Drawing Out, is an exhibition of student artwork from The Drawing Center’s program that places teaching artists in downtown public schools. The ambitious collaborative projects made by students in the Drawing Connections program will be featured in the Drawing Room at 40 Wooster Street.

Drawing Connections pairs teaching artists with teachers in Lower Manhattan public schools to develop projects that relate classroom curricula to current exhibitions at The Drawing Center. Students experience hands-on museum visits as well as in-school sessions with the teaching artists. Drawing Out will feature cross-disciplinary group projects by 100 students from four participating schools: P.S. 42 Benjamin Altman School, P.S. 130, and City-As-School and SoHo Communications Art Academy.

Through the Drawing Connections program, P.S. 130 second graders expanded their classroom study of the animal kingdom by examining the drawings of Christine Taylor Patten, recently exhibited in the Drawing Room. Inspired by Patten’s delicate, cross-hatching style, students were encouraged by teaching artist Maria Doubrovskaia to discover their own distinct mark-making technique. They also considered the concepts of scale and seriality and found natural occurrences of mark-making, pattern, and texture in the behavior and appearance of animals.

Third graders at P.S. 42 studied Eleanore Mikus’s exhibition From Shell to Skin and, employing her innovative use of found materials, related the artist’s techniques to their study of Native American culture. Working with artist Laura Greengold, the students’ projects explored the notion of materiality by layering and making repeated use of their chosen medium, whether it was rice, clay, feathers, twigs, or grass.

Ninth graders at the SoHo Communications Art Academy worked with artist Sol’Sax to learn about various non-traditional drawing methods and materials in the exhibition Levity: Selections Spring 2007. Students put similar ideas into practice by making their own selection of alternative materials and creating a drawing whose message was articulated by the connotations of the medium itself.

City-As-School eleventh- and twelfth-grade students, also working with Sol’Sax, considered the concepts of utopia and societal change in the work of exhibiting artist Yona Friedman, developed building designs through related discussions, and then created individual Styrofoam structures that were incorporated into a model three-tier utopian city.