PERENNIAL RECORDS

CREATED WITH GROVER WASHINGTON JR. MIDDLE SCHOOL, PHILADELPHIA PA
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TECTONIC QUILT

Eden Project

Eden Project created with the School of the Future: www.benvolta.com/eden.html

On Locust St between 15th and 16th

If you are in Center City check out the new Center For Emerging Visual Artists Gallery space. They used the Laurel Wreath image for the signage!

LITHOPHONE

Created with Ringing Rocks Elementary School in Pottstown, PA - Residency with the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts / Philadelphia Arts in Education Partnership. (click images to enlarge)

MIXTAPE
Uploaded by bvolt

MIXTAPE
In Gallery 167 at The Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Ben Volta with The Teen Sketch Club: March 4th, 2009

Cultigen Kunstkabinett

We began by asking ourselves what does creativity looks like, and how do we make it grow? We imagined great marble sculptures growing on vines as grapes and berries and the artwork found throughout the collection growing out of the ground as vegetables in a garden. After exploring the museum with this idea in mind, we sculpted seeds. From these seeds we created drawings to help us visualize our imaginative exploration. Guided by our drawings we sculpted plants and placed them in a cabinet under a magical light. A light, which when combined with our drawings and sculptures energizes the growth of our collective creativity / creations.

Created with the Delphi Art club (6th grade) at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. On view in the education galleries at the PMA for the month of February and March.

Fictions and Fabrications

Our artwork draws from the narratives and imagery of the Constantine Tapestries by Peter Paul Rubens (on display in the great stair hall at Philadelphia Museum of Art), and from stills taken from the animated film Spirited Away by Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki. Our exploration draws from multiple digital reproductions that were captured from the Rubens' tapestries at the PMA and from still captured as watched Spirited Away. We combined our own drawing fragments taken from digital reproductions of both of these artists work to create new individual artworks that visualize our collective exploration. Before creating our final prints, all of our drawings were scanned into a computer and each artist worked with Ben Volta to compose and colorize each individual artwork. We then interweaved all 34 individual artworks together to construct a quilt (inspired by the Gees Bend collective in Alabama, whose work we were also fortunate enough to see in a major exhibition at the PMA). Our artwork does not contain a story in the same way that the large narrative works by Rubens and Miyazaki do. However, we do hope that our artwork provides inspiration for others to imagine new stories that could be written, which is to say, we want our viewers to explore our work in the same way we explored Rubens and Miyazaki, not as a passive observers but as a creative story tellers and active participants.

Created with Grover Washington Jr. Middle School in Philadelphia, PA.

...
Our artwork is on view in the education galleries at the Philadelphia Museum of Art for another two weeks. The PMA has hung our work across from my sister Lisa Volta's artwork created with a middle school in Philadelphia. (I will post the info once I get it from her) Both projects are part of the Delphi Art Partners residency that teems artist with Middle School students in Philadelphia.