Week 15-16: African Kente Cloth

As a project for the school's annual International Luncheon, they study a region...this year was Africa. Parents prepare African food and they spent a month or more studying it.

For art, we did "kente cloth" placemats. Kente cloth is a Central African specialty and uses strips of intricately woven cloth in bright colors. It is a ceremonial cloth and well known outside of Africa. Each color has a meaning.

To do this with paper, I used a large brown paper that they folded and then cut slits so it resembled a comb. Use a ruler for spacing.  Your goal is to ufold the paper and have it look like a venetain blind but stay in one piece.  Then you take 2-3 other colors and cut strip with a ruler. Decorate this strips with a geometric pattern.

Alternating colors, weave the colored strips into the brown paper. When this all done, you can also decorate the brown parts as well. The finishing touch was "laminating" this with contact paper.

African masks, Spring 2009

To bring some international flair to our projects we did African masks with brown paper. I had brought in a bunch of printouts of African masks from the web, and showed the kids. What I didn't expect was that at this age, they felt compelled to copy individual masks, eventhough I said they could use their imagination!  What resulted was fascinating, since many did a great job of doing a copy, and some integrated parts of the printouts.

The "primitive" nature of many of the original masks, really lent itself to the "clumsy" way that these young kids painted. The final masks had a lot of character!


Here was an actual physical mask that we brought in as an example.



This boy did a great job of duplicating this mask!