Arlington Arts at Home

Bring Arlington Arts into your own home!

Get to know our programs and revisit past favorites with our at-home activities ranging from coloring pages to self-guided walking tours. Want to learn how to sew on a button? We have that, too!

This page will continue to be updated as more activities become available.

Please feel free to browse through the collection, or jump to a specific program using the links below.

 

New Online Programs

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Book Covers: Stories Told By Artists

Book Covers showcases artists and their creative processes, alongside the books and stories that inspire them. Recorded at home, or in the studio, these vignettes offer a glimpse behind the scenes into the working artist’s and performer’s private spaces, as well as each artist’s creative response to favorite books and stories. Presented in collaboration with the Arlington Public Library. Learn more.

Greetings from Our Microbiome!

The work of Arlington artist Shelly Smith focuses on microscopic life found in water and soil. The artist has illustrated five postcards, featuring the diversity of microorganisms found in five different bodies of water in Arlington, including a bog, vernal pool, and stream. Check the Arlington Art Truck Instagram or Arlington Arts’ Instagram, Facebook or Twitter account July 7 – August 11 to sign up for free postcard packs we will mail to you. The pack will have a mix of color and black and white postcards of which you can color-in yourself and mail to your friends!

Bring your favorite art supplies and join Arlington Art Truck program artist Shelly Smith for a fun drawing session featuring Arlington’s amazing microorganisms in the Science Sketch Along!

Words to Art Spring 2020

An Arlington Community Art Project by Sushmita Mazumdar
Monday, April 27- Sunday, May 24 2020

Give artists ONE WORD expressing your feelings and perception of the #COVID19 quarantine and watch them transform it into art! Arlington Arts will ask you to post new words every Monday for the next four weeks. Artist Sushmita Mazumdar and four other Arlington artists will turn select words from your submissions into original sketches to be posted on our social media throughout the weekend.

This project was originally designed by Sushmita Mazumdar in 2018 for Art on the ART Bus. The 2020 version takes a new angle by asking you to collaborate.

Participating artists:
Sushmita Mazumdar (Buckingham), David Amoroso (Douglas Park), Maribeth Egan (Ballston/Virginia Square), Kate Fleming (Maywood), MasPaz (Arlington Ridge)

View the completed artworks here.

 

Jump to a Program

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Arlington Arts FY2020 Grant Recipients

Arlington Arts’ Partners: Arlington Public Library, Arlington Parks & Recreation

 

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Arlington Art Truck

Recreate the magic of the Arlington Art Truck at home with these free, printable projects designed by our resident artists from previous years.

These downloadable pages are components of the original program, restructured for at-home use. To learn about each original project, as it was designed by Arlington Arts and the artists, follow the “Learn More” links below.

Learn more about the Arlington Art Truck here.

 

Ties That Bind: Learn to Sew on a Button and Connect

by Lorenzo Cardim with Charlene Wallace and Angela Latson

Fall 2019

Download a Sewing Kit

Learn how to sew a button with this pocket-sized guide. There’s also space to stow a needle and thread!

Sewing Kit and Instruction Guide 8.5″x11″

Make your own sewing kit and follow along with this instructional video!

Music by Cinema Hearts. Video by Caroline Weinroth, Arlington Art Truck assistant and member of Cinema Hearts.

Instructions:

1. Use cardstock, or copy paper.
2. Print the PDF double-sided, and select “actual size”.
3. Cut the corners and the marked notches.
4. Fold vertically in half.
5. Fold horizontally on each marked line.
6. Once folded into a small rectangle, tuck in the top like an envelope.

Watch How to Sew a Button

Learn how to sew a button by following along with Arlington Art Truck assistant Caroline Weinroth.

About the Original Program

Artists Lorenzo Cardim, Charlene Wallace, and Angela Latson taught participants how to sew a button while building community connections.  Participants sewed fun colorful buttons of all shapes and sizes onto fabric shaped like Arlington civic associations or neighborhoods to create a map of Arlington.  During this eight week activation, segments of the map filled up with colorful buttons which collectively represent the diversity of our community. Learn more about the project and artists.

