Not a snow fort

In art education, material limitations often lead to unexpected innovation by obliging makers and their teachers to grapple with the conditions of their environment through new and creative forms. This visual essay documents one such turn after an unseasonably warm winter necessitated the reconstitution of a snow sculpting curriculum for children from the Dovercourt Boys & Girls Club into a day of outdoor artmaking about the unstable conditions of the natural world. Included in their revised curriculum was an aesthetic scavenger hunt developed to attune young artists to natural materials. In response to this invitation, the children unexpectedly self-organized to create their own environmental, visual scavenger hunt. This visual essay records their teacher and collaborator’s uptake of their prompts to tell the story of the co-emergent learning possibilities that environmental artmaking can offer in times of instability and crisis.