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CHAIR IS ART
Exhibit features work by Delaware Arts Academy Thursday, April 6, 2006
By MACKENZIE WHITE
The Delaware Arts Academy students got creative with their pieces for the Chair is Art exhibit at Gallery 202, Partners in Art Inc. this month. The theme is seating, and students can follow that theme however they wish, academy art teacher and therapist Kim Roberts said. "The chair doesn't have to be a functional chair," Gallery 202 owner Renee Kropat said. One chair is basketball-hoop height, and a ceiling tile had to be removed to make it fit in the gallery. This chair also involved plastering a student's form to make a life-sized athlete shooting a ball in the hoop. Another chair has a papier-mache dolphin and waves made of spray foam insulation. "This year, they're art chairs," Kropat said. "There's a couple chairs in there that I go, 'Oh, my God.'" The Chair is Art Exhibit opened Saturday and runs through April 29 at the gallery, 38 N. State St. The Delaware Arts Academy, an alternative high school for students having problems at their regular schools, is the only school participating in the exhibit this year, Kropat said. Each year, the academy students provide "truly award-winning designs," she said. Students consistently receive best-of-show or first-place awards. Sometimes, the chairs deal with themes of "teenage angst" or even political issues, Kropat said. The chairs count for about half of the academy students' grades this period, Roberts said. Eleven academy students worked on the chairs, Roberts said. Some worked alone, others in groups. All of the materials, such as scraps of wood to make the chairs, were donated or gleaned from the trash, she said. "We were pushing it right to the end to get them done," Roberts said. She said that makes a planned class field trip to the gallery this month even more important, she said, because it will allow the students to see their finished artwork on display. And that, she said, helps build self-esteem -- a goal of the program. The arts academy is part of the Delaware-Union Educational Service Center. While it mainly serves school districts in Delaware and Union counties, students in the different high school programs come from other counties as well, Roberts said. At the arts academy, the students work on academics in the morning and on arts projects in the afternoon. "It's all self-paced," Roberts said. The point is to engage the students, get them interested in art and build their life skills so that they can return to their regular high schools, she said. The students have done a number of other projects. For this grading period, for instance, the other half of their grade is a section on darkroom photography. At the beginning of the school year, they studied mosaics. "They actually mosaiced the steps going into the school," Roberts said. The students also have added a mosaic sun face to what was a tabletop; it's now on display in the school garden. The most successful projects are those that are very hands-on, she said. "Sometimes their frustration tolerance is really low," Roberts said. Activities such as drawing, which can seem harder to control, aren't as successful as ceramics, stained glass, jewelry or the chairs, she said. One of the added benefits of this year's chair project was seeing how well the students worked together, she said. As for the finished products: "I think this has been our best year so far," she said. In the gallery, the chairs are interspersed between other pieces of art. For the basketball hoop chair by students Calvin Brooks, Zack Cordial, Sierra Pancake and Taylor Burkhart, a wooden chair atop a beam forms the actual hoop, with a net hanging from it. Pancake's dolphin chair has blue recycled plastic bags beneath the spray insulation waves. Stephanie Hagelgans' half-goat, half-man chair includes a teacher's donated fur coat stretched over the seat of the chair and down the front legs. All in all, academy students submitted eight chairs. Aside from the academy students' chairs, the other chair designs, by adult artists, include one painted in a Southwestern theme, complete with cacti and sand, and another in which the artist used the grain of the wood as a blueprint to create a watercolored nature scene. Gallery 202's normal hours are Wednesday from noon to 8 p.m., Thursday and Friday from noon to 4 p.m. and Saturday from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. The gallery can be reached at 614-890-8202 or on the Web at www.gallery202online.com.
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