BLACK HISTORY MONTH ART PROJECT: AARON DOUGLAS

Every year art teacher Jenn Atwell picks an artist to explore for Black History Month. "The artist we're inspired by this year is Aaron Douglas who lived soon after the end of slavery," says Mrs. Atwell. "We all put a piece of ourselves in our art so with this project we talked about the Great Migration and what the artists and musicians who lived during that time were trying to express. A lot of Douglas's work deals with suffering and he often depicted this through biblical allegories, showing how different characters in the Bible suffered and how God helped them through it."

For this project, every student picked a story in the Bible that deals with a struggle of some type. "We talked about suffering: what does it mean? It's not just physical pain. It is also God's molding," says Mrs. Atwell.  "Our project this month has been making tunnel books with the themes of Aaron Jackson's work. I try to have our Black History Month projects be very exploratory. Students had the opportunity to cut out different symbols and make their books look very 3D."