The Arts
The Art Room offers youth a wide variety of fun and educational cultural arts activities enabling youth to expand their imaginations and creativity. Programs are offered both in the visual and performing arts and include painting projects, creative poster contests, 3-D/sculpture projects, pottery clubs, music making, drama club, keyboarding club, guitar club, songwriting club, club runway, multicultural arts & crafts, beading & jewelry making, artist inspiration, recycled art, and various programs catered to different age levels and interests. Youth can also participate in independent art, put on short plays and puppet shows, and free play on the piano & organ.
Garden Club with Mr. Altman!
For the past months, we’ve been preparing for this summer’s Garden Club to begin by planting seedlings of some of our favorite herbs, vegetables, and flowers. As soon as Club members walk through the door, they’re checking the last day’s growth, which in the case of our sunflowers, you can almost watch as it happens!
Throughout the month of May, we’ll be getting our Club garden tilled and spend some of the month’s sunniest afternoons sowing and weeding its crop. Donations of seeds, plants, tools are always appreciated, but the gift that the kids love the most is your time. Stop by and lend a hand!
A No Waste Paper Company
Early this month, a group comprised of mostly fourth graders began behaving very strangely in the Art Room. Each day found them pacing back and forth between the recycling box and their tables, tearing up every abandoned square of scrap paper they could find into shreds, and all the while talking about their need to develop a business model. What could they possibly having been cooking up you may wonder? Our curiosity got the better of us, as well, and in reply to our questioning, they said, "A paper company, of course!”
Without any previous experience and using only their wits (augmented by trial and error…) to start, these enterprising youngsters have really begun to get the knack for their craft. The Art program has been happy to provide them with further training and supplies (screens, sponges, and old-fashioned egg beaters…) to take production to the next level. They’re busy as bees every afternoon, and with a keen eye towards reusing materials from different parts of the process at later stages, they’re approaching a project that generates no waste!
Keep an eye for their wares at the next art fair!
The Light of Creative Altruism
In honor of Martin Luther king Jr. Day, the members of the Brookings Boys & Girls Club in attendance on January 21st, 2013, along with employees of the Club and volunteers from the South Dakota State University Black Student Alliance, from 7:30 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. created this community weaving. Each participant chose his or her own fibers for the weft to weave into the jute twine warp, and while they worked, discussed Dr. King’s legacy and shared their own experiences with equality and gaps in that equality in our contemporary world, over fifty years since Dr. King’s death.
Each line of the weaving is unique and uniquely chosen by an individual with individual experiences that have structured his or her aesthetic tastes. The piece, looking as it does before you now, evidences these choices. Many hands worked to create this singular artwork, and in this model, we strive to continue the work of Dr. King in empowering each person to be more perfectly themselves in order to contribute their fullest to their communities and their world.
"A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom. Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.”
- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.