All art is autobiographical,
the pearl is
the oyster’s autobiography.”
The Art Project is dedicated to fostering creativity and artistic expression among elementary school students.
With a proven track record of delivering engaging and educational art lessons, Chance to Excel provided funding to support the purchase of their materials and expenses for the 2023-2025 school year.
The Art Project’s fixed fee per project is inclusive of all instructor expenses and materials. While expenses and costs for supplies have gone up substantially in the past several years, budgets have remained flat. Through the support of our network, to date, we’ve donated $7,607 to bridge cost disparities covering program expenses including the cost of Classroom Materials & Supplies. Chance to Excel supported this grant by refunding costs associated enabling The Art Project to focus on maintaining their current level of service to schools.
Additionally, Chance to Excel’s partnership with this program includes mentorship guidance, working together towards ways The Art Project can one day grow to be self sustainable.
BACKGROUND
The Art Project was established in 2016 as a way to provide hands on art instruction to East Bay schools which currently do not have dedicate visual arts resources.
The Art Project currently provides art to five different elementary schools and brings individual, creative, age-appropriate projects to Transitional Kindergarten (TK)-5th grade classrooms. Each 75-minute project brought directly to the classroom and is designed to dovetail with a teacher’s curriculum and to bring vital visual skills to all grade levels. Each art project comes fully stocked with all the materials needed to complete the project, including any display posters or books that help to explain the project.
For example, the art project “Going away coming home” introduces the students to the Bay Area artist Hung Liu, a Chinese-born American contemporary artist, who worked and lived in Oakland. We discuss her upbringing in rural China and how she came to America to fulfill her artist dream. We look at and discuss her site-specific installation “Going away, coming home” that is in the departure terminal at the Oakland airport. We learn about her creativity and symbolic visual language while painting our own versions of the red headed cranes featured in the site-specific installation. The process helps young artists understand how art is created, its many different meanings and its shared values, all while learning some basic drawing and painting skills.
This is just one example of the 37 art projects that teachers can currently choose from. The projects range from painting to sculpture, with a wide variety of mediums like tempera paint, water colors, pastels, oil pastels, cut paper collage, and experiments in using repurposed materials. Each year several new projects are developed to ensure teachers and young artists have a fresh, timely and creatively interesting list to choose from.
This school year, the Art Project is currently scheduled to bring 132 art classes to elementary schools, with more to be scheduled as the year unfolds. The Art Project established a fee per 75-minute class of $150. This fee includes all instructor costs, project development, class preparations, travel time, and all art materials.
The grant exclusively funded the purchase of essential art materials, including but not limited to paper, paint brushes, paint, and color pencils and related expenses. The materials are fundamental to the success of the art classes.
