Art making in the gallery, solution 1: interactive art cart with touchable materials, sketching, and ‘safe’ art-making alternatives like sumi-e water painting and scratch art

PEM is undergoing an exciting construction phase which means our art studios are currently out of commission, a grave sadness to those of us who are in love with messy art projects.  Many of the materials we’ve used in the past are on the “I seriously doubt it” list when talking about doing art activities in alternate spaces like galleries or the museum’s atrium.  Such materials include recycled make-up, a variety of paints (though the atrium space can take a few more of those than galleries obviously can), liquid glue, melted wax, silk screening, glitter anything, anything with sharp tools (for stamp cutting, some clay tools), and even most clay is on the iffy side.

So what to do?

Fortunately, I’ve been collecting fun ideas in preparation for this whimsical construction period, so here are a few I’m looking forward to trying out in the near future:

Multicolored translucent paper folding (click the inspiration image to go through to the artist’s site)

Kinetic Rubber Band Art (click the image to go to the directions)

Holepunch Art (click the image to go to the artist’s site)