1 — Cassidy Forlenza, Dreama Hughes, Jerry Cherian
2 — Tim Welsch and Jeffrey Teng
3- Hunter Friedman, Yakir Eylon, Elizabeth Jones
4- Rachel Levine, Ben Pine
5 — Yakir Eylon, Cesar Viveros-Herrera
6-Jerry Cherian, Dreama Hughes, Caitlyn Kim
7 –Ciara Smith, Sophie Sklar, Lauren Atkin
8 — Cesar Viveros-Herrera, Rachel Levine, Ben Pine
9 — Jimmy Milles, Lauren Atkin
10 — Nathaniel Greenspan
11 — Adam Kriesman, Saniyah Jones
12 — Caitlyn Kim, Ciara Smith, Sophie Sklar, Lauren Atkin
13-David Burns, Adam Kriesman
78 Ryan Caton, Gwen Robbins
A stairwell at Bret Harte Elementary School is due for a major makeover, as students, staff and parents prepare to welcome Philadelphia mural artist Cesar Viveros-Herrera and The Perkin’s Center for the Arts’ Arts Reaching Students in-school residency program.
The program places professional artists in local schools for residencies ranging in length from 6 to 20 days. Individually designed projects build visual skills, teach problem-solving strategies and encourage communication among students.
The students and artist will be designing, painting and installing an anti-bullying mural in the stairwell. And, Perkins Center’s artists work closely with the school’s art and classroom teachers to incorporate and implement the New Jersey Core Curriculum Standards into the ARTS learning process.
“The entire school will be involved in painting process,” Karen Chigounis director of the Perkins’ ARTS program said. “Every child will have a hand in painting, so will parents. They will be critical because of the size”
While the initial process began last year, the ball really began rolling in December, when fifth-grade students met in an assembly to talk about the theme, anti-bullying, and what it would look like and how they would portray it.
“Every year we like to host an artist,” Traci Miller, the Bret Harte PTA DDDD, said. “We have the mosaic in the front of building, we’ve done music, Shakespeare and a papermaker. While the entire school will be participating in the painting, this is a big event the fifth graders can look forward to every year.”
“All the imagery must be student generated,” Chigounis said. “The school is paying for a kid-guided mural not an artist mural.”
Once the students had their theme, they proposed 35 ideas to be infused into the mural. The artist then took the ideas back to the studio to come up with the visuals.
Students are soon expected to begin painting sections of the mural, and once painted, the process of placing the pieces in the stairwell.
The ARTS Program is co-sponsored by the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. Past programs in the southern New Jersey region have introduced students to a variety of media, including, fabric arts, sculpture, painting, theatre, jazz, African and modern dance, Native American arts and collage. Funding for the program is provided by the PTA parents, and funds from the N.J. state Council for the Arts, the Horizon Foundation, the Dominica Foundation, Bank of America, Suburu and Wachovia/Wells Fargo.
Themes incorporated into the residencies have included cultural diversity, environmental sustainability, social responsibility, and more.
