Fallston High students create another wall mosaic, one piece at a time, by Matt Button, The Aegis: Baltimore Sun, November 4, 2016
A group of Fallston High School students stood around a large table staring at hundreds of pieces of colorful broken glass, small pieces of tile and other materials Wednesday morning in art teacher Andrea Sauer’s classroom.
The students are creating a large mosaic art piece, which they have been working on since last month.
Under the direction of Sauer and artist Susan Stockman, the students sift through bins of glass and use various cutting tools to form and shape pieces large and small to fill the mosaic’s backer board.
A grant through the Maryland State Arts Council helped fund half of the project, with in-school and community fundraising fulfilling the other portion, according to Sauer.
Stockman is a mosaic muralist, who has helped Sauer and students create two other mosaic pieces over the past few years. Those pieces hang in the school’s cafeteria and just outside the main office.
This year’s theme of attending to the body, mind and soul was developed after much discussion among students, Sauer said.
“We had a lot of discussion about the project, we talked a lot in terms of how in school we tend to focus on the neck up, that we are concentrating so much on the academics,” Sauer explained, as she looked over the artwork in process around the room. “It’s about in this day and age, when we are bombarded by social media, advertising and all these different aspects, to be mindful of who we are as people and that a lot of our wisdom and knowledge comes from within.”
As Sauer talked, the next group of students begin to flow in and gather around the table.
“Don’t be afraid to be a bit of a critic, stand back and think for a minute, pause before you glue pieces down,” Stockman advised them.
“We spent a long time on the design and concept and now we really want to focus on execution,” the artist continued, as the new group scattered around the room to begin working. “This piece will be hanging in your hallway for like decades to come and we want to make sure that we are using the best skills to put it together.”
The students worked together, with some gathering more materials while others placed pieces and glued them down.
Senior Sabrina Parker said she is happy to be involved in the project.
“It’s a project of us growing as a person from our experiences and our challenges,” she said. “I’m going through a lot in my life and this really calms me down; art is like a coping skill for me.”
Fellow senior Michele Crapanzano, who plans to study art in college, said she is really excited to be working on the project, too, because it brings the whole class together.
“Kids that you would never expect that you would be friends with maybe, you just bond over simple things like cutting glass and creating a beautiful piece of artwork,” she said.
When completed, the 60-foot long mosaic mural will be installed along the wall just outside Sauer’s art room on the second floor of the school. A public unveiling is planned for 2:30 p.m. on Nov. 18, according to Sauer.
With meticulous precision, fifth graders at Hamilton Elementary/Middle School lay broken pieces of glass and tile on what will eventually become a mosaic tree as part of the school’s living classroom.
“We’re using this leftover glass because we want to recycle it and make something beautiful out of it,” said student Adaline.
A group called “Arts Every Day” and Point Breeze Credit Unit are helping students create an outdoor classroom. They’re combining lessons in the arts and sciences.
“It’s just a great way to empower students to be a change agent within their school,” Julia Di Bussolo said. “To be advocates for the arts and environmental causes.”
What the teachers love most about this project is the students don’t often realize what they’re doing is educational.
“They’re more engaged,” Danna Kerns-Sterett said. “They take on different leadership roles we don’t always get to see in the classroom. They feel more confident, so it really benefits the kids.”
Arts Every Day works with about 30 other city schools to provide them with arts integration programs and keep arts alive in the classroom.
Find the interview and article, here.
Follow Megan Knight on Twitter @Knightfromabc2 and Facebook @MeganKnightNews .
Fallston High School art students created a permanent art display for their school for a second year. Under the direction of art teacher Andrea Sauer, MSAC artists-in-residence, Sue Stockman and Bobby Malzone, 100 students produced a 300-square-foot mosaic for the school’s cafeteria. Funding came from a grant from the Maryland State Arts Council.Students participated in all aspects of the mural process, from creating sketches on the theme of “legacy” to learning how to break mirror and tile to fashion the imagery to layout, gluing, and grouting. The final result—a design of swirling, arching curves—will serve as a living legacy of the student artists who created it.
