The Chattanooga Public Library is hosting Michael Albert, pop artist and author, on Monday, June 25, from 5-7 p.m. for a unique art workshop for tweens and teens. Participants will have the opportunity to create their own pop art collages from empty cereal boxes and other discarded cardboard packaging. While some materials will be available, guests are invited to bring their own empty boxes for greater variety.
Mr. Albert often chooses collage subjects that bring awareness to social and environmental issues. By using found materials he supports and promotes the Green Movement. In his hands-on workshops, he teaches his self-invented technique of making collages. Mr. Albert prefers to use cereal boxes and cardboard packages of famous consumer brand products.
Other opportunities to see Michael Albert will be:
Sunday, June 24:
Creative Discovery Museum – Open Cereal Box Collage Workshop for Families, free poster giveaway & signing. 1 - 4 p.m.
Monday, June 25:
Collegedale Public Library, Artist/author visit for Teens and Tweens. 1-3 p.m.
Michael Albert has been making art since his college days at NYU. He became interested in art after visiting many of the great museums of New York and began his own serious artistic pursuits working with magic markers and later, with wax oil sticks (fancy crayons.) After seven years of drawing, he began an exploration of collage. His first collages were inspired by the need to use materials he had no other practical use for including old labels and leftover stickers he had accumulated from his business activities. Soon he began to use the extra photographs he had collected after putting together his family photo album to create ‘cubist-type’ collage portraits of family & friends.
Then came a breakthrough. One day, due to his reluctance to throw away a Frosted Flakes cereal box, Albert created his first ‘Modern Pop Artwork,’ a collage he titled ‘Portrait of an American Classic.’ This was in fact “The Birth of Cerealism,” as he now describes it, and led to a series of ‘Pop Cubist’ portraits of famous brands; including a collection of over 500 original Cereal box collages alone (he compares this to Picasso’s Blue Period).
Mr. Albert describes the Cereal Box collages, which he calls ‘Cerealism’, as “a cross between Picasso’s Cubism and Warhol’s Pop.” All of Albert’s original art is created without the use of computers. All materials were collected by the artist, a process which has evolved over the years, where he has been turning used cardboard consumer packaging into his own original fine art.