An eerily lifelike J. Seward Johnson sculpture of a woman sitting on a bench prompted Karimah Warren to make a paper mache sculpture of Rosa Parks sitting on a bus.
When Horace Madre circled John Foster's outdoor sculpture, "Drumbeat," it reminded him of a tank. He fashioned his own bright green one, and said he wanted people to think about the implications of war.
Deanna Lawrence connected with a print of a Japanese woman combing her hair, Utamaro's 1791 woodcut, "Woman Combing," and created her own print of an American woman brushing her teeth -- "something from everyday life," she explained.
Students from the art club at the John F. Reynolds School in North Philadelphia visited the Philip and Muriel Berman Museum of Art on the Ursinus College campus at the beginning of the spring semester. A few months later, they brought back some art of their own, inspired by pieces they "adopted" from the museum's permanent collection. They presented the art and gave a talk on their experience at the end of the college semester.
It was just what the museum's founder had in mind when he spoke of outdoor sculpture: "What you see in it is more in your mind, from your mind, from your own cultural background, than what the artist is creating. The piece is a vehicle to start to think about your own experience," the late Philip Berman had said.
In that same spirit, the youngsters from Reynolds School each selected a work of art from the museum's collection, took away with them a slide or digital print of the work, researched the medium and artist and responded with their own works.
Five outdoor sculptures, five prints and drawings and five paintings from the collection of the Berman Museum were made available for study to 20 students, mostly in fifth, sixth and seventh grades. All the works shared a thematic emphasis on the body.
"The trip to the museum has really inspired me to work a lot harder," said Kylia Warren. She said it was the blue color which drew her attention to Francoise Gilot's lithograph, "Flora," and she produced several works in blue and red tones. "I wanted to experiment with two different colors. I wanted to see how the colors changed the expression of the painting," she said.
Wilson Thomas said that one piece really "stood out" for him. "Nudes," by Perlott-Csaba, a 20th century tempera in paper, made him realize, "it's all right to show people as they are. The girls (in the painting) don't look perfect or happy."
And Karimah Warren said that Szabo's "Peasant" sent a "powerful statement." The subject, she felt "was homeless and out on his luck, probably because of his drinking." The message is to stay in school and not drink, she said. The painting reminded her of another artist she studied, Frida Kahlo, and "how the bad things in her life affected her."
The year-long pilot program, funded by a Congressionally-mandated grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, was designed to help students develop an understanding of the role of the museum in society and to help them engage on a personal level with a work of art through the process of "adopting" a work of their own.
Susan Shifrin, the museum's curator of education, who oversaw the project, said it embodied the museum's emphasis on visual literacy, which means, "teaching those with whom we work to become comfortable with making meaning through visual imagery." The program was successful, she said, because all the students "remarked on changes they experienced in their ways of seeing and understanding, their ways of constructing meaning through their art, changes to their self-perceptions and self-esteem, and most importantly, to their senses of capacity and potential."
During the program, Ursinus students helped select works for the students and mentored them during visits and through e-mails. The elementary school students had access to copies of the Museum's data sheets for their works and toured the Museum's storage areas, where they first encountered most of the works they "adopted." This was also the first time that any of them had been in a museum storage vault.
On the last visit of the semester to the Berman Museum, the Reynolds students toured the Annual Student Art Show at Ursinus, as a means of looking toward the future.
Said Kylia Warren, "I want to see my own work hanging in a museum one day."
Ursinus College, founded in 1869, is a highly selective, nationally ranked, independent, coeducational liberal arts college, located on a scenic, wooded, 165-acre campus, 28 miles from Center City Philadelphia. Known for quality programs in the arts and sciences, it is one of only 8 percent of U.S. colleges to possess a chapter of Phi Beta Kappa.
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