Conceptual Art at Home
KSMoCA Conceptual Art at Home is a series of short conceptual art prompts designed for K-5 students (and anyone else) exploring conceptual contemporary art. Prompts are written by artists who have worked with KSMoCA, and some of our friends.
Share with us! If you end up doing any of these projects at home, we would love to see your work. Please tag it #conceptualartathome or send us an email with an image of your project to ksmoca@gmail.com.
What is Conceptual Art?
“In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair.”
—Sol Lewitt ‘Paragraphs on Conceptual Art’, 1967
Assignments
Assignment #1: Make An Instrument
My dad taught himself to play the piano on a cardboard piano. Make up an instrument and play it.
Lisa Jarrett is an artist and educator. She exists and makes socially engaged work within the African Diaspora, and she recently discovered that her primary medium is questions. She is the co-founder and co-director of KSMoCA and is Assistant Professor of Community and Context Arts at PSU.
Assignment #2: an outfit you would never wear
Make a drawing of yourself in an outfit you would never wear.
Roz Crews is an artist who makes work about education, friendship, and community-formation. She teaches research and social practice classes at Portland State University, and during Covid-19 quarantine, she’s teaching an intergenerational drawing class on Zoom. She’s a program manager at KSMoCA.
Assignment #3: Laundry Sculpture
Fold a load of laundry very carefully and stack up all of the clothes on your bed. Take a photo of the clothes stacks as if they were sculptures. Then put the laundry away as usual.
About Harrell Fletcher
Harrell Fletcher is an Artist, Co-Founder of KSMoCA, and Professor of Art and Social Practice at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon.
Assignment #4: Diet Diary
Draw your stomach and inside of it, draw what you ate today. You can even do this every day. Think of the collection of daily drawings as a diet diary. You can also draw what your poop looks like after your meals. Eventually, you will start seeing connections between what you eat, and how it makes your poop look.
Ralph Pugay is an artist and teacher in Portland OR.
Assignment #5: Shape Landscape
Working on a single sheet of paper, ask the people you live with to each draw a simple shape using your favorite drawing material. Then create a larger composition that connects those shapes together into a landscape you'd like to visit.
Samantha Wall is an artist working in Portland, Oregon. Originally from Seoul, South Korea, Wall immigrated to the United States as a child. Wall’s images explore identity through the push and pull of cultural diaspora and human interconnectedness. Her work has been featured in both solo and group exhibitions regionally and nationally.
Assignment #6: Flag for an Imagined place
Design a flag for a place you wish existed. Hang the flag in your window.
Amanda Leigh Evans is an artist, educator, craftsperson and cultivator who lives in Portland, OR. She directs the The Living School of Art (a holistic art collective of neighbors in an affordable housing building) and is a program manager at KSMoCA.