GROW at the Nasher: The Nature of Arp Tour, Part Two

Tuesday, November 27, 2018

The Nature of Arp Tour, Part Two

We visited these seven prints at the next stop in our tour. As with our first stop, we shared shapes that we recognized in these artworks. What shapes do you see?

The students saw so many different shapes in these prints - we could have spent an entire hour sharing what we saw!

3rd grade

4th grade

5th grade

Below are some popular responses from students, along with the titles that Arp gave his prints.

Arp created these for a magazine that was published by an artist friend of his named Kurt Schwitters. He combines two different things in some of his prints, such as Mustache Hat and The Navel Bottle, so you could call these hybrids. They are also examples of abstract shapes.

In the prints above and the wood reliefs from the first stop in our tour, we see that Arp often uses body parts or things we wear on our bodies (mustache, hat, shirtfront, watch) and natural things (bird, horse, the sea).

Arp loved to create artwork by chance. What does that mean? To do something without planning, by accident, or when something happens on its own without you controlling the outcome or the result.

To get an idea of how it feels to make art by chance, each student was randomly assigned a number 1 through 5.

Then, I drew a word out of two separate bags for each group to combine together into a single hybrid drawing. One word related to nature, and the other word related to the body or things we wear on our bodies.