Concentric Circles

Like many world-famous artists, Leah Brown, an art teacher at Booker T. Washington Middle School, understands that beneath great art lies complex math. That’s why her projects often integrate geometry, algebra and other math forms. In this one, 6^th grader Myasia New uses water colors to create a grid of concentric circles in squares (left). The painting is not unlike Russian-born Vasily Kandinsky’s Farbstudie Quadrate (1913, private collection), for which Kandinsky rendered a canvas of brightly-colored concentric circles within squares. In class, Brown introduced New and other students to Kandinsky’s famed painting—and to the work of Andy Warhol, who fashioned similar patterns with circles, grids and pop culture icons.