New York Kids Art
By Sarkis Garjarian
From early stages of development, children use art as a form of conveying
their impressions of the world around them. A program in the New York
City school system is designed to help children of different ages express
their perceptions of their environment through art.
Thirteen-year-old Cheyenne Mack explains how he created his painting,
which represents his dreams for a beautiful world: “I imagine a colorful
place. I used sand pastels. Up here, I started switching on and off
with the colors.”
Cheyenne is a junior high school student in New York City. His painting
is part of an exhibition, "Imagine That!" which features children's
artwork as a way of expressing their views on the world around them.
The presentation is organized by “Studio in a School,” a non-profit
educational group that promotes art in the classroom. Tom Cahill is
its executive director. “This is a program where artists and professionals
work with children as their teachers,” Mr. Cahill says, “And they encourage
the children to think of themselves as creating something not only with
a material but with an idea and to take their work seriously. That's
why we display the children's work. The children see themselves and
learn about what it is to exhibit, learn about what it is to be in a
gallery, and they understand going to a museum, when they see their
work that way also.”
The exhibition includes about 300 paintings, sculptures, drawings,
and collages created by children from three to 12 years old. Mr. Cahill
says the art in the exhibition is representative of the work of the
30 thousand children participating in the program: “It's been organized
in a way so that it has been put in categories that any parent or person
who wanted to learn about children and their art could approach it and
understand which of the most common images children work with and then
gave very good examples of how kids at different ages exploit the same
concept or idea. So you will find something very simple like a child's
scribble of a head with a few lines to an older child's or adolescent's
very detailed self-portrait. Or their interest in describing animals
and their observation skills in noticing things that make an animal
have its characteristic.”
Andrew Aquino's work is one example of animal representation. A writing
assignment in an English class inspired the 11 year old to create a
mask of a cheetah in his art class. “I made it of papier-mache,” says
Andrew, “and to make it shiny like that I put this kind of wax on it,
and around it, it's feathers. The teacher had told us to write about
an animal, and I was doing an animal research project. I was doing it
on the cheetah.”
Andrew says this is the first mask he has ever created. He likes making
masks, and considers becoming an artist some day. Three ten-year-old
classmates, Gina, Tina, and Megan, also created a paper sculpture of
an animal.
Girl 1: “We thought it was a cheetah but then we changed it to a lion.”
Girl 2: “We made it of cardboard boxes, and we just laid it over papier-mache.”
Girl 3: “And we painted a lot of times.”
“Studio in a School” has been developing art programs for 25 years.
The educational group is planning to organize about ten more exhibitions
of children's works within the next year, including a continuation of
the “Imagine That!” exhibition.
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