Artists are as plugged into modern technology as anybody else these days. Not only is the proof of that statement hanging on the walls of the Howard County Arts Council’s Gallery I, but some of the proof is being projected on its walls for the three-artist exhibit “Digital Disclosure: UMBC Faculty Perspectives.”This academic trio displays high-tech ways in which artists acknowledge art history while also taking art forward.
Neal McDonald, for instance, has an interest in traditional drawing and printmaking. These traditionally have been hands-on activities, but McDonald’s choices for lines and colors are generated by running a photographic data-oriented computer program.
Ironically, this machine-generated art takes nature as its subject matter. McDonald has a projected animation titled “workly.com/redraws” shown against a gallery wall. It features a high-angle view of closely spaced trees that collectively create a leafy green canopy.
Hanging nearby are prints that also depict natural imagery. In “Draws/Redraws Print,” a tree’s solid brown trunk is flanked and dwarfed in near-surreal fashion by huge green leaves.
The mark-making activity in other prints ranges from the densely applied black lines crossing each other in SketchCloud” to the more spare application of isolated straight lines in “Cloud, Little, Fluffy.”
The second artist in this exhibit, Steven Silberg, is intrigued by how the basic video unit of the pixel is deployed for digital data that, as Silberg observes in an artist statement, is subject to degradation and decay.
Thinking back to 19th-century photographic studies of human beings in motion, Silberg has a video and related archival inkjet prints in a series titled “After Muybridge, After Marey.” Soccer players, cyclists and jugglers are almost impossible to make out as individual athletes in the extremely dark imagery, but flickers of light give a sense of their movement.
Silberg has additional video-reliant artworks in this exhibit that also explore ideas about human movement and, more specifically, about how visitors to the gallery will find live video images of themselves projected onto a wall. So, comb your hair and walk with confidence.
The third artist, Vin Grabill, has videos titled “Frontier” and “Sky Buy” in which the overlaid imagery includes shots of windows, water and sky. The imagery is broken up by gridded lines.
Related to some of this moving imagery, Grabill also has video stills from “Frontier” that have been printed on canvas. Here the gridded lines are laid over photographic shots of parked cars at a suburban mall. This unpeopled scene seems like a bleak car-populated landscape.
In a separate exhibit in Gallery II, the 15 artists in “Ordinary Woman” zestfully make the most of their mixed medium materials in order to make dresses installed on mannequins standing on the gallery floor. Each mannequin is also accompanied by an artist self-portrait hanging on the wall in this exhibit curated by Diana Marta.
Among the most innovative of the exhibiting artists is Susan Stockman. Her “Shattered Goddess Embodied” is a hollow-bodied, fragmentary female form made out of copper, bone, paint brushes, wire and fabric. Its extended metal wings conjure up the goddess of the title. Stockman’s accompanying self-portrait is painted on translucent silk, giving her smiling face a slightly ethereal quality.
Another artist making clever use of eclectic materials is Mary Deacon Opasik. Her “Collector” is an assemblage whose component parts include plastic figurines, beer caps and oyster shells. The corresponding self-portrait is made out of materials including metal chains, rings and beads.
Quite different from such metal-reliant figures is Jessica Walton’s “Remnants.” It is composed of so many overlapping strips of variously colored fabric that the result is a very full dress that’s emotionally full of good cheer.
If most of the exhibiting artists make visually busy figures, the most striking artwork in this show is the simplest. Nicole Buckingham’s “Nike’s Dress” is a white plaster-coated wire mesh figure. Just as the ancient Greek sculptors deftly carved marble in order to emulate the appearance of folds of cloth, Buckingham has created a motionless plaster figure that seems full of life. Her accompanying self-portrait is no more than an empty white wood frame, meaning her female statue tells you all you need to know.
