The Identity Project

Caleb printing a soccer ball pattern.

View the slideshow for images created by students from Sonoma Academy, SOLA, Roseland Prep, and Joshibi.

Switchboard-A Meeting Place for Art Exchanges

Switchboard Photo: P.K. Weis

For 20 years I've had students involved in art exchanges with schools abroad and within the US. Through these exchanges we share artwork, our cultural identities, and deal with the issues of our times and past. This fall the theme is Identity. We will do a virtual art exchange with the SOLA school in Afghanistan, Joshibi School in Japan and Roseland University Prep . Students in Sonoma Academy's foundation art class (a beginning art course of primarily 9th graders) will be initiating the project.

This spring the studio art class (10-12th grade) will be doing an exchange with a local public school, Roseland University Prep. The theme will deal with the Iconography of the Ancient Civilizations of Mesoamerica, Rome and Greece through the Medium of Encaustic. Two collaborative works of art will be created to reside at both schools. 

Here are some projects we worked on with the Joshibi School over the past few years. These were real art exchanges where each school mailed the collaborative art pieces to display in Tokyo and Santa Rosa.

The Wax Quilt- Exchanges with Joshibi and Beijing #4

The wax quilt is a project I have been doing with my students for over 10 years. A few years ago we did and art exchange with our sister schools in Tokyo and Beijing.

I created this video to demonstrate the process and project.

After students completed the illustrations they wrote the name of the flora and fauna in Latin, Chinese or Japanese. The individual renderings were then mailed and combined with work from the sister school and sewn in the respective countries. Half of the artwork was kept by each school so that in the end each school ended up with a wax quilt made of American/ Chinese & American/ Japanese art. These quilts are permanently installed in our library and reception hall at Sonoma Academy.