Solstice Celebration: A Tree of Circles

December 21 until January 18 

Celebration December 21 and 22, 2018
Friday 9 am - 5 pm
Saturday 1 - 5 pm

Hot cider and cookies available both days. 
The O'Neil Family Band will also be providing music!

The North Dakota Museum of Art has offered an opportunity to all school groups or classes to participate in a community-driven art exhibition set to open December 21, 2018.  Collaborating with Bradford Hansen-Smith, a working artist and teacher who lives in Grand Forks, the students are in the process of making a magnificent Solstice tree from thousands of paper plates.

Brad’s own recent paper-plate sculpture exhibition at the Museum was a “WOW” for everyone who saw it. Brad has developed a process of learning - simple to utterly complex geometric relationships - through folding paper circles; he called this process Wholemovement™.  His folding techniques offer a fun, hands-on approach to exploring geometry and art. Children and adults enjoy folding, taping, and coloring paper plates, all the while being led into a deeper discussion of mathematical principles and several other STEAM aspects. (Science, Engineering, Technology, Art, and Math)

Bradford is teaching his Wholemovement™ process to any grade level or school group that invites him into their classroom. The process is rooted in touching points on the surface of the paper plate to create folds which, when repeated in a consistent manner, allow beautiful geometric forms to be created. With each fold, more information is generated and explored — plants, DNA strands, benzene ring matrices, torus rings, Mobius strips, vector equilibrium, prism, anti-prism, hexagons, octahedral, fractals, patterns, and the ever-present tetrahedron are just a few of the options. The classrooms of students are being guided by Bradford to create basic geometric forms that will function as building blocks. The hundreds of resulting building block sculptures will then be assembled in the Museum into the form of a gigantic Solstice tree surrounded by geometric icicle forms suspended from the ceiling.

Click here to help fund the Solstice Tree Celebration
and/or
Sign up to volunteer to assemble the Solstice Tree

Individual Sponsors

Anonymous
Laurel Reuter
Janel Wallace
Jay and Sadie Gilbraith
Natalie and Carson Muth
Brian and Chulita Goodman
Madelyne Camrud 
Dawn Botsford
Melissa and Steven Kuhlman
Katy and Alan Johnson
Marydale and Jim Hansen
Joan Johnson
Denyse Sturges
Brendan Gilmore
Anu Bansal
Lynn Gilbraith
Leah Curden
Matthew Anderson