Run for President Tour, Part One

All GROW students visited the Nasher for their first tour of the year during October and November, focusing on the timely special exhibition Kathryn Andrews: Run for President. The next four blog posts will take an in-depth look at each stop of the tour.  Each tour was wonderfully unique; the students had strong opinions and astute observations about the topic and artworks, leading to rich conversations and slight variations between activities and artworks visited during the tours.

Visit 1 Vocabulary:

president / presidente

campaign / campañ​​a

narrative / narrativa

relationship / relación​

context / contexto

To begin the tour, we discussed the tour theme Run for President. We talked about the responsibilities of a President and recalled names of former U.S. Presidents. Students were asked to make two lists in their journals: qualities of a good leader or President, and qualities of a not-so-good leader or President.

2nd grade

2nd grade

3rd grade

4th grade

4th grade

5th grade

The students were extremely thoughtful as they wrote their lists. Below are some of the words they wrote in their journals.

Qualities of a good leader

nice, responsible, fair, helpful, smart, good, respectful (these were the most common words - nice was written the most often by far)
kind, honest, friendly, fun, trustworthy, creative
does what's right, does what the Constitution says, keeps people safe
makes the world a better place

Qualities of a bad leader

mean, racist, unfair, bad, selfish, irresponsible, not helpful (these were the most common words - mean was written the most often by far)
rude, judgmental, disrespectful, dishonest, not smart, untrustworthy

doesn't take care of us, doesn't make good decisions, doesn't make good laws
doesn't do what's right

Keeping these qualities in mind, we visited our first artwork and learned that Bozo the Clown, a beloved children's show character, ran for President in 1984 after someone in the media said "put the real Bozo in the White House". This documentary photograph shows Bozo's official announcement launching his presidential campaign. The students debated whether they thought a clown would or would not make a good President. Several students had very strong opinions on this topic!

2nd grade

3rd grade

5th grade

5th grade

We then turned our attention to a nearby sculpture by Kathryn Andrews inspired by the popular Bozo Bop Bag toy.

Bozo Bop Bag toy

"Bozo"™ "The World's Most Famous Clown" Bop Bag with Occasional Performance (Pink Variation) by Kathryn Andrews

We talked about the similarities and differences between the toy and the sculpture, and reasons why Kathryn Andrews may have made certain changes. How many similarities and differences do you see?

2nd grade

4th grade

5th grade

Stay tuned for Part Two of the Run for President tour!