The Walnut Gallery, in partnership with Episcopal Day School, presents Going Downtown! An Episcopal Perspective. This is a one night Exhibition and will include a reception honoring the students on May 18, from 5pm-7pm. The exhibition features works created by students in grades K5 – 12 and will include a variety of styles and media. The exhibition is funded by a grant from the Alabama State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. This event is free and open to the public.
The Walnut Gallery’s Mario Gallardo served as artist in residence this spring at Episcopal Day School thanks to a grant the school received from the Alabama State Council on the Arts. The culmination of the residency is a public exhibition at the Walnut Gallery that will allow the public to see the artwork created. It is also an opportunity for the students to see the “ins and outs” of putting together a show in a gallery setting. Students have been encouraged from the beginning to think of the project as a process. The process began with the creation of a work of art and continued from there through the preparation of matting and hanging the art, followed by lighting and finally putting together a reception. “The students have been amazing! I am always excited to see the vision of young people come to life through art. From day one they welcomed me and were enthusiastic about coming to art classes”, said Gallardo, executive director of the Walnut Gallery. Students engaged in a variety of different art sessions including; live figure drawing sessions, mixed media abstraction, sculptural installation art, and self-portraits to name a few. For the self-portrait sessions, students worked with digital media creating art in Photoshop. Each middle school and high school student transformed a photograph of themselves into a digital stamp and transferred it to drawing paper where they further transformed the image with a variety of drawing media including India Ink, chalk pastels, oil pastels and acrylic.
One of the most exciting projects that took place was the creation of over 400 sculptural bones which formed an installation in Downtown Gadsden on April 28, at the corner of 5th and Broad Street in front of the Mary G. Hardin Center for Cultural Arts. The bone installation was a part of The One Million Bones project that has partnered with Students Rebuild to challenge young people worldwide to make bones as symbols of solidarity for survivors of humanitarian crises. The project will raise funds for international humanitarian relief from the Bezos Family Foundation, which has pledged $1 per bone made up to $500,000. In the spring of 2013, the bones created in Gadsden will become part of a large installation of one million bones on the National Mall.
Visitors to the exhibition this Friday will see the installation of bones in the Walnut Gallery.
“Our school is serious about developing creativity along with rigorous academics. This grant and this program allowed us to further enrich our art curriculum, and allowed us to literally take it to the streets. I am very excited about the exhibition and invite everyone to come out to what amounts to a performance for the visual arts during the spring ‘recital’ season”, said Laura McCartney, the Headmistress at Episcopal Day School. In addition to the Walnut Gallery, Ryan McRae also worked with students by taking them to Downtown Gadsden, as part of First Friday activities. There students drew portraits of the public and rendered architectural drawings in perspective as a way of offering their art to the community.
This project received a grant of $1,600.00 from the Alabama State Council on the Arts (ASCA), the state arts agency. This grant is made possible through funding from an annual appropriation from the Alabama State Legislature and the National Endowment for the Arts. This public support enabled Holy Comforter Episcopal Day School to reach new audiences, foster community development, provide the highest quality programming, and demonstrate the importance of arts as a component for quality of life in Alabama.