Arts Week at Sausalito: Students Build an Imaginary Museum of Water

A Week of Art, a Museum of Water — Sausalito's Arts Week Takes Shape

This spring, the Sausalito campus is dedicating a full week to artistic creation, with water as the thread running through every classroom, every age group, and every medium. ZAN'ART is an AEFE network art project developed across the Zone Amérique du Nord (ZAN).

The Project: An Imaginary Museum of Water

Water flows, transforms, disappears, and returns. It has fascinated artists across centuries — Monet made it a mirror of light, Hokusai revealed its force, Hockney its modern clarity, Turner its coastal mist, and Goldsworthy its ephemeral forms in nature. Each captured something different, and each reminds us that water can be represented in an infinite number of ways.

This is the starting point for ZAN'ART 2025–2026. The project asks a central question: how can students represent water through an emblematic artwork — mobilizing varied visual techniques and integrating a fragment of writing — to contribute to a shared collection titled Les emblèmes du musée imaginaire de l'eau? Every participating class across the AEFE network adds its own emblem to this growing imaginary museum, where visual art and poetry meet.

Crucially, the artistic references students explore are not models to reproduce. They are sources of inspiration — invitations to expand the imagination and open new creative directions. Each student's response must be personal, original, and reflect a deliberate creative choice.

Looking, Analyzing, Interpreting

Before creating, students spend time with art. Working from water-themed works in the ZAN'ART collection, they observe and form hypotheses about each artist's creative process, identify the visual techniques and media at play, and ultimately interpret what the work communicates. This three-step sequence — observe, analyze, interpret — anchors the project in genuine art history practice and gives students the visual vocabulary to make informed choices in their own work.

The Constraints: A Shared Framework

To ensure the final collection has coherence across all participating schools, every artwork must respect four shared constraints:

• Transparency : Each piece must incorporate at least one transparent element (tracing paper, cellophane, plastic, voile…) to evoke water's elusive, shifting nature.
• Movement : The composition must suggest movement or transformation, through layering, gradients, undulating forms, or visual flow.
• Mixed media : Students combine at least one dry medium (pencil, pastel, paper collage…) with one fluid medium (gouache, ink, watercolor…) to create a dialogue between effects.
• Writing : Each student integrates a word, phrase, poem, or text fragment directly into the artwork — through collage, calligraphy, stencil, or cutting — so that language becomes part of the visual piece itself.

Writing prompts are adapted by grade level. Preschool students might choose a single word that evokes water, invent a sound-word, or create an imaginary word that feels like water. Elementary students write simple descriptive or poetic phrases. 

The Week at Sausalito

On Monday and Tuesday, classes work on their ZAN'ART pieces, following the full project methodology. From Wednesday through Friday, the campus organizes multi-age studio workshops bringing together students from GS through CM2 to create alongside one another across grade levels. Preschool students explore the theme of water in their own classrooms throughout the entire week.

The Final Step

Each class's ZAN'ART contribution will contribute to creating a collective exhibit for all to enjoy. We look forward to sharing what our students create!