picasso was, by some estimates, one of the wealthiest men in the world when he died, in 1973. In the early 1980s, after years of legal wrangling and well-publicized squabbling over the settlement of his estate, his heirs established a committee to officially authenticate his works. In 1993, however, that committee was disbanded after disputes among the heirs over the authenticity of a set of drawings. Afterward, two of the heirs—Picasso’s daughter Maya Widmaier-Picasso and son Claude Ruiz-Picasso—began issuing certificates of authenticity independent of one another. This created a situation that dealers say has been time-consuming and awkward, particularly because auction houses, faced with dual (and dueling) authentication options, were increasingly requiring certificates from both heirs.

Read the entire ARTnews article here.

What is design education? Design education, which is considered “an applied art,” teaches problem-solving as the application of creativity—it’s about functionality, usability, feasibility and desirability. Design education teaches relevance, ideation and aesthetics. It considers human factors such as psychology, sociology and ethnography. It teaches research methods, visualization and presentation skills, critical analysis, collaboration and team building. It teaches creative cognitive skills as well as productive hand skills. In short, it not only encourages students to be imaginative, it also teaches them how to harness that inventiveness and put it to practical use. Most importantly, it teaches methodologies for many of the recommended transformative academic and life skills of the twenty-first century.

All of this begs the question, if design education can accomplish all of those things, why has it been overlooked?

Read the entire AIGA article here.

Get the details here.