From Caterpiller to Butterfly: Cycles, Circles and Patterns
Artist: Vicki Scuri
Art Work: Butterfly Garden, 1996, steel and Lexan, natural elements (plants and butterflies)
Location: P.S. 34, Grote and Prospect Streets
Grades: K-4 and Special Needs
About the Art: Butterfly Garden is a naturally growing installation that adds an art and nature experience to the daily life of the students and teachers at P.S. 34. The environmental designer and artist Vicki Scuri transformed a former asphalt playground into a garden of living things. The central structure, a butterfly gazebo, is composed of colorful perforated steel and Lexan screens in organic shapes. It creates a light and seemingly weightless structure of color and moiré patterns blending yellow, blue and magenta shades. Cedar planters surround this structure with plants and bushes that attract butterflies. Butterfly trellises provide shade and shelter for the people who enjoy this park. The trellises, also steel, are curvilinear shapes suggesting the motion of a butterfly about to light. In her work, Scuri invites us into a transitory and vivid world.
Questions for Discussion: What do you know about butterflies? Why do they have patterns on their wings and are in so many colors? How are they different from other insects? What parts of this art work give us the feeling of butterflies—is there anything that reminds us of them without showing us what they look like? How do we care for public art work so that it does not get destroyed?
Sample Art Activity: Students create butterfly puppets and write and draw to represent its life cycle.
Purpose: To develop imagination and sense of identity; to develop pattern recognition and knowledge of how patterns in nature help maintain the life cycle
Materials: glove fingers cut off from the glove (one finger per puppet body), white glue, stiff fabric for wings, scraps and markers for eyes and designs on wings, chenille stems or fishing line for antennae. For the written and drawn activity, use a round format such as a paper plate.
Teaching Strategies:
- Before the visit, read Eric Carle’s The Hungry Caterpillar to the children.
- Shop for inexpensive gloves in late winter or in a dollar store.
- When you cut the fingers off, put a line of glue around the cut edge so they will not unravel.
- Cutting fabric can be difficult for small hands and school scissors, so depending on the skill of your group, you can precut the fabric yourself.
- Keep in mind that as long as children understand the principles involved, the less they use precut materials, the more creative they can be.
Closure: Write in journals about the art experience in the park and in creating the puppets. Write in groups of 2 or 3 a puppet skit to perform. One group can create a puppet background with a recycled cardboard box. Perform the skits for invited visitors, such as another class or parents.
Extensions: Using the K(now)-W(ant to know)-L(what have they Learned) format, conduct a discussion and research activity to find out more about patterns in nature. For math learning: emphasize ordinal numbers when reading The Hungry Caterpillar. Collect data on how many and what kinds of butterflies visit the garden and create a graph to show the findings.
National Art Education Learning Standards:
- Understanding and applying media, techniques and processes
- Using knowledge of structures and functions
- Reflecting upon and assessing the characteristics and merits of their work and the work of others
- Making connections between visual arts and other disciplines