 

Going Native: Flora and Fauna of Arlington, Virginia

by Kate Samworth

Summer 2018

Download Coloring Pages

Explore your own backyard with coloring pages featuring the native plants and animals of Arlington.

Coloring Pages (8.5″x11″)

Instructions:

• When printing, select “Fit” in the printer dialogue box.
• Recommended paper: For watercolor, use cardstock. For coloring, use cardstock or copy paper.

Download Pocket Guides

This guide was originally a full color folded pocket guide that was given out at the Arlington Art Truck during Kate Samworth’s activations. It is now re-sized to fit on one sheet of 8.5 x 11” paper. You can choose it in full color or in black line art for coloring. The guide shows a few native plants grouped with some of the species they support from left to right.

Original version with full color artwork (8.5″x11″)

Black and white version for coloring (8.5″x11″)

Instructions:

• When printing, select “Actual size”, “Print on both sides of paper”, and “Flip on short side” in the printer dialogue box.
• When folding, use an accordion fold, starting with the vertical folds first. Then fold into thirds so the title is on top.
• Recommended paper: copy paper

 

Interested in painting your own watercolor plants and flowers?
Watch artist Kate Samworth giving a quick instruction on a simple watercolor stroke using a flat brush.

About the Original Program

Going Native: Flora and Fauna of Arlington, Virginia, created and illustrated by artist Kate Samworth, is a folding, pocket-sized manual of some of Arlington’s native plant, mammal, and insect species. Using her artwork as a reference, participants enjoyed a quick hands-on art project examining and recreating the shapes and patterns found on selected species of plants, insects, and butterflies by using collage, watercolor and drawing. Learn more about the project and artist.

 

Color Your Future Garden

by Marcella Kriebel

Summer 2018

Download Coloring Pages

Learn about the gardens that grow in Arlington County with coloring pages of a map of local community gardens and seasonal seed planting charts.

All pages: 8.5″x11″ | 11″x17″

Instructions:

• When printing, select “Fit” in the printer dialogue box.
• Recommended paper: For watercolor, use cardstock. For coloring, use cardstock or copy paper.

About the Original Program

Marcella provided five different black line illustrations for participants to choose to watercolor in their own way: Arlington seed planting charts that reveal the diversity of the County through a broad selection of vegetables grown in our community gardens in one of the four seasons, or a map of the Arlington Community Gardens. Learn more about the project and the artist.

 

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Art on the ART Bus

Art on the ART Bus is a mobile gallery on one of Arlington County’s ART public transit buses. This unique bus features original works of art, and it rotates throughout the different routes available to ART bus passengers.

Learn more about the Art on the ART Bus program

 

 

 

 

 

 

Let’s Go to the Park

by Hannah Churn

February 2019 – present

Download Activity Sheets and Coloring Book

Celebrate active transportation and show kids how easy it is to bike and walk places – like the park! – with the “Let’s Go to the Park” coloring book and activity sheets.

“Let’s Go to the Park” Coloring Book | “Vamos al parque” Libro para colorear
Word Search | Sopa le letras
Spot the Difference | Encuentra las diferencias

Instructions:

• When printing, select “Fit” in the printer dialogue box.
• Recommended paper: Copy paper.

About the Original Program

This project was a collaboration with Arlington Arts, Arlington Transit and WalkArlington.  These fun walk and bike safety illustrations were rendered for both the Art on the ART bus and for WalkArlington’s coloring book project, Let’s Go to the Park. Can you identify some of the distinct Arlington neighborhoods and parks in these illustrations? Hannah Churn is a Washington, DC based animator, illustrator and art director in both the non-profit and commercial fields. The creator of a comic called Palindrome, in her spare time, the artist is an avid doodler of cats. Learn more about the project and the artist.

 

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Arlington Public Art

Discover Arlington’s award-winning Public Art Collection from home or when taking time to get some fresh air. With over 60 permanent works of public art and numerous temporary projects, there is so much to explore!

Learn more about Arlington Public Art.

