#zoomartclasses

Festin' With Food New Orleans Culture + Visual Arts Ms. Erin

Looking back on this past year, I am feeling immensely grateful to have been able to accomplish so much through virtual learning with KID smART. I began the school year with a series of virtual visual arts classes blending art history and art, and now I have ended the year with a series blending New Orleans culture through food and visual art. Working on these projects helped me grow as an educator and artist.

Arts integration while social distancing has been a challenge, but as an artist and teaching artist, creative problem solving is the key to success. I wanted to pick topics that would bring joy to my students and myself. When I love something I know that energy can be passed on to whomever I am working with. I could tell that our community needed to reflect on what we're missing this year, and one way to hit the New Orleans community's heart is through their tummies!

With festival season approaching after Mardi Gras, all I could think about was my favorite dishes from New Orleans festivals that we would all be missing this year (yaka mein, crawfish monica, po'boys, crawfish beignets, and so much more). Food is something that connects us all. As a mixed Indonesian-American New Orleanian who only speaks English, language has hindered me from experiencing my Indonesian culture. I have always found refuge in breaking bread to experience my culture and other cultures. It can be an amazing window into understanding the history of a place and the heritage of a person. For this series, we decided to focus on very special foods from New Orleans festivals that have been canceled or postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The live, virtual series spanned four weeks and focused on several festivals including Strawberry Festival, French Quarter Festival, Crawfish Festival, Po'boy Festival, and the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. For each lesson, we began with an introduction to the festival featuring special guests and went into a multimedia PowerPoint that would introduce an arts objective and dive deeper into why these foods are culturally specific to New Orleans. Then, the student artists created artworks based on these foods dreaming up ways to make them unique to each student's imagination and interests. I encouraged students to use my guidelines as a jumping-off point, so if they wanted rainbow sprinkles on their po'boy or if their crawfish is flying through outer space, I wanted them to go for it!

This series was near and dear to my heart. As an offering where students opted-in to coming after school to spend an hour with me creating artwork, I was overjoyed to see the same students coming every week, excited and ready to learn and create. Siblings, friends, and even students with their parents or grandparents showed up on Zoom to take my class together. Through Festin' With Food, we built community, created artwork, and shared ideas about our culture! I am overjoyed to have been given the tools, support, and opportunity to do this series, and I hope to continue to make art accessible for those who need it!