Fine Art Fridays: Collage 101

Perfect for homeschool groups, Fine Art Fridays offer beginning to intermediate art-making sessions. In September, we’re celebrating Charlotte-born artist Romare Bearden’s birthday with a collage-making workshop. Designed for enthusiasts of all ages and levels, local mixed-media artist Shane Manier will guide workshop participants as they create an original work of art.

Collage is a technique using an assemblage of diverse materials and media which can include newspaper, magazines, fabric, paint, photographs and other found materials in different forms and shapes to create a finished composition.

We’ll provide the supplies. You provide your imagination.

Schedule of Workshops

Friday, September 20: Collage 101

Morning Workshop (11:00 AM, ages 4-8) - RSVP

Afternoon Workshop (2:00 PM, all ages) - RSVP

About The Teaching Artist

Shane Manier is the founder of Guerilla Poets, a nonprofit outreach art collective with branches in the US and UK. As a poet, artist and activist based in the Charlotte region, Manier has been featured across North and South Carolina. She is currently Spoken Word and Arts Teaching Instructor for Behailu Arts Academy as well as the Center for Faith in the Arts Artist-in-Residence.

About Romare Bearden

Romare Bearden gathered moments of Harlem life and shot them through with vivid images of the American South. His family left Mecklenburg County in 1914 when he was a toddler, and he grew up in the heart of the Harlem Renaissance. Family friends included luminaries such as Langston Hughes, W.E.B. DuBois and famous musicians who helped ignite Bearden's passion for jazz. One of his first patrons would be Duke Ellington. Much later, he designed a record cover for Wynton Marsalis.

Bearden's primary medium was collage, fusing painting, magazine clippings, old paper and fabric, like a jigsaw puzzle in upheaval. But unlike a puzzle, each piece of a Bearden collage has a meaning and history all its own. Shortly before he died in 1988, Bearden said working with fragments of the past brought them into the now.

"When I conjure these memories, they are of the present to me," he explained. "Because after all, the artist is a kind of enchanter in time." – The Art of Romare Bearden, NPR, 2003