 

 

 

 

 

Public Art Collection

Learn about Arlington’s Public Art collection through an online catalog of permanent and temporary projects as well as upcoming projects.

Tour Guides

Check out a variety of tour guides available on our website – from driving tours to walking and biking tours.

• Public Art Collection Map
• Rosslyn-Ballston Corridor Public Art Tour
• Virginia Square-Pentagon City-Route 1-Shirlington-Columbia Pike Public Art Tour
• One Pager Tour Maps of Rosslyn-Ballston and Virginia Square-Pentagon City-Route 1-Shirlington-Columbia Pike
• Visual Art Bike Tour: A 14 mile cycling tour of 21 public art projects throughout the Ballston-Rosslyn Corridor.
• Walking Tour of Rosslyn’s Public Art
• Video: Public Art Tour of Arlington: Public art tour with Arlington Cultural Affairs Public Art staff, May 2008

Sidewalk Tour

Incorporate public art on your next stroll with a new self-guided walking tour! Join Arlington County Public Artist in Residence Graham Coreil-Allen virtually on a walk through Rosslyn’s celebrated public art collection. The tour is available on Sidewalk, a free app for self-guided walks. Visit WalkArlington’s website to learn more!

 

 

 

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Arlington Arts FY2020 Grant Recipients

The Arlington Arts Grants Program is a way for the County to invest in a vibrant, equitable, sustainable and evolving arts and culture ecosystem. Read below for some ways to experience at home the work created by our grant recipients.

Learn more about the Arlington Arts Grants Program.

Arlington Arts Center

At-Home Art Projects

The Arlington Arts Center has fun, at-home art projects for you and your kids to work on together using supplies that you can easily find around your house. Learn more.

• Flower Collages Cards
• Story Time with Mills Brown
• Abstract Characters
• Spring Animal Patterns
• Arrange the Rainbow!
• Visual Scavenger Hunt

Art in Context

Online content related to exhibitions and and the resident artist program. Learn more.

• Curator’s Notebook: Join AAC curator Blair Murphy as she discusses AAC’s recent exhibition, Applied Forces
  • Rose Nestler in Conversation with Blair Murphy: Nestler’s soft sculptures, wall hangings, and videos reimagine iconic patriarchal institutions as feminine spaces, chipping away at the entanglement of gender and history. The conversation will explore the overlap between Nestler’s sculptural work and her video practice, including the relationships between her costumes and her soft sculptures and her use of humor and the absurd.
  • Laura Hyunjhee Kim in Conversation with Blair Murphy:  Kim’s current practice-based research projects explore emerging consumer technologies and their influence on human interactions and experiences of the body, topics that have only become more relevant as so many of us rely on technological connection as a substitute for physical proximity. Recorded primarily on a smartphone and disseminated through social media, the experiments in Kim’s ongoing project The Living Lab encourage viewers to consider the ways we speak, perform, interact with one another, and navigate this world alone together.
• AAC Off the Wall: Throughout this series the Curator of Exhibitions, Blair Murphy, will be joined via Zoom by resident artists as they take a deeper look at a specific piece of artwork within the context of their artistic practices.
  • Ryan McCoy: Ryan McCoy is an artist based in Washington DC. He works in various media but is known primarily for paintings in which he combines specific materials, such as seawater, ash, rust, and baby powder to create iconographies about time, place, and memory.
  • Jen Noone: Although Jen has worked primarily in sculpture in the past, this new body of work channels her interest in materials and material exploration into two dimensions. This experimental approach to materials builds on the work that was included in Sort of, Kind of, Almost, Jen’s solo show, which took place at AAC in the summer of 2019.
  • Emily Fussner: Castings:  Emily is a multidisciplinary artist who works in response to ephemeral patterns and overlooked spaces, exploring questions of place and the body, fragility and care, transience and presence.
  • Olivia Trupp Morrow: Working with found, recycled, donated, and discarded materials, Morrow explores themes related to the body, sexuality, and gender. In January of 2020, the artist underwent major back surgery to halt the progression of scoliosis. Her most recent work deals with her experience of surgery and how the physical transformations it involved has impacted her relationship to her own body.
  • Negar Ahkami: After Winter Must Come Spring: Resident artist Negar Ahkami’s installation After Winter Must Come Spring was an interactive dance floor that was part of her first solo show at AAC in the spring of 2018. The work and the exhibition approached the themes of dance and music as strategies for surviving dark times.

