Summer program connects MassArt faculty and students with children and teens for free Summer Art Workshop Series

Where better for children to learn how to make four-panel comic strips than in a public library? MassArt Comic Arts Instructor LJ Baptise will be making sure that happens at the Salisbury Public Library north of Boston on Monday, July 29, from 1:00  to 2:30 PM. It’s part of the Summer Workshop Series, a collaboration between the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners. The aim is to increase access to art education over the summer.

MassArt faculty and student ambassadors are leading the workshops, giving children and teens an opportunity to learn about the creative process and explore art as a possible career path.

“As a public college, making an art and design education accessible to all across the Commonwealth and beyond is at the heart of our mission,” says President Mary K. Grant. “We’re excited to see how this program may spark a new interest in art and design.”

Previous workshops this summer included a session led at the Charlotte and William Bloomberg Medford Public Library by our Fashion Design Chair and Professor Jennifer Varekamp, who gave youth insights into sustainable fashion and led an interactive project where each participant contributed their own creative ideas while learning how to work toward a more sustainable future.

At the Woburn Public Library, Fine Arts 3D faculty member Marjee-Anne Levine, along with MassArt student ambassadors, helped kids carve their own designs into scratch blocks –  pre-formed molds made of resin-bonded sand. From there they melted aluminum on site, poured it into the blocks, and watched it solidify. Each participant walked away with their own custom cast aluminum art.

The Summer Art Workshop series is sponsored, in part, with funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Sciences.