Influential Person Portrait & Collage

This is a fantastic lesson I found on a Facebook art teacher's group I belong to. 

It was posted by art teacher Mary Saca @bigheartbigart

Find her lesson HERE on TPT.

It involves telling someone’s story through imagery. It is inspired by the work seen below: 

This collage entitled “Cloak of Heritage” was made in 1991 by Kevin Warren Smith, a contemporary Cherokee artist. It shows a First Nations woman wearing a cloak made of many black and white pictures of Indigenous Americans. We can guess that those pictures are the woman’s memories or even pictures of her ancestors. We can recognize Sitting Bull (in the bottom left-hand corner).

The fact that she is wrapped up in all those memories / images of her ancestors may mean that they are part of who she is, that they are her heritage

My high school students had to choose a person they considered influential and create a realistic portrait of their face in combination with a photo collage of their life/accomplishments.

Many students chose to do a pencil drawing. We reviewed basic face proportions. 

Here's a quick demo I did on the whiteboard on a young Prince Philip- (yes, someone actually wanted to do him). 

Young Stalin 

Important to use photo reference! Misty Copeland

Once the face is complete, time to move onto the collage.

Students collected photos/quotes in a Google doc, then shared it with me so I could print them all. 

It was a pain running back and forth to the office photocopier to get just the right sizes!!

For the background, many painted it, others put the collage in the background. 

Nietzsche in progress below....

Beginning the collage step for Oscar Wilde.

Some finished works: Grade 10 - 12

Claudette Colvin is an American pioneer of the 1950s civil rights movement and retired nurse aide. On March 2, 1955, she was arrested at the age of 15 in Montgomery, Alabama, for refusing to give up her seat to a white woman on a crowded, segregated bus. This occurred nine months before the more widely known incident in which Rosa Parks, secretary of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), helped spark the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott.

Students had to complete a biography of their person. 

Salvador Dalí (11 May 1904 – 23 January 1989) was a Spanish surrealist artist renowned for his technical skill, precise draftsmanship, and the striking and bizarre images in his work.

George Floyd  was an African-American man who was murdered by a police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota, during an arrest after a store clerk suspected Floyd may have used a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill, on May 25, 2020. After his murder, protests against police brutality, especially towards black people, quickly spread across the United States and globally. His dying words, "I can't breathe," became a rallying cry.

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (15 October 1844 – 25 August 1900) was a German philosopher, cultural critic and philologist whose work has exerted a profound influence on modern intellectual history.

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.
And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”

This student hand wrote all of the quotes!!!

Misty Copeland (born September 10, 1982) is an American ballet dancer for American Ballet Theatre (ABT), one of the three leading classical ballet companies in the United States. On June 30, 2015, Copeland became the first African American woman to be promoted to principal dancer in ABT's 75-year history.

Robert  De Niro  (born August 17, 1943) is an American actor, producer, and director. He is particularly known for his nine collaborations with filmmaker Martin Scorsese, and is the recipient of various accolades, including two Academy Awards, a Golden Globe Award, the Cecil B. DeMille Award, and a Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award. In 2009, De Niro received the Kennedy Center Honor, and received a Presidential Medal of Freedom from U.S. President Barack Obama in 2016.

"Auditions are like a gamble. Most likely you won't get the part, but if you don't go,
you'll never know if you could've got it."

Oscar  Wilde (16 October 1854 – 30 November 1900) was an Irish poet and playwright. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of the most popular playwrights in London in the early 1890s. He is best remembered for his epigrams and plays, and his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. Unconventional in his writing and life, Wilde’s affair with a young man led to his arrest on charges of "gross indecency" in 1895. He was imprisoned for two years and died in poverty three years after his release at the age of 46. 

 “To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance.” 

Joseph  Stalin (approx: 18 December  1878 – 5 March 1953) was a Georgian revolutionary and Soviet political leader who governed the Soviet Union from 1922 until his death in 1953. Initially governing the country as part of a collective leadership, he consolidated power to become dictator by the 1930s. Widely considered to be one of the 20th century's most significant figures, Stalin was the subject of a pervasive personality cult within the international Marxist–Leninist movement, which revered him as a champion of the working class and socialism. Conversely, his regime has been described as totalitarian, and has been widely condemned for overseeing mass repression, ethnic cleansing, wide-scale deportation, hundreds of thousands of executions, and famines that killed millions.

"Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, 

why should we let them have ideas."

 Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (born October 13, 1989), also known by her initials AOC, is an American politician and activist. On June 26, 2018, Ocasio-Cortez drew national recognition when she won the Democratic Party's primary election for New York's 14th congressional district. She defeated Democratic Caucus Chair Joe Crowley, a 10-term incumbent, in what was widely seen as the biggest upset victory in the 2018 midterm election primaries.

Taking office at age 29, Ocasio-Cortez is the youngest woman ever to serve in the United States Congress. She has been noted for her substantial social media presence relative to her fellow members of Congress. Ocasio-Cortez attended Boston University, where she double-majored in international relations and economics, graduating cum laude. She was previously an activist and worked as a waitress and bartender before running for Congress in 2018. She advocates a progressive platform that includes support for workplace democracy, Medicare for All, tuition-free public college, a federal jobs guarantee, a Green New Deal, and abolishing the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

*Personal note: if you haven't watched the Netflix documentary "Knock Down the House", do it now!!

“You don’t have to be perfect, but you do have to be 100% committed.”

Finally, here is the sample I made, of one of my icons, Gloria Steinem. Once I finished it, I showed it to many staff members around the school to see if my drawing was recognizable. I want to say that maybe only one teacher out of the 10 I showed even knew who she was. I was shocked!! The others had never even heard of her (insert sad face emoji)

Gloria Marie Steinem  born March 25, 1934) is an American feminist journalist and social political activist who became nationally recognized as a leader and a spokeswoman for the American feminist movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

“We’ve begun to raise daughters more like sons … 

but few have the courage to raise our sons more like our daughters.”