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Elementary School Students explore Memory through the art of Carmon Colangelo

For the past two years, UGA art education students have worked with Gaines and Chase Street Elementary Schools as part of the University Community Partnership between the University of Georgia and Clarke County Public Schools. Through this project the elementary school art programs are extended to afford the children more “art” time to study and explore artists, ideas, and artmaking. In addition, the UGA art education students receive valuable teaching experience and work closely with Gaines elementary school art teacher Margot Dorn and Chase Street elementary art teacher Krista Dean to connect their teaching with Georgia curriculum guidelines in art, social studies, reading, science, and other subjects.

This semester the art education students worked with the young children at Gaines Elementary School to explore the idea of memory. First grade teacher Janna Dresden explained, “As the school will be moving to a new building next year, this is an especially appropriate theme for everyone involved.” The unit of instruction centered upon UGA Lamar Dodd School of Art Director Carmon Colangelo’s painting entitled All but Forgotton. Similar to a disjointed dream, Colangelo’s mixed media painting is a veritable medley of layers with colors, signs, symbols, and images heaped upon the surface of the canvas. A closer look reveals a book opened to a special passage, stacks of papers, searching eyes, and hovering faces amidst a mass of patterns and grids. Colangelo appears to be reminding us of the value of memory as well as our constant attempts to capture or remember events, times, and places in our lives. The unit, written by art education student Jennifer Dance and her professor Pamela G. Taylor with assistant from education professors Jenny Oliver and Gwynn Powell, involved the young children in discussing and creating a wide variety of objects surrounding their memories. The young children created placemats to recall table manners and “germy” refrigerator magnets to remind them to wash their hands. They made memory books and created layered drawings to reveal how time often changes our memories. These examples of the children’s art as well as memory boxes, self-portraits that include symbols to remind them of their addresses, and hand sculptures with “a string tied around a finger” are currently on display in the school cafeteria.

On March 22, another special memory will be made by the children at Gaines Elementary School. The artist they have studied, Carmon Colangelo will visit the school to see and talk about the children’s art and engage them in creating a memory painting together during an assembly in the school cafeteria. Thrilled to be a part of the University-Community Partnership, Colangelo says, “I am looking forward to seeing and learning from the ways these children’s eager young minds have explored the idea of memory. The work of the partnership has truly added a new dimension to our art school and we look forward to involving many more artists in working in the community in the future.” The assembly will take place from 1-2 p.m. on Monday, March 22 in the Gaines Elementary School cafeteria where art education students will also present principal Phyllis Stewert a collaborative work of art featuring their memories of the partnership experience.