Oldenburg Project

Vote on your favorite Claes Oldenburg sculpture. Leave a comment explaining your choice and why. We will be working on a new project inspired by Oldenburg - a collaborative sculpture on a large scale. Include your idea for the subject of our sculpture in your comment.


Floor Burger, 1962

Clothespin, 1976

Floor Cake, 1962
Spoonbridge and Cherry, 1985-88

Balancing Tools, 1984

Claes Oldenburg

Claes Oldenburg creates sculpture based on commonplace objects, often food. He uses a variety of media, from soft fabric and paper to steel and aluminum. The scale of his sculptures also vary. Some fill one corner of a room and others are several stories tall. He transforms the everyday into the extraordinary.

Watch this video of curators assembling one of his works.

Surrealist Collage Project

Follow the steps in this slideshow to create your own Surrealist collage. When you're finished, comment on your experience with this project.

Surrealism

Listen to some first impressions of the painting The Persistence of Memory, 1931 by Salvador Dali (move your cursor over the bottom of the image and press play). What do you think?

How about these paintings by Rene Magritte?




Time Transfixed, 1938



Personal Values, 1958

Salvador Dali and Rene Magritte were part of the Surrealist movement in the early part of the twentieth century (1930s-1950s). The objects in their paintings are distorted and combined in unusual ways as if they are part of a dream world. Surreal means "beyond reality" or "resembling a dream". They were heavily influenced by Sigmund's Freud's ideas about the subconscious and the importance of dreams.

Share your thoughts about these paintings in the comments section.

Halloween Origami Project

Materials:

• origami paper

Follow the steps in this video demonstration to create your own origami bat.

Origami

Origami is the Japanese art of paperfolding. "Ori" means fold, and "kami" means paper in Japanese. Check out these origami projects. There are so many possibilities.