field trip week!

We've gotten to the middle of our weeks of summer camp, which means exciting things for all of us. The Sharks and Polar Bears are both taking excursions to new locations this week, while the Starfish and Dolphins get to have Urban Arts all to themselves!

On Monday, the Sharks took the city bus to Downtown Minneapolis, equipped with black and white film cameras. In two smaller groups, we explored Hennepin Avenue and nearby streets, taking pictures of transportation, architecture, people and art. This was the exhausting part, but one of us had a lovely nap on the bus ride back to Urban Arts. The rest of this week is spent in a darkroom at IFP Center for Media Arts in St. Paul, where we developed the pictures ourselves. It was a little tricky figuring how much light to expose onto the photo paper, but everyone got at least a couple amazing results!

The Polar Bears have been venturing out to Powderhorn Park on foot, where we have been molding and sculpting clay into pots, volcanoes, creatures and objects so thick they exploded in the kiln. We also cooked up some homemade clay and self-drying lint-based clay, which smelled kind of funny. Our recycled lint combined with our imaginations turned into various monsters and intern caricatures; by the end of the week we had enough work for our Thursday afternoon art show. What a week!

This week the Dolphins and the Starfish have been having a great time experimenting with mix-media sculpture. We've been creating bugs out of unusual items and toys that you might see around the house, and created habitats for our bugs to reside. This week we've also had the wonderful opportunity to explore sound and the art of radio broadcasting. We've been exploring ways to make different noises with ourselves vocally, with music instruments, and with things around our art space. Then we planned a story to tell in a radio format. In the end, we had a whole radio show that we played for all our friends and family members!

Well, it was a fantastic week here at Urban Arts, and we are all looking forward to next week's theme of "The Way We Move". Adios!