Prichard art program teaching students identity
Posted on: September 9th, 2015
By Holden Barnett | Lagniappe
On a recent Monday, visual artist Colleen Comer visited Mobile County Training School’s eighth grade class to engage them in an hour and a half art session. Her class is one in a series conducted under the Mobile Museum of Art’s “Who I Am” project, which will last four weeks and cover a wide variety of artistic mediums.
Elizabet Elliott, curator of programs at the museum and a Fairhope native, is no stranger to art.
“I was a painter for many years. I started showing when I was 16 or 17 and did pretty much exclusively that until my early 20s,” she said.
Although beginning in painting, Elliott, a graduate of Massey University in Wellington, New Zealand, and Goddard College in Port Townsend, Washington, quickly developed an interest in other artistic mediums, particularly those combining different art forms in meaningful ways.
“I found that what really drove me to art in the first place was a love of storytelling. I started exploring lots of different mediums and methodologies as a vehicle for telling a story rather than fetishizing the medium for the medium’s sake. I discovered that I am less interested in putting pigment on a canvas than what conversation you can start with whatever you are using,” Elliott said.
It was this intense interest in using art to tell narratives that led her to revisit the “Who I Am” project professionally. See full article>>