Fulbright Scholar Pamela Lawton leads workshops at the Uffizi Gallery and Pitti Palace
Fulbright scholar Pamela Lawton has led many impressive workshops during autumn of 2019, in residence at the Siena Art Institute. (click here to read about her workshops in Athens, Greece, and click here to read about her workshop with Riabilita at Siena's Natural History Museum! )
She led a series of two workshops in Florence on Saturday November 23rd, one at the Pitti Palace, with a group of deaf adults, and one at the Uffizi Gallery, with a group of adults and young people with low or no vision.
The Uffizi staff were very supportive, including the director of the Uffizi Galleries, Eike Schmidt, who visited both the morning and the afternoon classes. The Uffizi Magazine will have an article about the classes in their upcoming December magazine issue!
In the Pitti Palace, they collaborated with a gardener from the Boboli Gardens, who provided the group with clippings of bark, leaves, and fruit from the gardens. Pamela introduced mark-making through touch in the workshop space. The group then went to the Modern Art galleries, where participants created composite landscape drawings by drawing, for example, clouds on one paper, wheat textures on another, water from a third, focusing more on mark making rather than "copying". Then back in the workshop space we put everything together in collage form, and then added watercolor for a resist technique. Everyone participated and they were all energetic and praised the experience, saying they had never tried something like this before, and were eager to do it again!
In the afternoon session at the Uffizi gallery the director of the museum came again, Eike Schmidt, as well as the director of education, and other museum staff. The participants were adults and young people with low or no vision. The participants surrounded a life-sized Niobide Moreno sculpture, and through verbal description and touch, they created drawings , using paper and regular boards, as well as paper and Sensational Blackboards, which create a raised line. In the workshop, they drew self-portraits through touch using oil pastels. It was wonderful to receive positive feedback about the workshop both from the participants themselves as well as the museum staff.
For more information about Pamela Lawton's work, visit her residency profile page.
