Arts & Entertainment
High School Artists and Writers Display Their Sense of Place
The Greater Reston Arts Center showcases student art through April 14.
To celebrate Youth Art Month, the (GRACE) threw open its gallery doors to 55 and Herndon High School artists and writers.
“It’s all about tomorrow,” said GRACE President John Alciati at the Saturday opening reception.
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For this year’s theme, Emerging Visions: A Sense of Place, students studied GRACE’s fall exhibition artist Freya Grand and, guided by their teachers, created works that combined visual arts and language.
“Merging words and visuals is challenging,” said Joanne Bauer, GRACE Exhibitions Director. “The results here are sophisticated and successful.”
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South Lakes students Dorothy O’Boyle and Sydney Hamilton created art that addressed a hot topic: bullying. The photo depicts the artists heavily made up amid pieces of paper with hurtful words hanging above them and scattered on the floor.
“We have both struggled with the verbal abuse of others, and this in the piece we wanted to show our shedding of all of the bad memories and our negative body images,” said O'Boyle and Hamilton. "The makeup is used to cover up our faces to help us hide from the society that we face everyday.”
Artists Thomas Cusimano and Myra Richardson said their project represents what clouds one's vision.
“It could be something as simple as love to something super complex like judgment,” said Cusimano. “The clouds are made so if you look close enough you can see the structure, so you can understand the structure or reason why your vision is clouded.”
Cusimano and Richardson had to adapt their piece to the space, said Bauer “They weren’t sure exactly where it was going as they hung their piece but they went with the process; that is good art,” she said. “They made excellent use of the shadows.”
Bauer encouraged the audience to come back to the gallery and spend time reading the artists’ statements and looking at the art. She lauded the student-teacher involvement.
“The quality of teaching students’ receives really shows," she said, and turning toward the artists, "and you are the ones that have the gift.”
Emerging Visions: a sense of place
Featuring new works combining language and art from Herndon and South Lakes High Schools March 4 - April 14, 2011
Click to view educational programs,more photos or GRACE's blog
