MICDS Lower School art students had a fantastic day with visiting artist Macarena Sotelo. Sotelo and our Beasley students had an immersive day filled with creating, making, and finding inspiration.
Leading up to the visit, Lower School art students have been learning about Sotelo’s artwork, radial symmetry principles, and the different ways symmetry is expressed. For example, Senior Kindergarten students designed cat faces with elements of symmetry, first graders created their own shoe designs, second graders developed designs for skateboard decks, third graders drew symmetrical faces, and fourth graders tackled symmetrical mandalas with guidance from Sotelo on the day of her visit.
Sotelo kicked off her visit day with an assembly in the Beasley Music Studio, where she shared that she was born in Santiago, Chile, and has lived in St. Louis since 2018. She specializes in creating custom art for skateboards, shoes, wall art, murals, and home décor. For her, everything is a canvas. Her style is diverse and inspired by different colors, abstract shapes, and materials. Her designs are unique, featuring flowing shapes and mandalas. A few murals can be found on display at TechArtista in The Grove. She said, «My art is simply designed to encourage a positive mood!»
In the Lower School Makerspace, Sotelo showed the fourth graders an app that can create digital mandalas and showed them the «old-school» way of making them with a ruler and compass. Next, each fourth-grade student created a mandala on canvas and began filling in color with paint, markers, and pens. The canvases will be put together as a legacy project and displayed as a collaborative piece in the Lower School for many years to come.
Sotelo’s skateboard designs inspired MICDS second graders, and using their own designs, they used the Glowforge machine in the Makerspace to engrave and cut out their designs to make fingerboards.
Lower School Art Teacher Sarah Garner said, «Macarena really enjoyed working alongside our Beasley artists. It is always special to see our young artists collaborate with working artists and find inspiration in their art. All had a magical and memorable day!»
Thank you, Ms. Sotelo, for an inspiring visit and for bringing the art of symmetry to MICDS!