Group Activity

How to customize your blog – the top picture – the “Appearance”  and “Customize” option on your Dashboard menu.

The blog gives your suggested sizes. How do you crop your photo? Here is a free tool you can use online, anywhere – almost the same as Photoshop, Pixlr.com
Together, everyone pick a big photo from online to use as your blog banner, crop and save and upload to your blog, follow along, will show up front.

If you finished your interview last week

• Look over Transit Art Examples: https://blogs.umb.edu/intransit/sample-page/ and note down your favorites.
• Pick out a sentence from your interview that you like.
• Google or sketch out by hand some ideas for pictures that might go with that sentence. This is visual brainstorming, you will eventually photograph or paint your own image so it doesn’t matter about copyright, this is just to start getting ideas about which pictures would go well with your words.
• Make a post with your ideas – your favorite sentence and images you found online.
• You can also use the camera in class if you have ideas of things you could photograph in class – symbolic object -something from your bag or something easy to find in the building.

If you finished your interview today

• Make a post where you type up your interview

If you don’t have an interview yet

• Start a post where you note down who you plan to interview.
• Type up which questions you will ask them. Here is a link to questions that you came up with a couple of weeks ago, https://blogs.umb.edu/intransit/2015/11/20/workshop-2-documentation/
• Work on customizing your blog with photos and something about yourself and what kind of art and activities interest you.

Welcome back from Thanksgiving Break!

Agenda:

1. Discussion: How did the interviews go?
2. Documentation: Artists document – every week one or more people to be the photographer/class journalist and help do the follow up blog post with pictures.
3. Work on making a blog post about the interview – listen to your interviews and review your notes and start to type out quotes.
4. Make sure everyone can post pictures and words to their blog and Lisa will connect it to this main site here: https://blogs.umb.edu/intransit/artists/
5. Share your best quotes with the group.
6. If you didn’t get to do an interview: Planning for one for this week.
7. Brainstorm  – photographing to go with words.

Where: P6 Mac Lab, Healey Library Lower Level
When: 4-5pm – come early for snacks because we can’t eat in the lab

Agenda:
1. Read out loud interviews from last week – introduce your “interviewee”.
2. The Blog – learn how to login to the blog and make your own artist page
3. StoryCorps – look at the website – talk about Thanksgiving break interview project.

https://storycorps.org/blog/the-great-thanksgiving-listen/
StoryCorps is working with high school teachers across the country to ask students to interview a grandparent or elder over the 2015 Thanksgiving holiday weekend.

4. Come up with a questions list – as a group – about Journey.

5. Practice using your phone if your have a phone that can record. (Lisa will look into ordering digital voice recorders if needed).

6. Over Thanksgiving break conduct at least one interview with an older adult on the topic of “Journey.”  Take at least one picture or sketch to go with your interview. The picture can be of the person or something that you think matches what they were talking about. For example, if they talk about immigrating from another country, you could take a picture of a flag from that country.

Welcome to the public art project, “In Transit: Voices & Vision.”

Agenda for November 12:

4:00 -4:15

• Snacks & Overview
• Brief introductions – names, school, grade
• What is “In Transit”?
  A public art project. Total of 10 poster designs — 5 horizontal designs, 5 rectangle designs – inside Orange Line trains.  Public art project funded by New England Foundation for the Arts Creative City Grant program (see press release in your folder).
• Why?
  I spend a lot of time on the trains and so do my kids and their friends, my two kids graduated from BPS and in Boston I haven’t seen  much art by students in the trains so I applied to start putting it there. So many BPS students are in the trains every day.  With Brad and Suamy, we  chose the theme of “Journey”.  Journey’s can be about either  physical or emotional journeys.
• How?
  Studio exercises in photography, painting, graphic design, and journalism every Thursday 4-5 p.m. In addition to meeting every Thursday, you will sometimes get art activities to take home with you.
• When/Where?
  The designs are due for production, June 1, 2016.  This is a public art project with a strict MBTA deadline so your attendance is critical. Your voice matters, you will be part of a professional art team. We will meet in classrooms and sometimes in a Mac computer lab or painting studio so check all emails and announcements.
• Art Style & process
  These will be text / image designs – words on top of either photographs or paintings. Work in teams on collecting stories on the theme of  “journey” from older people in your communities – family, friends, neighbors. Choose the best  quotes from the journey stories to go on the posters.
• Contacts
  Lisa Link, lisa.link@umb.edu
  Brad Bleidt, Bradford.Bleidt@umb.edu
  Suamy Ventura, Suamy.Ventura@umb.edu

4:15 – 4:30

Examples of public art, on this page and also actual posters Lisa will show you.

4:30 – 4:50

In-class journalism practice – interviewing each other.

4:50 – 5:00

Questions and discuss art assignment #1.

Art take-home activity #1

1. Photography:  Artist selfie – something you want for your blog page.
2. Drawing: MBTA ad sketches & observations. What ads  do you look at on the MBTA? Which ones do you like? Why? Take notes about colors, fonts, photographs,  and  words the ad designers chose. Which ones make you stop and read them? Why? Sketch roughly your thoughts on the ads  that you see on the horizontal card card spaces over the seats and  the vertical space behind the driver spot.

Bring to  next meeting.