Lessons on Art and Influential Artists

At our Kansas City Learning Center, HALO youth are given a safe place to receive lessons in therapeutic art, professional development, higher education prep, and after-school tutoring. They are taught how to set goals, work towards them, and reach their full potential with support from HALO. Therapeutic art programs help the kids explore their emotions, understand conflicts or feelings that are causing them distress, and help them find resolutions.

Recently, HALO kids have been learning about influential artists. These workshops serve as a means of showing our youth contemporary artists they may not be familiar with but whose distinctive styles and unique forms of expression made a strong impact in the industry. These lessons also show HALO youth that there are multiple ways of expressing themselves, not just words. During this art workshop, they learned about the artist's career and their life, and then they replicated the artist's style in their own ways.

Recently, HALO youth learned about Alma Woodsey Thomas. Thomas' work consisted of an abstract painting style focused on bright colors through a series of "dashes." Thomas used these stripes to create images rather than try to depict something realistically. They learned how to use art to show how something feels rather than simply trying to recreate what something looks like perfectly.