Our 2012 summer art camps will be offered in four sessions in July from 9:00 am to 3:00 pm each week.  To register for a camp, please click here to print and complete the Summer 2012 Art Camp Registration Form, then mail it with a $45 supply fee deposit to Luisa Tio, P.O. Box 1331, Alexandria, VA, 22313.

• Session One, July 2-6, 2012 – American Genius: An Artistic Celebration of America’s Birthday (1^st to 3^rd Grade)

Celebrate America’s birthday with a week-long exploration of American artistic genius!  We’ll work with American art visionaries this week to learn about what art is and how we can develop our own artistic imaginations.  We’ll explore how Georgia O’Keeffe changed the way we see nature by getting up close and personal with flowers and bones, take the leap from 3-D to 4-D by making sculptures move like Alexander Calder, burst through barriers in architecture with Frank Lloyd Wright, and make the ordinary extraordinary like Andy Warhol, Romare Bearden, Jasper Johns.  Come discover what’s in you that could inspire a whole generation!

• Session Two, July 9-13, 2012 – Sculpture: Trip to Another Dimension  (1^st to 3^rd Grade)

All kids know the world isn’t flat, so why should our art be?  We’ll get inspired by artists who have gotten up off the canvas to use clay, wood, and stuff they just found to bring their art into the third dimension.  We’ll learn how to discover and carve hidden sculptures like Michelangelo, master the magic Rodin used to transform clay into plaster and then bronze that seemed to come to life, add together different shapes to make sculpture puzzles like Louise Nevelson, and explore with Picasso and Andrew Goldsworthy how the things we find just laying around can be used to make some pretty amazing 3D art.  Join us and add a new dimension to your art experience!

• Session Three, July 16-20, 2012 – Unlocking the Secrets of Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex (4^th to 6^th Grade)

Leonardo da Vinci left a lot of secrets, but he solved a lot of mysteries, too – and he used art to do it all!  We’re going to study the art that da Vinci left us in his codex (notebooks) and paintings to unlock his secrets for ourselves!  How can you make objects in a drawing look closer or further away, or show the back of a three-dimensional object when you only can see the front?  What was behind Mona Lisa’s mysterious smile?  How can doodling help your noodling?  How can drawing help you figure out how things work or even imagine things that have never been created?  We’ll learn da Vinci’s painting and drawing techniques and how to use them to build amazing creations and machines from paper, wood, clay and even marshmallows (did you say marshmallows?).  We’ll each start our very own codex to create our own art that will help us investigate the world, create breakthrough designs, and solve some mysteries of our own.

• Session Four, July 23-27, 2012 – Art Around the World: Why Is Everyone Making Art? (4^th to 6^th Grade)

Why do people everywhere make art?  In our trip around the world, we’ll explore the unique ways and reasons that different cultures create art.  We’ll explore how artists from Africa to Asia to the Americas use the materials in their environments to transform pottery, fabrics, and other everyday objects into things of beauty.  We’ll also discover how cultures use art to explore their deepest questions and to celebrate the things that matter most to them.  Along the way, we’ll tell stories using Chinese calligraphy, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and petroglyphs of the Navaho (Diné), Pueblo, Chacoan and other native peoples of the American Southwest.  We’ll learn weaving techniques used by the Navaho and by the Ashanti of West Africa and the printmaking techniques the Ashanti use to adorn their fabrics.  We’ll try our hands at using clay to make objects as varied as the pottery of the native peoples of the American Southwest and models of the terracotta warriors of Xi’an, China.  But most of all, we’ll learn how no matter where we are, we just can’t stop making art!