Disney Spirit Day at School

We had Spirit Week at school this week.  Since I am no longer the Student Council adviser (I had a few extra classes added instead)  I was able to relax and actually think about how I might tie in Spirit Week to my art classes.  This year I am having the kids do a 5 minute silent art warm-up at the beginning of class.  I write a prompt on the board and the students draw in their art journals that they bring to class. This has been so awesome.  First of all, it gets the kids focused on a task immediately in the room. Well, I do have to remind them sometimes or read the art warm-up to the littlest kids, but it’s a nice stable routine that the kids can know what to expect when coming to art class.  Plus, the best part is that it gives me a couple minutes to do some last minute switching out of art supplies or fiddling with technology or whatever I need to do.

So, back to Spirit Week.  On Thursday, we had a Disney dress up day.  The kids came dressed as whatever Disney character they liked or they wore Disney t-shirts.  I know there are a bunch of famous artists that have created artwork with Mickey Mouse, so I did some researching and found a whole bunch of awesome Mickey artworks that I didn’t know existed.

Of course, I knew of this one by Andy Warhol.

But did you ever see these by Wayne Thiebaud?  Amazing, right?

Of course, Peter Max made quite a colorful Mickey as well.

Then, I came across this awesome artist named Tennessee Loveless who did a huge series of Mickey themed artwork.  Like this one made of nails.

Here is one of my favorite Mickey pictures by Tennessee Loveless.  Can you tell who this is a tribute to?

Yep!  Rene Magritte!  Do you see the apples in his eyes?

So, I created a whole slideshow of lots of Mickey Mouse artwork.  I showed the students the typical style of the artist and then the Mickey Mouse picture.  If you want to save yourself the time of making your own slideshow, you can download my Mickey Mouse artwork presentation on TPT.  There’s 35 slides and the presentation sparks lots of interesting discussion about contemporary art and art history.

This year, I had all my classes on Disney Day watch the slideshow and then create Disney themed drawings in their sketchbooks.  I raided my daughter’s collection of Disney toys and had them draw from observation by looking at stuffed animals I brought in.  This was a good “catch up” day, because some of the kids in each class needed to catch up on other projects.  If I did this again next year, I would talk more about appropriation and how artists can create an artwork based on a well-known icon but use it to express their own ideas.  With the older kids, I started to touch upon that and I could see making a whole unit based on appropriating a cartoon character.   The younger kids just loved the opportunity to draw stuffed animals!!

So, what do you think?   Would you ever used Disney or cartoons to talk about art history and contemporary art?   Do you have any suggestions for ways to expand this into a larger unit?   Leave a comment with some suggestions and I will pick a few people to send the slideshow to.