FICA has long since been engaged in developing projects and workshops aimed at engaging school children, young learners, and art educators with contemporary art and the possibilities of learning using the tools of visual arts. These programmes have been specially designed to respond to and incorporate ongoing exhibitions at the time, structured around specific learning outcomes. For the Love of Art was a pilot programme that FICA ran in 2016-2017 which focused on developing a year-long modern and contemporary art course for students between the ages of 7 to 11. Conducted in collaboration with Nilanjana Nandy, a visual artist and educator based out of Delhi, this culminated in an exhibition of the work developed during the course.
The For the Love of Art course offered students the opportunity to engage with the world of modern and contemporary art in India through sessions that were focused on the exploration of mediums, materials and artistic language. Spread out over a period of a year, with a session on every second Saturday of the month, the course aimed at bringing students into an extended conversation with ways in which one could understand and navigate the world through the visual medium. Each session addressed a medium or material or thematic, and explored it through the works of well known artists by encouraging students to try their own hand at similar techniques.
This exhibition that followed marked the finale of the year-long course where works by the young learners were exhibited alongside an exciting display of art books for children and a roster of outreach events including a Mural workshop for young learners, an educator’s workshop for art teachers, and a talk by leading educators in the field of creative arts.
- As part of the course, the following link is a guide for art educators working with young learners, edited by Nilanjana Nandy and Bhooma Padmanabhan. Bringing together personal experiences and ideas about teaching contemporary art to young learners, the booklet includes several conceptual frameworks that can form the basis of lesson plans for educators looking to expand the potential of teaching art in a classroom.
https://ficart.org/s/for-the-love-of-art-booklet-final.pdf - The following is a link to a presentation assimilating the resources referred to during the sessions of the course. It lists the various concepts the course touched upon, and also consists of references images of artworks that learners were introduced to.
https://ficart.org/s/For-the-Love-of-Art-resource-on-modules-2.ppsx