 

Online Classes and Workshops

• Children’s Summer Camps
• Adult Classes

Online Exhibition

• By Proxy
  • Featuring new and recently created work, By Proxy explores the tension between solitude and solidarity that has characterized public and private life for many people since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. AAC’s website will act as the hub for the exhibition, but exhibition artworks, performances, and artist talks will also live on Instagram, Zoom, and YouTube. By dispersing the exhibition across multiple platforms and continually launching new work throughout the exhibition, By Proxy takes full advantage of the virtual format. Learn more

Educational Theatre Co.

Collaborative Classroom

The Collaborative Classroom initiative is ETC’s online learning program. Each class will be taught by a professional teaching artist through Zoom.  Classes are available for all ages ranges. Learn more.

ETC Collaborative Classroom

Online Summer Camps

ETC has adapted all of their high-quality theatre summer camps to be held virtually! Led by ETC’s professional teaching artists, their programming uses creativity to help campers find their inner confidence, collaborate virtually and join an arts community. Our programs are designed to keep campers engaged while gaining valuable theatre skills. Participants of all ages get on their feet, and use their bodies, voices and imaginations. New programming will be added all summer long! Learn more.

 

Encore Stage & Studio

Encore Live!

Encore Stage & Studio is delighted to offer virtual theatre classes and online summer camps. Students will learn and engage with us through live classroom interactions through the Zoom platform and pre-recorded content and materials. Learn more.

• Make it an #IndoorEncore Adventure! 15 ways to stay creative at home, courtesy of the Encore Education Team
• Virtual Summer Camps: Create memories and theatre with Encore’s fun camp offerings! It’s Elementary is uniquely tailored to the imaginative nature of young people. Scenes for Tweens students will deep dive into diverse and fascinating topics. In Stage Door and Tech Camp, students get a glimpse of what it’s like to work as a theatre professional. More complex storytelling and musicality make Center Stage an excellent primer for students looking to gain experience in musical theatre to prepare for upper-level auditions.

Jane Franklin Dance

Online classes

To speak to community needs for connection, exercise, and just plain enjoyment with friendly faces, Jane Franklin Dance is offering free online classes everyday of the week. (Live stream and not recorded.) Offerings are updated each week and include a variety of classes, like ballet barre, inspired stretching, fitness exercise, clogging, improv, simple steps paired with great songs, and more!  Learn more.

Online summer camps

Join us for an online dance experience! Young dancers participate virtually in daily dance classes, art projects, creative assignments and lunch with friends in our weekly camp offerings. Learn more.

Stream a performance

Streaming performance on demand. Learn more.

• Going Polar Online Party: New works created especially for the camera
  • Applied Forces: inspired by land art created at Bonneville Salt Flats by Mike Dax Iacovone and from a recent installation at Arlington Arts Center
  • Hoopla: A new work for Forty+ by Emily Crews
  • Inside Out A Part: movement in opposition transformed by place and distance with music by Monstah Black
• The Big Meow, adapted from the book by Elizabeth Spires, is the story of an ever-hopeful fluff-ball who desperately wants to belong to the band of neighborhood cats, but is ostracized for a “loud as a lion’s roar” meow.
• Complete Dogness: Incorporating spoken word, movement, music this family friendly story is about a new puppy, Barky. “Doggone it. This is a fun show!” Wendi Winters, DC Metro Theater Arts.
• Sampler Viewing Party: Dances from a May 30, 2020 Viewing Party featuring a work by Brynna Wilder choreographed for Forty+, a 2019 dance inspired by the work of visual artist Fax Ayres, and Going Polar featuring live music by Mark Sylvester.
• Aflight draws a picture of connections to earth and to each other. People — like animals — move to react to a push or pull in their natural habitats. As we confront global issues, we invite you to experience the real, personal journeys of the people and ecosystems in our midst.
• Called a “smart movement-based work” (DC Theatre Scene), enjoy Beauty and the Beat at home with a video from Baltimore’s Charm City Fringe Festival, October 2019.
• The whole family is sure to enjoy Splatter, inspired by the book by Anna Llenas “The Color Monster.”
• Shorthanded, an “immediately compelling” (Dance Metro DC) work, visually represents stories of coming of age.

