Martin Luther King Jr Day 2023
This year we were so happy to welcome everyone back into our Center for Martin Luther King Jr Day! Over the past 5 years (you can view our past activities here and here) we have shared our curriculum so that even if you can’t attend our events you can find lessons and art projects about Martin Luther King Jr, the civil rights movement, as well as historical and contemporary Black artists.
We showed this video titled Freedom’s Ring, which is a 17 minute animated version of Dr. King’s I Have a Dream speech. This is a great video for listening to the words of the speech but also seeing some interesting images and understanding the historical context.
This year we brought back some previous favorite activities like button making:
And mini protest signs:
We also added new activities about two contemporary Black artists, the first of whom is drawing, textile, sculpture and performance artist Kenturah Davis.
We focused on her drawings, seen below, in which she draws a portrait and then fills it with words. By using text as a departure part for her art, Davis “explores the fundamental role that language has in shaping how we understand ourselves and the world around us.”
We made a community artwork inspired by Davis’ work using a large gridded picture of Martin Luther King Jr that each person received a piece of and could cover in words they found meaningful from some of Dr. King’s speeches and writings.
Our next contemporary artist was Derrick Adams who works in painting, collage, sculpture, performance, video, and sound installations:
We took inspiration from his paint and collage portraits seen above and made collage self-portraits out of paper scraps.
Adam’s work portrays empowerment through joy and relaxation so we asked the participants to make their own self portraits represent them doing something that brings them joy or makes them feel powerful.
We are so glad we got to do an in person event this year and thank you to everyone who attended and to those of you reading this post to do MLK Day activities of your own!
