Meet our Artists
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Lisa Arnold | Visual Arts
Lisa Arnold | Visual Arts
Lisa Arnold believes that art changes people and people change the world. She encourages her students to engage with themselves and the diverse world around them by using their life experiences to create art and art experiences to create their lives. Her main goal is to empower students by honing their visual, technical, and poetic abilities. She gives students tools in art interpretation and creation so they can express themselves in positive, productive, and creative ways, both inside and outside the classroom.
“I’ve been working with Lisa as the Artist in Residence of our arts org. for 20 years and recommend her to everyone! She’s as passionate about art as she is teaching, using her storytelling skills to connect with and inspire her students. What makes Lisa shine as an instructor is her open authenticity, wide breadth of knowledge, and infectious enthusiasm. ”
Lisa loves being a teaching artist, creating and leading collaborative art residencies that celebrate community and shared power. While she specializes in mosaic murals, her favorite residencies are multi-disciplinary, combining a mix of social/ environmental justice with mosaics, masks, collage, illustration, poetry, and/or nature art.
Lisa did her doctoral studies in Theater, Art, and Social Change at the University of Minnesota, where she also taught. She worked at the Weisman Art Museum while in school then taught theatre and film through a social justice lens at University of St. Thomas and St. Catherine. While at UST, she founded and coached the slam poetry team, taking them to Nationals. As of 2021, Lisa is also a certified Trauma-Informed Educator.
For 30 years, Lisa has been a teaching artist/activist and has conducted about 100 art residencies and workshops in schools, libraries, museums, and outdoor settings. She’s taught at suburban community centers, schools struggling with poverty, private schools, a refugee center, rural K-12s, one-room school-houses, international schools in China, and village schools in Jamaica. She loves collaborating and designing programs to best suit her students wherever they may be.
Learn more about Lisa in her September 2020 Artist Spotlight Interview.
Sample Programs: Customizable To Site’s Needs
Residencies
Minnesota Mosaics: Beautiful Basins - A STEAM project
During this residency, participants will be encouraged to think about our individual and communal relationships with water while learning about the 81 major watersheds and 8 main water basins we have in Minnesota. Using mosaic techniques, students will create Minnesota Watershed Basin Maps as visual reminders of our roles as water protectors.
Individual Micro-Mosaics to Community Mosaic Murals
Lisa leads Community Mosaic projects, teaching techniques for a variety of tools and materials. Her specialty is interdisciplinary residencies where participants write poems, draw pictures and/or make nature art for mosaic imagery, make a mosaic, and perform their poems/show their work at the unveiling. This way students are taken through the design, create, exhibit process. The main emphasis of this residency collaboration, shared power, giving back, and using art to create an artistic legacy of love.
Sample Programs: Flexible residencies tailored for your wants, and needs, time, budget, and materials.
One day: Introduction to Mosaics: Micro-Tiles
One week: Individual Mosaics: Mixed Media
Three weeks: Community Mosaic
Nature Art
Lisa emphasizes the Elements and Principles of Art to lead participants in a creative exploration of nature and nature art. Using the lens of a Wonderer, participants will approach flora through their senses, emotions, and imaginations.
Sample Programs: Flexible residencies tailored to your wants and needs:
Collage – participants create landscapes or masks, focusing on such Elements of Art as foreground, mid-ground, and background, emphasis, space, and color
Treasure Hunt – Searching for Elements of Art in Nature, participants collect and draw organic lines and shapes, and make Texture mystery-bags.
Field Guides – Students arrange elements of nature according to elements of art and photograph them.
Pebble art—Students create ephemeral pebble mosaics (outdoors preferably) to be photographed
Masks: Sustainability, Self-Expression, Emotions
In this residency, participants make masks from cardboard and/or paper bags. While expressing emotions, we’ll explore our faces and its lines. Using upcycled materials, drawing supplies, and/or paints, we’ll make masks that reflect our passions and artistic style. Participants will look at masks around the world and we will talk about cultural appropriation.
Cardboard masks: Drawing, painting, and/or collage.
Paper bag masks: Drawing, painting, and/or collage
Illustration: Mission, Message, Color, Image & Composition
In this residency, participants will focus on image and lettering while developing their own mission statement and message, logo, color scheme, and illustration. Posters can be drawn on paper or digitalized.
Tape-a-Rama: Public Art Mini-Sculpture
In this residency, students will learn about public art and study some of pieces in the Walker Sculpture Garden in Minneapolis and Western Sculpture Park in St. Paul. Using masking tape, cardboard, and paper, students will design and create a miniature sculpture for a public art. Using particular building techniques, students will focus on purpose, form, and function.
Workshop one: making sculptures
Workshop two: painting your sculptures
Workshops
Social Justice Sticker Art, Poster, and Patch
In this workshop, Lisa takes participants through a short history of sticker and poster art and activism showing examples of various kinds. She teaches the 10Cs of Art and Social Justice to inspire her students and help them create unique and meaningful designs.
Sample Programs: Collaged posters, drawn stickers, digital patches.
Illustrated Posters
In this workshop, participants will focus on composition and making a mock-up using lettering while developing their own mission statement and message, logo, color scheme, and illustration. Posters can be drawn on paper or digitalized.
Learn more about Lisa:
