Berman Week at Mission High

I was the substitute for a week-and-a-half for Ms. Freedman’s computer art class at Mission High School. As an artist with a limited amount of time to pass on some knowledge to the next generation, I wanted to do something special.

If it were a traditional analog class, I would have centered the lesson about some of the techniques I use in my own practice. But this class works in Photoshop, and I know that the skills they’ll be learning from Ms. Freedman are beyond what I can do.

So I made the lesson about the process of making art as a form of inquiry. I talked about how my City of Awesome project was about investigating, “What makes San Francisco so aweseome?” We did a little bit of brainstorming, then I set them free to make their art.

We made a large collaborative collage/brainstorm mural on the wall as a way to keep the ideas flowing. As I tried giving students ideas about the next step they could take with their art, I decided to follow the advice I was giving them and to try taking pictures of the paper drawings and collages and playing with the pictures in Photoshop.

I’ve documented the process on this blog in the #BermanWeekAtMissionHS posts.

I’ve shared a random selection of some of the more striking student art, but certainly not all of my favorites.