 Hi everyone. Good afternoon. So glad that you can all be here. Welcome to each and every one of you. My name is Catherine and I am a librarian at San Francisco Public Library in San Francisco, California, and wherever you are tuning in from we are so that you can be here today. Thank you for joining us. And welcome to our program, which is called Entitled Introduction to Spot Art with Alejandra Ramirez. I am currently in San Francisco on the unceded land of the Ramaytush Olone people. I want to take this moment to gratefully acknowledge the cultural and historic contributions of the Ramaytush. If you would like to learn more about the land that you live on, please visit the link in the chat. Alejandra G. Ramirez is an experienced Selena based and Bay Area based artist and museum educator. Please follow her work on Instagram at Alemina that's at A-L-E-I-M-I-N-A. A-L-E-I-M-I-N-A. By the way Alejandra will be back with us this Wednesday at 4pm to talk about artivists and how to make social justice signs. Thank you also to the friends of the San Francisco Public Library for their generous support of this series. We would not be able to do it without them. For more info about her story SFPL's Celebration of Women's History Month, of which this program is part, please visit SFPL.org backslash her story. And on that page you will not only find our events listings but also wonderful book lists for all ages that highlight the contributions of women and honor the special experience of being female. We hope today's program will be as interactive and engaging as a virtual craft program can be. I do want to ask the grown-ups in the room if you would please take a moment to rename your Zoom window to the child or the children's names that are tuning in today. And this will allow Alejandra to see the windows and to know who's participating, who's here. Please add your questions to the chat and Alejandra will answer them at the end. Feel free to utilize the chat to ask our SFPL staff questions directly. And our staff person Carmen will be monitoring the chat. We're going to record today's session and share it on YouTube so others can watch and practice. So if you prefer not to be on camera, please turn off your video by clicking stop, STOP stop video. All right, I think we are ready. Briefly in today's craft we are going to learn about the Japanese painter and sculptor Yayoi Kusama. And you will get inspired to create your own colorful dots artwork. I don't want to give away too much but I will share with you that Yayoi Kusama is considered the princess of polka dots. She was born in Japan in 1929. So that's 92 years ago. And she adored drawing and painting as a child, which her mother totally disapproved of. She kept going and despite her mom's discouragement, she kept producing art. When she couldn't afford art materials, she used mud and old sacks. And she loved covering her paintings with hundreds and hundreds of dots. In fact, she said our earth is only one polka dot among a million stars in the cosmos. Polka dots are a way to infinity. And it's true that a dot has no beginning point and no end point. So it can certainly be a symbol of infinity, pardon me, of infinity, of endless possibility. So Alejandra, welcome and take it away. Thank you so much Catherine. All right, hello everyone. My name is Alejandra and I'm so excited to be here with all of you. We are going to get started right away, but give me a thumbs up if you're ready to learn and do some art today. Awesome, Imogen. Awesome. You can show me through the video thumbs up or in the reaction. Okay, as we're going through today's PowerPoint, if there's anything that you like, you can tell us in the chat, you can again, give us a thumbs up, give us a heart. Okay. All right, we're going to move on. Today for Women's History Month, we will be inspired by Japanese artist Yuyoi Kusama and her famous and colorful dot art, which we find in her sculptures, paintings, installations, clothing design and even performances. After that, we're going to be creating some art together. Before we get started on learning about Yuyoi and her history, I want to review the art materials we're going to need today. And that is minimum, the least that we want to have today is a paper and a pencil. If you do have more art materials accessible to you, that will be great. If you have at least maybe two sheets of paper, if you have different colored pieces of paper, that will work best. If you do have more than one piece of paper, if you could please have with you scissors and a glue stick. And also for everyone, if we could have with us something to color with, so either markers or crayons or colored pencils. Okay. Let us know in the chat if you have any questions about any of the materials. But again, it's very, there's a lot of different options, but at least we want to have a piece of paper and a pencil today. All right. Now, as we go through Yuyoi's life and work, I would like you to take note of the many ways that she creates art with dots, the color she uses the shapes of these dots and the sizes to take notes of how just one person allows creativity and her feelings to flow through them to create unique unique artworks. At the end of this slide show, we will be creating our own artwork inspired by Yuyoi. We're just like her, we will let creativity and our feelings lead the way. All right, can we go to the next slide. I also would like to note that throughout today's slideshow you will see some gorgeous illustrations from the book Yuyoi Kusama from here to infinity, a children's book. A book by Sarah Suzuki and illustrated by Ellen Weinstein. There are so many great books about Yuyoi available, but I highly encourage you to check out this one as an introduction to Yuyoi in her life. All right. Next slide. Okay, growing up in the mountains of Japan, Yuyoi Kusama dreamed of becoming an artist. One day in the fields of her