Sequoyah 10th Graders Celebrate Exquisite Corpse

Article and Photos courtesy of SEQUOYAH SCHOOL FEBRUARY 1, 2022

Exquisite corpse is a drawing exercise invented by the surrealists where a drawing is made by different people without seeing the different parts that come together. Last week, Sequoyah’s Vivi did a quick exquisite corpse with 10th graders. They worked on sections of the body and folded the paper before passing to the next artist allowing for a big reveal in the end. The game was typical of Surrealism’s interest in automatic and random processes of creativity. The 10th graders’ works created for the show were neither gimmicky, grotesque nor incoherent and all maintained a sense of both visual and conceptual integrity.

Exquisite corpse (from the original French term cadavre exquis, literally exquisite cadaver), is a method by which a collection of words or images is collectively assembled. Each collaborator adds to a composition in sequence, either by following a rule (e.g. “The adjective noun adverb verb the adjective noun.” as in “The green duck sweetly sang the dreadful dirge.”) or by being allowed to see only the end of what the previous person contributed. [Wikipedia]