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Thursday, September 14, 2006
It rained.
| and rained. | and rained. |
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Every few minutes, the sky looked better – and then it rained some more.
The weather didn’t matter to student artists from the Buffalo Academy for Visual and Performing Arts (BAVPA), a Buffalo public school for grades 5 through 12. They know that the rain makes colors more vivid, the beat of the raindrops can inspire a rhythm, and the mist can evoke a poem, thanks to their participation in an Empire State Partnership (ESP) grant from the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA), which has provided BAVPA students with opportunities to collaborate with visual artists, musicians, and poets, attend performances, and participate in a variety of art making activities for more than eight years.
Throughout the year, students participate in trips to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery and other venues for team-designed learning experiences around a theme selected at the beginning of each school year. The theme for 2006 was Form, Space, and Vision. To kick off events on September 14, 2006, a team of 250 students in grades 9 through 12, eleven teachers, two parents, a poet, and a Gallery educator visited Griffis Sculpture Park in East Otto, New York. Griffis Sculpture Park was also the site of the program’s first kick off event in 2002. Students who were in ninth grade in 2002 were now seniors, and their involvement in the program came full circle that day.
After an hour-long bus ride, the students eagerly explored the park. The discouraging weather did not deter them – they have learned that all of life’s experiences can be the basis for art making. Students sketched and took notes on slightly soggy paper, wrote rainy day poetry with teaching artist Sherry Robbins, recorded raw video, and took photographs of rain swept vistas, clouds, and sculptures. Back in the classroom, the students turned their raw data into finished works of art.
Inspired by the theme of Space, Form, and Vision, BAVPA students created artwork that explored the ways in which individuals experience natural and man-made spaces and forms, and how these experiences can culminate in a unique artistic vision. Click on the images below to view student artwork.
After studying artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude, whose artwork includes wrapping buildings and areas of land and water in cloth, and installing 7,503 large, saffron colored fabric and metal gates in Central Park, New York City, BAVPA students in Elizabeth Larrabee’s class wrapped the sculptures at Griffis Sculpture Park.
In Sean Witucki’s drawing and painting class, BAVPA students used their sketches from Griffis Sculpture Park as a reference for creating charcoal drawings and oil paintings.
In Rachel Lyon’s computer art class, BAVPA students designed public sculpture for specific sites at Griffis Sculpture Park, and presented their designs with computer renderings created from photographs taken during their visit.
In Elizabeth Larrabee’s printmaking class, BAVPA students created woodblock prints that incorporated their sketches from Griffis Sculpture Park.
BAVPA students in Kerry Chiodo’s class created collages by combining photographs, poetry, and journal entries from their visit to Griffis Sculpture Park.
One month after their trip to Griffis Sculpture Park, BAVPA students experienced another exciting event – the October Surprise snowstorm. Local schools were closed for a week, and the students’ visit to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery exhibition Chuck Close: Self-Portraits 1967 – 2005 was canceled. Upon returning to school, BAVPA students wrote poetry about the disruption to their daily lives. Students in Margaret Haug’s sculpture class combined their poetry with sculptural images to commemorate that crazy week.
In December, BAVPA students visited the Albright-Knox Art Gallery exhibition Andrea Zittel: Critical Space. In response to Zittel’s artwork, students in Margaret Haug’s class designed their own living units. Kerry Chiodo’s class made jewelry out of recycled paper in the spirit of Zittel’s interest in “getting something out of nothing,” and created two- and three-dimensional personal diary calendars that incorporated the idea of acute awareness of the passing of time.
Throughout the rest of the 2006-2007 school year, BAVPA students will meet artists and attend performances that address the theme of Form, Space, and Vision through varied topics including the Underground Railroad, dreams, and regular poetry writing sessions with poet-in-residence Sherry Robbins.
– Nancy Spector, Associate Curator of Education
About the Empire State Partnership Program
The goals of the ESP grant are to integrate art into the curriculum and to improve the way teachers plan and teach, both collaboratively and individually. BAVPA teachers collaborate in unique ways, using the experience they have gained in cross-curricular planning, and the camaraderie they share after years of bimonthly planning meetings and professional development opportunities at the ESP Summer Seminar in Long Island, New York.