family's nursery, she had a vision in which the world and everything in it, the flowers, the plants, the stones, the people, the sky even, they were all covered in polka dots. At the age of 10, she began to cover her paintings, drawings, sculptures, and even her body with dots. Next slide. As she grew up, she traveled all around the world from Tokyo to Seattle and New York and brought her dots with her, imagining the world around her as streams and clusters and arrays of them. As we can see in this picture, at the top of the Empire State building in New York, the tallest building in a city of tall buildings, Yuyoi loved seeing buses and cars and yellow taxis and people zooming up and down the avenues, all looking like dots. She felt like anything was possible. So she decided to set a new goal to start a new art movement. She very much achieved that goal. She quickly became famous for her paintings patterned with dots and circular shapes. And for her big soft sculptures of chairs, sofas, and boats completely covered with stuffed tubes. Next slide. Yuyoi Kusama has always shared her opinions about peace, war, love, and society and her art. In the 1960s, during the Vietnam War, Kusama stated, started the polka dot happenings. She staged demonstrations in New York that counteracted violence with activism in the form of body festivals in which dancing participants were painted with brightly colored polka dots all over. And we can see in these pictures how she also makes the car herself and the horse part of her dot art. Next slide. Okay, in this picture, we see another polka dot happening here in the gallery in the Netherlands. So we can see the dots spread out, I believe on the floor, on the people and the figures and on the walls. Next slide. Next slide. In this artwork, so in this photograph, we can see an artwork behind a yoy that she created. Let me see, we can see yoy has covered the sheet, you know, this sheet of paper with many small yet different sized in different shaped repetitive circles or dots. These are her signature infinity net paintings, each filled with thousands of tiny little dots. So again, the background behind her, right, she created every single dot in that painting. These infinity nets not only fed her love of art, but they also helped her feel calmer when she felt stressed. So something, there's something when you do some an art very repetitive that sometimes it can help you be calmer and feel a little bit less stressed out, and that's exactly what painting dots did for yoyo. In 1959, the infinity nets paintings became the subject of her of her first New York solo exhibition, and today yoyo it continues to make these patterns and repetition painting paintings. Next slide. In 1965, yoyo Kusama began her infinity mirror room series. So this is where we can see her inside her own artwork. She creates spaces where visitors are encouraged to enter a room, wonder between six large mirrored rooms filled with tiny multi cultural multi, multi, I'm sorry, multi colored twinkling LED lights, where the visitors presence will be reflected in what appears to be an unlimited constellation of stars. These mirror rooms also give you the sense of the infinite existence of electronic polka dots. And today, Kusama has actually produced over 20 infinity mirror rooms of all over the world. There's, there's so many different kind of art spaces that she has created just like this. And they're so so fun to enter an hour back. Now, while polka dots are yoyo Kusama's most recognizable art, pumpkins are a close second, at least among younger audiences. They have popped up in drawings, painting, sculptures and installations throughout her career. The pumpkin you see here in the picture behind the yoyo is a kabocha, a kind of pumpkin used a lot in Japanese cooking, and it carries an element of nostalgia from when her family's business stocked them in abundance during World War Two. More recently, she's reproduced the vegetable in the form of shiny massive huge sculptures covered just like in this picture with her signature polka dots. In this photo we see yoyo keeping with her the same kind of style of the mirror rooms we saw before, where the viewer in a space where the viewer finds himself in a space where the patterns of dots never end. Here we have yoyo Kusama in front of her ongoing My Eternal Soul series. To date, yoyo Kusama has completed more than 500 of these artworks for the My Eternal series. It's a typical day of creating these artworks that have, if you can notice those paintings in the background, that they have psychedelic polka dots, eyes, faces, some parts of the drawings look like, of the artworks look like body cell structures. Right. Her usual work day starts at 9am and finishes in the evening, resulting in a completed work every two or three days. So if you think about it, look at the size of that artwork. She can complete one of those artworks in two, three days max. That is very, very interesting. All right. The next slide, can you go to, yes, perfect. Here we see the interactive obliteration room, where yoyo Kusama gives colorful dot stickers to visitors and invites them to cover the white room, including the objects inside of them. Over the course of few weeks, we see how the room is transformed from a blank canvas into a warm explosion of color with thousands of spots stuck over every available surface. And again, I love this, this work because it's such a community collaborative art activity, right throughout the time that this space is open, anyone can come in and place stickers wherever they would like there's no wrong place to put a sticker. Right. All right, next slide please. Again, in the first picture, in the last picture we saw, we saw the space looking pretty white, right, so we had just kind of open and some people had already started placing stickers. In this one, we see, you know, most of the walls are kind of full. And