Rainbow colors of several hundred artworks splash across Bainbridge Arts and Crafts walls this month.
The biennial exhibit of elementary art gathers paintings, sculpture, prints and drawings from eight island public and private schools.
With so much work on the walls, it takes real effort for the viewer to look at each piece, but the reward becomes apparent as the overall contour of the collection emerges; creative students supported by fine teachers.
“I like our art teacher,” Blakely 4th grader Stephanie Scharrer said, watching from across the room as Robin Hruska installs Scharrer’s print. “She’s really fun – and she’s a good example, because she’s a good artist.”
Hruska, who has taught art for 17 years in Bainbridge elementary schools, repositions her students’ oil pastels, with the help of parent volunteer Nancy Shurtleff.
“It’s important to present the work with care,” Hruska said. “They love to see their work on the walls, and it’s nice to present it well.”
The small oil pastels are abstract flower shapes.
Hruska explains that the assignment was to teach the contrast between warm and cool colors.
“If the flowers were warm, the background had to be cool – or the other way around,” Hruska said, “and the assignment was also about covering all the surface.”
Hruska has hung a number of collagraphic prints made from building up inking and printing textures – like Bryn Kepler’s print of a spaceship, in which moon and stars came from burlap and a paper coffee holder.
Young artists like Kepler in the public schools have followed a print curriculum that has moved students from the rubber stamps of the first grade to the negative space and incised styrofoam of second grade to the collagraphs Kepler and other fourth graders have on display.
The sequential nature of the print component reflects the elementary art curriculum formulated a half dozen years ago by Bainbridge public elementary art teachers Hruska, Sherry Chandler (Wilkes) and M.J. Linford (then at Blakely).
“The art curriculum – like other curricula these days – was teacher-generated,” Chandler said. “We had a good idea that we wanted something sequential that reflected what we were already doing.
“We weren’t doing ‘puppets’ any more. We weren’t painting a ‘landscape’ any more; we were teaching principles.”
The island art teachers were in the vanguard of a trend that found expression several years later in a statewide move to define and implement “essential learning requirements” in the arts, a trend recently realized nationally in the sweeping education act passed by Congress last December that elevated the arts to the status of “core” academic subjects like math and reading.
While the student show is, arguably, the most diffuse presentation of the BAC gallery season, as the show that is the purest statement of BAC’s mission to support arts education, it could also be construed as the most sharply focused.
“Isn’t it wonderful how the arts are supported in this community, Chandler said, opening her arms to include a sweeping view of the gallery. “Look around you.”
