ART RIG : Students Exercise Creative Bent in 48-Foot-Long Mobile Studio

The San Diego Museum of Art rolled out a new, brightly painted educational tool Friday morning, a 48-foot-long semi-trailer, dubbed “Art Rig.”

The big rig, which will visit 107 San Diego city schools over the next two years, was parked in front of the museum next to tented hands-on art exhibits for children. The “Art Rig” is the latest element of an innovative, $3.75-million arts education program funded by philanthropist Muriel Gluck.

“Last fall we planted a garden called ‘Young at ‘Art,’ and now we see it flowering,” Gluck said at a news conference. While hoping that the educational program would “open the minds of the children,” Gluck also praised the San Diego Unified School District for its role in putting 60 artists-in-residence, whom she funded, into elementary classrooms during the past school year.

Last September, Gluck announced a $3.75-million gift, to be divided between the school district and the museum over a three-to-five-year period. The innovative donation was designed to create a new arts education program by linking practicing artists, the arts teaching resources of the school district and the museum with young children.

Tom Payzant, school district superintendent, presented Gluck a photo album of the program’s accomplishments in the schools to date, saying much has been realized since a year ago “when we were talking about . . . an idea.”

Museum of Art Director Steven Brezzo praised Gluck for the work she has already done and “of the great potential about to be realized through the program,” before surprising her with personal vanity license plates spelling “Art Rig.”

The cost of buying and outfitting the “Art Rig” was more than $100,000, Brezzo said. The trailer’s 360 square feet of hands-on demonstration exhibits were soon tested as scores of students from four elementary schools invaded the air-conditioned space, where they were guided by intern docents.

Texture, Shape, Color

At one end of the trailer the children swarmed around separate displays on the different elements of art: texture, shape, color and space. In the other end, they made art.

In the texture exhibit, students turned a crank to move different materials through a cut-out in a replication of Dubuffet’s “Bonne mine,” which is in the museum’s permanent collection. The kids put their hands up to feel the different textures of fur, brushed aluminum, tree bark, weathered and smooth lumber.

At the other end, they were told to imagine they were a scuba diver, an astronaut, city planner or interior designer. As scuba divers, the students envisioned themselves at the bottom of the ocean, then were instructed to “make a painting of it” by sticking painted foam shapes with magnets on a section of the wall. They charged across the trailer to boxes of shapes like settlers in the Oklahoma Land Rush.

On leaving the trailer, Elacio Martinez, a fifth-grader from Balboa Elementary said, “I liked it. I liked the part where you can build everything in your imagination. Like when you close your eyes, it’s like it really happens.”