At 3 p.m. on a Friday afternoon, the halls of the Grinnell Middle School are flooded with students released from a long day of classes. Sounds of eager footsteps, excited chatter and bouncing backpacks fill the walls of the school as students make their way to the bus loop for pick up. While the end-of-day chaos ensues, the Grinnell Middle School Art Club (MSAC) volunteers prepare for the day’s activity.
In celebration of fall and Halloween the day before, the attendees were decorating pumpkins. Grinnell College students, who serve as volunteers for the club, all helped grab bins of supplies from the van. Paint pens, Sharpies, pipe cleaners, yarn, fabric, buttons, jewels and a hot glue gun station, where a volunteer executed the middle schoolers’ artistic visions for their pumpkin, were strewn across newspapers laid down to protect the tables from the students’ messy creativity.
As volunteers finished setting up, students gathered in the cafeteria, quickly breaking out into conversation about what they were for Halloween. A whole array of characters were mentioned including an Oompa Loompa, Moana and Coraline.
The MSAC, entering its 18th year, is a branch of community outreach for the Grinnell College Museum of Art (GCMoA). Each week, middle schoolers are able to express themselves through different art mediums.
“We try and connect every lesson plan with something from the museum that is either on display or in our catalogue. This year we did imaginary friends. We had them make imaginary friends out of clay. Whatever that meant for them, whether it was a real human or an abstract blob or an animal or a place,” Philomena Frasca `25, a co-leader of MSAC, said.
During previous meetings, the art club has done a variety of printmaking activities. Most recently, the middle schoolers did gyotaku fish printing, a Japanese art form that applies ink to fish and other types of sea creatures and presses them against paper to create a detailed print.
Tilly Woodward, Curator of Academic and Community Outreach for the college and mentor for the MSAC, “encourage[d] them [the kids] to look at the fish and appreciate the beauty of nature,” Sophia Mason `26, fellow co-leader of MSAC, said.
While decorating pumpkins, the middle schoolers drew inspiration from all sorts of places. Many referenced shows they had been watching, others created more abstract designs and some resembled people or animals.
When asked about their favorite activities they’ve done at MSAC, many kids said that the art they made with clay had been their favorite.
In addition to the joy from the activities, Frasca and Mason also said they appreciate the special bonds that they form with the kids. “At the end of the day it’s not as much about the exact materials that we’re teaching but it’s more about the connections we make with the kids. A moment that stuck with me this semester was … I was abroad in Spring of last year and sometimes you don’t know if kids remember you or really have a connection with you and the first day back, I walk in and some of the kids I recognized from last year were like, ‘oh my gosh, Philomena, you’re back. Are we gonna do these activities and how was Milan?’ And I was like, oh my gosh, they remember me and I made some sort of impact on their life and they’re excited to get back to this organization that we organize and put a lot of love and care into,” Frasca said.
Mason discussed the interests she had as a middle schooler and the commonalities she’s found with kids at MSAC as a result. “We were all middle schoolers once, and I was very into Five Nights at Freddy’s and Warrior Cats and just specific fandoms in middle school that for a while I was kind of embarrassed about because I was really into them,” Mason said.
“Coming to middle school art club, a lot of them are still into the same things that I was into in middle school and it’s just so funny to chat with them about it. I’m just chatting about Minecraft or Five Nights at Freddy’s with these middle schoolers again and it’s just so sweet looking back on it because we were all just being middle schoolers. It makes me kind of nostalgic and very protective of that,” she said.
At the end of each MSAC meeting, each child receives a brown bag with a variety of snacks including a protein, carbohydrate and fresh fruit. According to Woodward, “GCMoA is part of a network of organizations working to help address food insecurity for children in the community through snacks at MSAC and our summer StoryTime Art in the Park program.”
MSAC provides middle schoolers with an important creative outlet at the end of the week and provides Grinnell College volunteers with an opportunity to interact with people and places outside of the college community.