now we see some people actually putting stickers on the floor and on the couches. In the next picture. And in this picture we can see a room that's even more full with stickers. And so I really love how we also, you know the community starts with the white space of blank canvas. And together, we all get to fill up and create this very colorful space for all of us. Next slide. And here I just, I just thought it would be fun to share this moment of yoyo, where she took part of the Macy's Thanksgiving parade. Now, we can easily see why yoyo Kusama is known as an art world superstar today with museum goers around the world lining up for hours for the chance to see her work. Actually, in 2014, it was found out that her exhibitions were the best attended globally. If you have had a chance to go, I'm, you know, I'm very jealous. I keep seeing pictures of her spaces and, you know, we I was talking with this with someone about this with someone earlier. People lined up outside like tickets sell out. All right, next slide. Perfect. All right, today yoyo Kusama is 92 years old and lives a peaceful life and Japan. People continue admiring her work throughout the world and seen her dots in very different ways, something they are tiny like cells and other imagine them enormous like planets. She continues to create with her heart and soul, spreading her dots and the sculptures and paintings they cover around the world, offering us a way to experience it the way that she does. She hopes her art lives forever and that it serves as a kind of parting gift to the generations of girls she will leave behind. Next slide. So here's another picture of yoyo creating her artwork so again, she this is her studio and she works from 9am to evening hours every day, creating her dots. Next slide. Hi everyone. So this is where now we are ready to start our time. Go ahead and grab one piece of paper. And something to draw with preferably a crayon or a color pencil or a marker. So this is a piece of paper that she has to not use pencils today. As you get as yoyo has said that in front of her art materials, her hands react to them and make her work. Then when the piece is completed she looks at it and is always surprised by the result. So with that quote, I want you to, I want to encourage you to just go with it. Okay. You did. I just need you to choose one piece of paper and something to draw with and give me a thumbs up when you're ready to go. Awesome image and awesome. Thank you, Mary. See, thank you everyone. Okay, so again, right now all we need is the paper and something to draw with. We are going to do art time while doing some reflection, practicing some gratitude. And instead of usually, instead of journaling in writing, we're going to be journaling through drawing. Okay, I'm going to be asking you around 10 questions, one at a time. Every time I ask you a question, you will think of an answer. And then you are going to draw your feelings. You are going to draw a circle while you think of that answer that just came up for you. Okay, by doing that you will be transferring your energy from your brain, your heart to your hand to your pencil to your paper. Okay, and you're going to be drawing it as a circle. So every question that I ask you, I will be, you will be giving me a circle, a draw a circle drawn on your paper as a response. Now there's no guide in how you should draw your circle. This is very something very personal. I'm asking you questions that are just for you. Okay, so you get to decide how big you want your circle. What kind of, you know, how round you want it, what kind of color you will want it, maybe that's something that you will do a little bit later on. But again, this is something where you get to decide how you want to create your art. So again, are there any questions about materials. Okay, so again, we're going to, we're going to be doing one question at a time. I have my paper with me, going to grab my marker, and I'm going to be doing it together with you I'm going, I'm only going to be going to be showing you a few times. Okay, but again, you get to choose how wherever you would like to draw your circle and however you would like to draw it. Okay. Okay. Next slide. Okay, so the first question, the first prompt, the first ask is draw a circle, thinking of how your yoy kusamas art makes you feel. So as we're all in mute right now, maybe you can even talk to yourself. Right. Okay, how does your yoy's artwork make me feel. For me personally, it makes me feel happy. It makes me feel creative. So I'm going to think of that while I draw my circle on my paper. So it makes me feel happy and it makes me feel creative and it makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside. So I drew my circle. So as you can see my circles a little bit of an oval. Okay. I drew my circle a little bit of a bigger size. Are there any questions about how we are doing every ask. Awesome. Jasmine's got it. Okay, perfect. Next slide. Draw a circle, while you think of a song that makes you happy. If you can, again, you're on mute right now. If you can, I would highly suggest going on your Spotify or YouTube, and maybe putting it on replay a few times. As we're doing a lot of reflection and thinking about ourselves. Maybe it would be a nice moment to hear that music also that makes us feel really nice inside. So I'm drawing my second circle. The third circle drawing ask, draw a circle while you think of a quality you have that makes you special. So we all have a million qualities that make us special. But think at least one. Okay. What comes up really quick. If you're having a hard time thinking of something, think of yourself as your own friend. Right. A lot of times we're much nicer when we're thinking of ourselves as a friend, ready for the next circle. Perfect. Draw a circle while you think of something that makes you happy. Okay, so think what makes you happy. Maybe