“Digital Disclosure: UMBC Faculty Perspectives” and “Ordinary Woman” run through Feb. 21 at the Howard County Arts Council, 8510 High Ridge Road, in Ellicott City. There is a reception Friday, Jan. 24, 6- 8 p.m.; the reception snow date is Jan. 31. Call 410-313-2787 or go to http://www.hocoarts.org
Copyright © 2014, The Baltimore Sun
Read more: http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/howard/columbia/ph-ho-go-digital-art-0123-20140116,0,3085636.story#ixzz2xdIEeyD1
Beams from tensor lamps make the colored beads, shards of glass and pieces of silver on Sue Stockman’s worktable come to life as she talks about her career as a multifaceted artist. From intricate earrings to large wall-mounted mosaics, she has built a national reputation for design innovations and an ever-broadening range of skills. For her, the art she creates comes from an inner desire to find beauty in a broken world by turning fractured and found things into objects to behold.
Her mosaic murals can be found on the walls of schools and public buildings on both sides of the Bay Bridge, including the Talbot County Senior Center and the St. Michaels Community Center. And lately she is focusing more time and intensity on teaching others how to come together and participate in the process of making art.
“My work has moved on and a lot of what I do now is to facilitate kids and adults to create large pieces that are collaborative in nature,” she says. “I teach a lot about cooperation and a shared vision. I really like that, whether I am teaching at the Senior Center or painting on silks or mosaicing, there is no where else for me to be.”
It was that passion for her art work that helped her win First Prize in the Ron Cubbison Alumni Exhibition and Travel Awards competition at her alma mater, Towson University. The $7,000 prize awarded in September was created by Cubbison, a long-time arts professor at Towson who died in 2008. He intended it to help his former students gain a broader view of art and the world through travel.Stockman remembers Cubbison, who was her teacher in the mid-1980s, as a very demanding instructor who knew when a student was trying to just get by. “He knew if you spent your full ten hours on a piece. You couldn’t fake it. His critiques were harsh.”Her life and work partner, Bobby Malzone, a woodworker by trade who now teaches with Stockman, says that he had an early feeling she would win the Cubbison Award and encouraged her through the year long, step-by-step process to enter. She had to send in ten pieces that had been made since 2009, along with reams of documentation. Then she was juried into the final exhibition with five pieces.
“Sue has been an iconic, collectible and successful jewelry maker and metal smith in this area for 20 years, and there was nary a piece of jewelry submitted,” Malzone says. “She went solely with what is driving her today, which is mosaic work.”
Stockman says her friends were skeptical about her submissions. “People were saying, ‘What are you doing? That is not your strongest work.’” As the final jury stage approached, Stockman says she was having second thoughts about the process. It is one thing to have a show where people come in and like your work or don’t, but this was a competition where she was going to be judged. “I had a whole panic attack just walking into the building.”
The former Cubbison students were divided into undergraduate and graduate competitions, and Stockman took first in the undergraduate category. It is just the latest accolade in a career that can be traced back to her childhood when she used to hammer copper wire into forms in the basement of her family home near Denton.
“I started out at Towson as a biology major, but then I found out that I had to learn chemistry, and that sucked. And when we were supposed to work on live animals, I walked out in protest.” That is when she switched to the study of art full time.
of Bobby Malzone and Sue Stockman.
Before she graduated from Towson, she took a year to study at the Glassell School of Art, part of the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas. “I was working as a bartender in Houston and I was making jewelry, so I would wear my work to the bar. It was a nice, upscale place and I would get commissions,” Stockman says. “Before I left Houston, I had a show at the Museum of Fine Arts. It was serendipitous. I went to them to talk about getting work in their gift shop and they said, ‘Oh, are you here for the First Choice Exhibit?’ and I said, ‘Ah, yes, I am.’ It was a very, very successful show. I said, ‘Wow, this is going to work.’ It helped me build my confidence.”
After returning to Towson, and before her graduation, Stockman says she started teaching at the Howard County Center for the Arts. “I am a good teacher, and I love what I do. I love the product, but I also love the journey to get there. Everyone needs a release, some way to process the crazy world we live in. That was a mesh right from the beginning, and you really learn your subject by teaching it.”
