A new book, “Draw It With Your Eyes Closed: The Art of the Art Assignment,” published by Paper Monument, is a collection of art teacher folk wisdom — the best classroom assignments that the contributors, most of them artists or art teachers, have given or received or even heard of.
Some of these assignments are quite difficult, and will make your head hurt. (“Design an abstract monument to Uncle Tom.”) Others will make you smile. (“Design a set based on L. Ron Hubbard’s ‘Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health.’”)
Some you may even wish to try at home. Here are several, plucked almost at random from this book:
“Take an 18 x 24 inch piece of paper and make a drawing using nothing but your car.”
“Design a monstrance.”
“Make a paper doll of yourself.”
“Make a sculpture / installation where everything needed to make it is included.”
“Design something to put over a child’s bed.”
“Make a tool to work on a problem that is currently unknown.”
“Redesign a rainbow.”
“Design something to sell on a street corner.”
“Defenestrate objects. Photo them in midair.”
Then there is this one, from an artist named Helen Mirra, which the book nerd in me thinks is splendid:
“Make an autobiography with books from the library. Using the Library of Congress classification system, choose books with call letters which are part of your name. Photocopy the stack of books, showing the full spines, so your name reads across the bottom of the page of the photocopy. If needed, scale the image to fit on a single sheet of paper. The titles of the books form the autobiography.”
I’m no visual artist; I can barely dress myself or draw a straight line. But I spent 20 minutes working on one such assignment, from the artist Paul Thek, who died in 1988. His directive: “Design a work of art that fits in a matchbox.” So I’ve made a Xerox of my face and my thumbprint, each roughly of equal size, and put them where the matches used to be. Eat your heart out, Joseph Cornell.
Any you’d like to try? Upload a photograph of your results here, and we’ll post some of the best.
