Barbara Bickart, Fire in the Belly Artmaking

11/14/2021 5:24 pm

Barbara Bickart is creating community through art making. Her latest session for Fire in the Belly Artmaking, where all of the workshops are process-based, is about to come to a conclusion, and after eight weeks, a collection of 5th graders will have designed, crafted, and built their own miniature treehouses, just one of the workshops offered this Fall.

“Over the course of the workshop they are developing the skills to create structures from their own imaginations and they problem solve all over the place in order to do that.  They are figuring out their strengths and weaknesses, and they are working around those,” she explains. “Holistically, it has been an amazing thing to watch.”

In the ‘Building Miniature Treehouses and “Bundle Houses” workshop, each child gets a 12x12in pine wood base and pieces of 2”x4” lumber, the feet, to make it stand up. Barbara then teaches her students how to safely use tools to saw, drill, and nail pieces together to help build their treehouses. The rest, she says, is up to them. 

“Their joy, curiosity, and ingenuity is the best I can ever hope for with process-based learning. This is where the kids are really excited and enthusiastic,” she says. “The kind of community and cooperative, communal problem solving is happening in the workshop. Kids are working together to troubleshoot. There is group attunement, and the kids are enjoying being a part of a team at the same time that they’re totally focused on their own projects.”

Building treehouses is just the latest iteration of what Barbara has on offer for students. The summer saw Fire in the Belly Artmaking become a hive of creativity for students from first grade all to the way up to high school. The summer sessions for middle school students were particularly poignant as they explored the intersection between art, expression, and social justice. Asking her students to work together to tackle a social issue - in this case the group chose LGBTQIA+ rights - students had to convey a message through the use of a print on a t-shirt. 

Barbara says: “They came up with some amazing designs. I felt excited and good about the substance they were able to tackle through the use of visual language. I’d love to have the Printmaking & Social Justice as an on-going staple of my workshop offerings.  That’d be really exciting, especially with the older kids.”

Barbara, a Tuscan parent, started Fire in the Belly Artmaking as a way to give kids access to a creative space where they could learn new skills and find new ways for self expression, while exposing them to big art ideas and art history.  “Kids are so smart and get really frustrated by art workshops that teach “down” to kids and expect so little of them when it comes to the world of Art and Ideas.”  She ran her workshops from her garage-studio through the pandemic, and her workshops proved so popular, she now has sessions for parents.   She and Katey Darago, another Tuscan parent, have collaborated on some of the workshops for parents.

But what makes Fire in the Belly Artmaking so fantastic is that Barbara injects her own creativity into the sessions that she provides. So, she is about to launch a three-week upcycled fashion and mini-me puppet workshop starting November 29 which she has never tried before with Fire in the Belly Artmaking. For parents, on December 2, she is trying out a print making session using upcycled materials. And for her winter session, she is currently working with the PTA to figure out a way to provide after school classes for students and is considering offering a Walking Train from Tuscan to her studio one afternoon per week for that session, which starts in mid-January. 

Barbara is also looking for ways to give back to the community. One initiative she can now offer is a Fire in the Belly Artmaking scholarship. The scholarship would be offered to one student per workshop, awarded on a first-come-first served basis and would be dependent on whether she meets the minimum number of students (six). 

She is also trying to find a way to set up a gallery in Maplewood, where her students’ work can be on display for the wider community to come and experience. “My bigger vision is that I want to be able to get a venue and fill a room with the [students’ art] to have a show,” she says. “My whole career trajectory has been about making art, and making art makes community where bigger ideas get exchanged and talked about.  That goal is always in the back of my mind.”

Find out more information here: https://www.fireinthebellyartmaking.com/

And here: https://www.instagram.com/fireinthebellyartmaking/