Stockman’s first students were adults interested in learning how to make jewelry, but she says that after her children were born she began taking her art into school classrooms. “I had a whole different affinity towards children once I had one. I have amazing kids, but I never stopped working to raise my kids. I moved them into the studio with me.” She says bringing her children into her studio made her take another look at the chemicals she was using to make her art objects. “I didn’t want them to be breathing that in, and maybe I shouldn’t be breathing it either. It really made me clean up my act.”
She has been an active member of the Maryland State Art Council’s Artist-in-Residence program for several years teaching children how to turn abstract ideas into physical forms. She and Malzone start each class project with a brainstorming session to get the children excited about what they are going to make. They try to get all of the students involved, from design, to breaking pottery, glass and mirrors, to the final assembly of a mural.
“At first, there is a disbelief that kids will be able to do it themselves, and even after they are finished, they can’t believe they made it,” Malzone says. Stockman adds, “Even after it is up and on the wall, they can’t believe they did it.”
Theresa Colvin, executive director of the Maryland State Arts Council, says she has known Stockman as artist and teacher for more than 15 years and owns some of her jewelry creations. “She has a wonderful warmth about her. Her strength is her sense of compassion and empathy with the students and her willingness to help them along. She makes sure that the students are well engaged in the process and that they feel successful. She’s a great lady.”
As for their travel plans, Stockman and Malzone are heading for Barcelona, Spain, in April and May. The city is known around the world for the major influences of mosaic artist and architect Antoni Gaudi. “The real ‘winning’ thing was as soon as we started dreaming about winning the Cubbison and going to Barcelona, we realized we could go even if she didn’t win,” Malzone says.
“At first it was about going to Barcelona, a place that I want to go to and an artist’s work that I want to see,” Stockman says. “But then it became an exercise in identifying the next place I have to go to be inspired.”
When they return, the next phase of winning the Cubbison Award kicks in. Stockman has to prepare an art exhibit to be shown in 2014 to let the world see what she learned on her latest journey.
For more information about Sue Stockman and her art, visit www.suestockman.com.
Dick Cooper is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist. He and his wife, Pat, live and sail in St. Michaels, Maryland. He can be contacted at dickcooper@coopermediaassociates.com.
Arundel High School students on Tuesday formally dedicated an 80-foot mural that will serve as a symbol of the school’s signature program. The mural was painted and constructed over a 10-day period this spring by nearly 150 students with the help of a local artist-in-residence.
Its design, featuring a mosaic globe and colorful sunbeams, was inspired by the Community Development and Global Citizenship program at Arundel. “It’s about reaching out and hopefully pulling people in, and welcoming them,” said Frankie Wilson, a senior who helped lead the art project.
The mural has transformed a once-gray concrete wall into a stretch of color. Students worked under the supervision of Art Department chair Sheila Brooks and Susan Stockman, an artist whose work appears in schools as part of the state’s artist-in-residence program.
Stockman said she worked with students on a wide range of ideas for the mural, all inspired by major global issues, ranging from the conflict in Syria to world food shortages.
The mural was funded using donations and a matching-funds grant from the Maryland State Arts Council.
Students at Polaris Expeditionary Learning School recycled broken dinner dishes, bathroom tiles and other items to create two beautiful mosaic art pieces that represent their school culture and local community.
With the help of two guest artists, 20 students participated in the “Little Piece of My Heart” course to create the mosaic pieces as part of Intensives Week at Polaris.
Intensives, which take place three times a year, are weeklong enrichment experiences designed to teach students analytical and critical thinking along with hands-on skills.
Students choose an area of in-depth study that may focus on service learning projects, the arts, careers, adventure or outdoor skills.
Two visiting artists from Maryland, Sue Stockman and Bobby Malzone, along with Polaris teacher Matt Strand guided the sixth- to 12th-grade students as they brainstormed, sketched out their ideas and went through the creative process as they developed the original pieces.
“We decided we wanted to do something that was reflected right here in our community,” Strand said. “We also wanted something that represented the adventure program and our Polaris community. These were created around those experiences.”
One of the two large mosaic art pieces showcases Larimer County’s Horsetooth Rock, Poudre River and the outdoor community. The other mosaic piece portrays people sitting around a campfire and tents to represent Polaris’ spirit of adventure.
