Presented in collaboration with Congregation Beth Elohim Early Childhood Center
Zorica Čolić is an artist who often juxtaposes found images and objects from diverse sources—fashion magazines, medical books, pills, medical paraphernalia—to focus on political and cultural individuation processes that form the human body. For her collaboration with the Early Childhood Center, students were encouraged to observe images from different sources (books, magazines, newspapers), cut out those they found interesting, and then experimented with shapes, design, and placement to create a collage that represents them. Each student created a self-portrait that doesn’t just resemble them physically, but represents their character as well.
ECC x Artists Alliance is a series of collaborative projects initiated by Artists Alliance Inc with Congregation Beth Elohim Early Childhood Center. Designed and led by guest artists, in collaboration with ECC educator Tom Pnini, students work in the classroom on pre-designed projects that both parallel the school’s current art curriculum and extend from the individual artist’s existing practice. Collectively, the projects urge students to experience art-making through unexpected visual relationships, using professional artists’ practices as a means to create engaging and interactive learning activities.
As accomplished by ECC’s impressive programming, ECC x Artists Alliance aims to amplify the school’s ongoing success in providing children with a generative and hands-on approach to education. This project series extends ECC’s mission by designing classes that create new opportunities for students to develop cognitive skills within the framework of peer collaboration, discovery, imaginative sharing and the revelation of hidden narratives. But, perhaps most importantly, the projects are intended to be playful.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Zorica Čolić is dedicated to a research-based practice, working across media, such as video, sound, installation, collage, text, and appropriated objects. Through various hybridized forms of display, she explores the complex relationships between politics, art and consumer worlds, examining how our lives are regulated or defined by different ideologies.
