Catalogue of Critical Creativity Presentation

Creating with Words: Line and Caret
Creating with Images: Minimalist Poster
Creating with Sounds: Audio Landscape
Creating with Body: Dallowian Party
Creating with Stuff: Metaphorical Architecture
Creating with Social Media: HashMash

Modification: Minimalist Poster

     When I read the title for ‘Minimalist Poster’ I assumed it was something much different. While I really like the idea of trying to illustrate a concept (an extension, I think, of the idea that you don’t really know something until you can explain it to someone else. You don’t really understand a concept unless you can picture it visually in play?) I can tell that a lot of these lessons were written by an art teacher. They focus on concepts usually only talked about within an art context, like simplicity, or on visual artists, like Piet Mondrian (the two assignments feel very similar to me, though one is the illustration of ideas, and another is the illustration of knowledge). At the same time, the communication of ideas is fairly easy to translate into multiple different studies.  If I were to modify this assignment to fit an English classroom, I think I make it a bit more of what I originally assumed the assignment would be: task students with creating minimalist posters for books/poems/stories we read in class. It would require them to understand what parts of the text are the most important and how a theme is different from/sometimes more important than a plot.

     An assignment like this is a really great opportunity to talk about iconography too, I think, and how certain symbols mean so much to us, denotatively and connotatively, like words. How these symbols are used to manipulate how we view the world around us. You could talk about the manipulation of advertisements or 50s movie posters, which went through a big minimalist phase. I can’t help thinking ‘Minimalist Poster’ would fit perfectly into a class reading The Scarlet Letter. The A is an obvious, minimalistic symbol that completely changes an entire community and how they respond to each other, but in creating minimalist posters for the book, I’d want them to stay away from using that as a cop out. The posters could be used to identify symbols and themes in the book. You could also split a book/play you’re reading into chapters/acts, so each student/group of students has to understand what each scene/chapter/stanza adds to a text individually, why parts that we don’t have time to talk about as a group still matter. As a class we could create a poster book, where we tell the whole story through important minimalist moments/symbols, a bit like the emoji story, but where we create our own visual language. That’d have to be a build up though. I wonder if knowing that their poster will go into a series will change how the students address their individual assignments. Depending on the quality of the posters, these would also be really fun just to hang around the classroom.