Both pieces, made entirely of reused and donated materials, were installed as permanent art pieces near the entrance of the school.
Strand said he often leads adventure trips with students during Intensives Week.
As a change, this time he decided to stay in town and work on an artistic project with students.
“It was a chance to create something beautiful,” he said. “I also like the fact that this project didn’t equate drawing talent with artistic talent.”
Stockman and Malzone, who often work with schools through the Maryland State Arts Council, said they enjoyed working with the Polaris students while also visiting family in Fort Collins.
“This project allows kids to collaborate and create a legacy of beauty for a lifetime for their school,” Stockman said. “It also gave us a chance to introduce to the kids another concept of what a professional artist does.”
Sue Stockman is understandably pleased when she views a mosaic mural she and woodworker Bobby Malzone have just finished installing, such as the recently hung 6-foot by 30-foot piece adorning the exterior of the Eastport Elementary School. It’s colorful, decorative, reflects the area around the school’s location, and perhaps most important, the students helped create it. For these St. Michael’s artists, what’s more pleasing is hearing the students talk about their experience
“I had fun. I learned that you can make anything you just have to believe in yourself,” said Daniel from Riviera Beach Elementary, where the 3-foot by 10-foot mural he worked on, incorporating indigenous plants and animals, including bull nose ray, rockfish, jellyfish, heron and blue crab hangs.
“I learned that working with a group was fun,” said fellow classmate Haley.
Victoria, another student, said, “I liked when we had to put the cement down and really use our muscles to use the rag and get the stuff off the glass and tiles. Finally after all that hard work, I think it looks really great.”
Hailey added, “I loved what we did and I want to do it again. I loved how we made the cattails, the turtles, and everything else. The most fun was when Bobby sang songs to us, everybody was happy and not mad at anybody. People had fun gluing and breaking and enjoying themselves. I had so much fun with Sue, she was the one that wanted to talk about the day and listen to everyone talk their talk. I really had fun with all the music and dancing. I love the mosaic.”
Many of these mosaic school projects are funded through the state AiE (Artists-in-Residence Program) that allows students, faculty, and artists the opportunity to participate in a collaborative creative program. Other funds may come from a county arts program, Title I funding, or local fund-raising. An AiE project may last for an intensive week or be spread out over a longer period of time. It might be performance, puppetry, theater, playwriting, architecture, ceramics, fiber art, photography, sculpture, music, poetry, or other creations.
The students, faculty, and artists participate in the collaborative creative program, from idea submission (from drawing contests to discussions) to design to material collection (in the case of a mural project, glass, plates and dishes, bottles, and other elements) to installation.
“The students bring in the broken pieces and glue them into place, giving them ownership,” says Stockman. By using found objects, they learn the value of recycling materials and environmental awareness. The completed piece is a visual reminder and conveys the students’ pride. “Students are grouped together to create an element and then the elements are joined. The emphasis,” says Stockman, “is on teamwork and the shared pride that results in creating a large impressive piece of artwork.”
“Almost every child knows which piece or pieces he or she applied to the mosaic and proudly shows where it is in the mural,” says Lynne Evans, Eastport’s principal.
“Bobby,” Stockman said, “has natural talent to connect to kids and he brings in the element of music with his guitar and some of the children work on songs about what we were creating. They sing songs while working on the mosaic, adding another dimension,” to projects that she hasn’t been able to include before.
As the older students are taught to use and are trusted with professional tools and materials that could be considered risky, they develop pride knowing that those supervising have confidence in them to use these items correctly. “Everyone treats everyone with respect and kindness,” says Stockman, “and they know they have to be safe. Rarely does anyone have to be reprimanded.”
Stockman has worked on seven local mural projects this year. Her, and the students’ work can be seen at St. Michael’s High, St. Michael’s elementary, Chapel District elementary, Eastport, Riviera Beach, Hillcrest and the Annapolis Area Christian School. If you have photos of murals created at any local schools, email them to the editor at heather@tasteofthebay.net and we’ll post them on our Facebook page for all to see.
By Kelley L. Allen, Staff Writer
EASTON— After placing broken pieces onto the mosaic for more than five weeks, local artist Susan Stockman and her muses unveiled the finished piece at the Talbot County Senior Center Wednesday afternoon.
Seniors gathered around the mosaic, installed on the east wall of the center at 400 Brookletts Ave. Pieces of broken ceramics combine to make the 36-inch-by-60-inch piece, filled with colorful images.
At the bottom, near the center, is a red high-heeled shoe. That represents Naomi Reed, a senior center advocate who died in 2005.
“That’s Naomi’s shoe,” one woman said at the installation.
The face in the center represents no one, but the other images represent the seniors.
“They wished to include the water of the Eastern Shore, the importance of sharing meals, their religious faith, their travels, their family trees, their love of music and art and games, and their recollections of loved ones gone before them,” Stockman said.
Stockman gathered recycled, broken pieces of things like wedding plates and tiles and brought them to the center on Mondays, where she and the seniors worked on the piece. They glued the last piece onto the mosaic Monday.
As they worked, the seniors shared stories with Stockman. Those stories came alive in the mosaic, which is filled with images of paintbrushes, musical notes, games and other colorful symbols that represent the seniors, their lives and what they do at the center.
The mosaic embodies the wisdom, beauty and worth of our elders, Stockman said, and she titled it “Sharing Stories.”
“There is a parallel between taking things that have been discarded and creating beauty,” she said. “It’s about honoring our elders and them not feeling discarded.”
The Maryland State Arts Council awarded the Talbot County Arts Council a $1,250 grant to support the creation and installation of the mosaic. The Talbot County Council provided matching funds.
Gerry Early from the Talbot County Arts Council and County Councilman Len Wendowski attended the installation, along with more than 20 people, mostly seniors from the center.
The center is set for dedication next month, and is still raising money for furnishings. (Photo credit Star Democrat.)
From left, Annapolis Elementary School third-graders Rahmier Chase, Serenity Myers, Michele Holmes, I’esha Johnson and Fredy Salmoran create a mosaic with artist Sue Stockman. With funding from grants and the school’s Parent-Teacher Association, Stockman spent last week at Annapolis Elementary as an artist in residence. The mosaic mural will hang in the school’s media center.
Students at Annapolis Elementary School worked the State House into their Annapolis mosaic last week, along with local wildlife like terrapins and blue crabs.
Photo by Paul W. Gillespie – The Capital
CDES fifth graders create fourth mosaic mural, decorate school hallways
CORDOVA—In 2005 it was a cheetah. The next year it was an eagle, followed by a rockfish. This year Chapel District Elementary School fifth-grade students completed a mosaic depicting a terrapin diving into underwater grasses. The mural was dedicated May 22 in ceremonies at the school.
“Adults have been told as kids that they aren’t good at art and it carries with them,” said local artist Susan Stockman, who planned and supervised the work. “Kids are more open and less afraid of failure.”
The student artists working on the mural are from the classes of art teacher Vaughn Volungis, who coordinates what has become an annual project. Although Stockman completes the pattern for the children and gives them suggestions, she also uses Volungis as a guide.
“Sue has a natural talent for working with students,” Volungis said. “She really gets them involved and keeps them busy with her well-organized activities.”
The project was completed in five days and keep on the stage in the school’s cafeteria during its construction.
“The medium is so simple to do and the results are always spectacular,” Stockman said. “I teach adults (mosaics) and I tell them, I have fourth and fifth graders that do this.”
This year’s mural dedication included principal Elizabeth Cassidy and school manager Hester McNeil, as well as Stockman and Volungis. Special guests were Talbot County Superintendent of Schools Dr. Karen Salmon, TCPS Arts Coordinator Kathy Dill and Monica Heinsohn of the Talbot County School Board.
The Talbot County Arts Council, which helped sponsor the project using funds allocated by the Talbot County Council, was represented by board member Rima Parkhurst. The project was also sponsored by the CDES PTO.
“It’s important for our kids to learn about the environment and what an important tool art can be,” Stockman said.
Published: Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Story and photos by KATIE SULLIVAN Community Editor