Making Main Street: Buildings in Transition
A collaboration with first graders from the Palouse Prairie School of Expeditionary Learning
McConnell Building (detail).
In fall 2012 I was a visiting artist for Lizzie Bromley-Vogel's First Grade Class at the Palouse Prairie School of Expeditionary Learning in Moscow, ID. Lizzie's students studied twelve of the buildings on Moscow's Main Street, creating drawings and black and white relief prints based on what the structures look like today, as well as what they looked like in photographs from the turn of the century. This art project was part of a larger study of the Moscow community and its history, with students learning what life was like 100 years ago. As visiting artist, I talked to Lizzie's class to talk about my own artwork, which explores architecture, mapping, and experience of place, and helped the students draw their buildings.
Inspired by my visit to Palouse Prairie, I decided to create my own images to explore the changing nature of architecture on Moscow's Main Street. Incorporating both elements from old photographs and impressions of the current state of structures, I created silkscreen prints to complement and reinforce the work of the first graders.
All the prints were shown in an exhibit titled "Making Main Street: Buildings in Transition," as part of the City of Moscow's Art Walk in June 2013. To prepare for the show, Lizzie and I reprinted all the students' relief blocks: Images that address buildings in their past form were printed in white ink on black paper and images that address buildings in their present form were printed in black ink on white paper. The students' prints were displayed alongside my color prints as shown in images 1, 2, 4, and 5 below.
Click on any thumbnail below to begin viewing this series in the image viewer. This work can also be viewed at my Good(bye) Buildings project website: www.goodbyebuildings.com.
Click on any thumbnail above to begin viewing series in image viewer.