Kilpela leads class into art, nature
Kilpela leads class into art, nature
| CAPTION: Kayla Gahagan/Daily Mining Gazette Michelle Walter, 15, of Lansing shares her “lyrical” art with Michigan Tech University summer youth program instructor Susanne Kilpela Friday. |
By KAYLA GAHAGAN, DMG Writer
HOUGHTON — When her summer youth art class students found themselves far from their inner-city homes and instead on the beaches of Copper Harbor last week, Susanne Kilpela asked for nothing more than an open mind.
“It’s all about them,” she said. “I give them very little direction. It’s all in their head.”
Teaching creative arts as part of one of Michigan Tech University’s summer youth classes, Kilpela took the students north for the day to give natural artwork a try.
Natural artwork, inspired by one of Kilpela’s favorite artists Andy Goldsworthy, utilizes nature to create art before it is also destroyed by nature. An example, she said, is something created on a beach before it is later washed away by the waves.
The class is a challenge, she said, not only with the ideas, but with the heat and the bugs too.
“The kids struggle with it,” she said. “But I think it’s important to think differently as far as art is concerned.”
Rock and stick sculptures, drawings and beads littered Kilpela’s Tech art room as the students made finishing touches on projects Friday. Deyonta Wilmot, 13, of Lansing, concentrated on painting a rock and Jamilah Muhammad, 11, of Lansing worked a pottery spinning wheel in the corner.
New ideas about art were not the only thing Kilpela tried to keep open minds about. A majority of the 14 students in the class were black.
“There are racial differences and I just want to say - ‘let’s make a connection with nature,’” she said. “In art, we can all be different colors and religions and we can connect. We’re all the same, we just come from different places.”
And while Kilpela said she found a frustration in the fact that many of the students didn’t know they were taking the class until the last minute and therefore were less enthusiastic about the projects, she said something got through to them.
“The kids all found a creative side to them,” she said. “I learned you have to go with the flow.”
The flow this year meant reading over the shoulder of Michelle Walter, 15, of Lansing, as she bobbed her head to the hip hop beat in her head phones and sketched the rhymes in a colorful glue stick.
“I ain’t got no doh,” Kilpela read aloud as Walter wrote. “Doh?”
Walter slid off her headset and laughed, “You know, doh, as in money.”
“Here, put these on and listen,” Walter said, rewinding the song.
Kilpela grinned and slid them over her ears.
Kayla Gahagan can be reached at gahagan@mininggazette.com
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