Synetic Theater

The Decameron

As profiled in The Washington Post, The Decameron is a collection of novellas that celebrates the human impulse to connect through storytelling in a time of despair and isolation. The book is structured as a collection of 100 tales told by a group of young people sheltering in a secluded villa just outside Florence to escape the Black Death epidemic. The tales the group tells each other range from life lessons and tongue-in-cheek commentary, to erotic and tragic love stories.

In this virtual play, artists are remotely adapting one story each while being mentored by other Synetic company members and artistic leadership to prepare the work for streaming. Choose your own viewing experience through individual selections, pre-created playlists, or tune in beginning June 10 to experience the work serially over 10 days, in honor of the source material. Learn more.

2020 Virtual Summer Camps

Virtual Camp, Real Fun! Synetic is not going to let staying at home keep their actors from performing! These virtual camps are designed to keep kids active, engaged and learning important life skills. Each family who is enrolled in the summer camp program will receive a personal “Camp in a Box” specifically designed for that session and will contain everything your camper needs to have a successful camp experience. Learn more.

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Looking for more things to do? Check out our partners!

• Arlington Public Library
  • How to Use Your Library Card – Even If You Can’t Get to the Library
  • Quaranzine: a small online publication of local art and writing by the Arlington community, distributed through the Library website.
    • Submit your own work!
    • Issue 1, April 3, Arlington County Staff Edition
    • Issue 2, April 13, Signs of a Socially Distant Spring
    • Issue 3, April 20, Notes from the Field
    • Issue 4, April 27, Your Weekly Checkup
    • Kids Edition, May 4, A Dispatch from Our Youngest Friends
    • Issue 5, May 11, Keep Your Chin Up
    • Issue 6, May 18, Holding Steady
    • Issue 7, May 26, Keep Hope Alive
    • Kids Edition, June 1, From Our Youngest Friends
    • Issue 8, June 22: A Wider Focus
    • Issue 9, July 6: All Together Now – Work From All Ages
    • Issue 10, July 20: Nostalgia Settling In
  • Arlington Reads: One Community, One Book – Arlington Reads brings authors and readers together to talk about the important topics of our time. Authors in conversation with Library Director Diane Kresh include Brooke Gladstone (“The Trouble with Reality”), Alexis Coe (“You Never Forget Your First”), Elaine Weiss (“The Woman’s Hour”) and many more! [YouTube channel]
  • ive from Diane’s Living Room: Library Director Diane Kresh talking about and with interesting people in Arlington whose stories you might or might not have heard. Featuring Freddie Lutz (of Freddie’s Beach Bar), Holly Karapetkova (Arlington’s Poet Laureate), romance author Diane Gaston, and more. [YouTube playlist]
• Arlington Parks & Recreation
  

  Art with Jim: Water Lilies

  • Recreate at Home: Lots of fun activities to do at home and outside while practicing safe social distancing
  • Learn how to create art with Community Arts Programmer, Jim Halloran. Featuring twenty-two family-friendly videos, including topics like Death Stars, Monet’s Water Lilies, Seascapes, Basquiat’s King Dinosaurs, and more! [YouTube playlist]
  • Art with Liz: Learn and create art with Liz! Videos include topics like Mexican Folk Mirrors, Still Life Paper Flowers, Spider Prints, and more. [YouTube channel]
  • Sensory-stimulating activities can help calm the body and mind as well as aid in self-regulation. Visit the Therapeutic Recreation Facebook page for new fun projects every week day at 1 p.m.