Art for Bellingham!

Inviting all Bellingham kids (and the grown-ups who love them) to make art and messages for our senior community members who are self-isolating during this time! The goal is to create a virtual public art space to help our community stay better connected while we all social distance during the covid-19 pandemic.

I threw this project together because it breaks my heart to think of our beloved Bellingham community as fractured right now. I thought it would be lovely to empower kids to help their community while helping us all connect with some of those most isolated and at risk.

The video below I made as a mini art lesson to rally participation, feel free to share it with your kids!

Please send PHOTOS of any art or messages to me (use the contact form on my website). I’ll add them to a shared dropbox folder, where participating adult care facilities can access them and print them out for their residents (or share the link for those who are tech-savvy, no actual paper mail involved for safety reasons!).

I hope you’ll consider joining or inviting your kids to participate (messages from grown-ups are welcome too).

And please invite others! Thanks!

PS I originally posted this on social media but I am adding it here as an easy place to link for those who want to share. Thanks to everyone who has already participated! I’ll be sending our first round of messages by the end of this week so please get messages in by Thrusday April 2.

Kid's Art Walk

I've been hard at work on a few projects I'm very excited about. There are so many things I could post about! But for now here's a picture from the Kid's Art Walk here in Bellingham which took place during the month of May.

I helped the students from this class make the Chinese Dragons you see in the window. The kids were studying China and I'd learned a lot about Chinese Dragons when I lived in Asia so I taught them some about what I'd learned and we made these puppets. It was such a fun project!

Making art with kids

I've said it before on my blog: sometimes when you are busy with the very things that are interesting to blog about, you are too busy to bother blogging. So I've had a full last few months! I have a few posts I'd like to put up soon but how about I start with sharing this collage I made with kids because it's close to my heart.

The last couple years I've been teaching art to the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd graders at a local Montessori school here in Bellingham, once a week for a few months a year. A few days ago I finished glueing together this paper quilt made from collage squares all the kids made. I've been a bit of an accidental art teacher but honestly it's become one of my favorite and most rewarding things that I do. I'm so grateful that I get to make art regularly with kids (at least during the months I'm teaching). This piece is for the school's fund-raising auction. I'm pretty psyched at how it turned out. But mostly I like that each square makes me think of each kid who made it and that makes me smile.