it's a person, a place, a thing. There's no wrong answer. Next, next. Draw a circle while you think of a time that you felt loved. So again, you're drawing and you're thinking and you're transferring that energy, those thoughts, those feelings to the paper. All right. All right. Next slide please. Thank you. Draw a circle while you think of the most fun you had recently. What were you doing and with who? So again, no wrong answer. It could be something big, something small. Give me a thumbs up when you're ready for the next ask. Okay. Next slide please. Draw a circle while you think of an achievement that makes you feel proud of yourself. So think of what is it that you've done recently where it's like you can give yourself a high five. Again, no wrong answers. But I hope you can feel those feelings of being so happy with yourself and transfer those thoughts, those feelings to your paper. Right. At the end, you will see all these circles on your paper and only you will know what why you were drawing them. All right. Next slide please. Draw a circle while you think of something you're excited to learn this year. Again, anything you're excited to learn this year. All right. Next slide please. Draw a circle while thinking of someone that you admire that you appreciate that maybe helps you a lot. Maybe in your everyday, maybe in growing, maybe in feeling better. All right. Next slide please. Draw a circle while you think of how you spread love to the people and community in your life. So how do you spread love? Give me a thumbs up when you're you've got your circle ready. So we're going to move on to the last ask. Okay. Draw a circle thinking of what you are thankful for today. So again, the last ask is draw a circle thinking of what you are thankful for today. Give me a thumbs up when you got all your circles done. Make a citizen, awesome image in. All right. We can move on to the next slide. And here are just some illustrations from the autobiography book of yellow. Some just waiting to make sure everyone has finished their circles. So we did see. four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 11. So everyone should have 11 circles on their paper. And now this is where you get to personalize your artwork a little bit more, okay? Maybe you only have one piece of paper with you, okay? Where you have drawn all your circles, then what you will do is you will decide how you want to color the circles, how maybe you want to add more circles or polka dots around your artwork, okay? Or if you have more than one piece of paper, you can cut out your circles and glue them on a second piece of paper just like this. Okay, so I believe these are my 11 dots. I did this activity earlier, thinking of the same questions that you did, okay? So every single, so all of these circles together, they make me think of all these happy feelings that I thought of earlier, I reflected on earlier, okay? So again, you can see I cut out my pink circles and I decided where to place them. Now this is where then I went on to decorate more. I had some more construction paper and I had a lot of markers with me and I went on to add some smaller circles on top of others. I went on to draw circles, let's see, right here we can see them and I added very, very small polka dots all around these circles. So at the end, I don't know if you can notice what I feel like I noticed, but after I placed my pink circles all around, for me they kind of stood out as flowers. And so I went ahead and created and used all these colors of a very spring garden. So maybe you can see that. I use different tones of green to create different leaves. Some of the greens are cut out circles in different sizes. Some of them are drawn with my marker, but all the little polka dots, right? I did it with my marker. I just kind of ran around everywhere to fill up my paper. I'm going to show you a few more examples. Here is another type of artwork that can be created. So this one, maybe you can notice I was very much inspired by Yoyoi's mirror room, the infinity room with like a very dark room with a lot of little colorful lights. Here I have another example. So here I drew my circles with marker, I colored them in. And then I grabbed my construction paper, did smaller circles and glued them on top of those colored markers. And then right in the middle, I did just a few polka dots. And now this is just another example. Okay. So this was me using a black background paper and the other ones I used white. Maybe you have such a very different colored paper. That's okay. But again, this is where you decide how you want to continue doing your artwork with dots. As we saw in Yoyoi's artwork examples, right? There's no wrong way to create dot art. There's so, so many different ways. And so I really hope that you're not using pencil today. I really encourage you to be using color pencils or crayons or markers. Okay. We don't have a lot of time together today. So we just want to make sure that we create something. And honestly, the most important part of today we already did, which was the art journaling part. Lovely. So I'm being asked what kind of markers I use. I just use a Crayola, very trusting of Crayola. Maybe it helps also that they're new. So they come out really colorful. But I think what shows my artwork as bright as it does also is that I bought astro bright construction paper. So it's a very thin cardstock. I usually end up using general craft construction paper, but I find the color just to be very low saturation. And so with astro bright, it's a little bit more expensive. So I do save it for special occasions, but it creates artwork very, very colorful and easy to love. To wrap them, and you can continue on your projects at home. Thank you so much to each and every one of you for joining us today and to Alejandra Ramirez for leading us in this incredible exercise in creativity and feelings. And in community.