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By Darla Martin Tucker
Until recently, 13-year-old Leslie Rosales had never known the thrill of creating and publicly displaying her own artwork.
An exhibition at the Riverside Municipal Auditorium of the black box abstract art she and her classmates created proved an exhilarating experience. The youngsters, with the aid of La Sierra University art students, got a glimpse into the world of professional artists.
“It was exciting. To do the artwork for everyone to see was really cool,” Rosales said. She hopes one day to work as an artist drawing Japanese animation characters.
Rosales was among about 114 students at Loma Vista Middle School in Riverside whose black painted, object-filled boxes La Sierra University art students composed and glued together into a sculpture at the university art department’s painting studio.
La Sierra art department Chair Beatriz Mejia-Krumbein transported the work to the auditorium in her husband’s truck. La Sierra students helped install the exhibit for display during the Riverside County Philharmonic’s gala season finale concerts held April 5 and 6 titled “American Ideal.” The performance included Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess Suite” sung by operatic soprano, Angel Blue. The orchestra also performed John Williams’s “Star Wars Suite” and “March” from hit movies Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark, respectively. All together about 2,500 people attended the shows.
Fourteen La Sierra art students logged five hours each in the weeks preceding the concerts, helping Loma Vista students in their various art classes. Their efforts included helping some classes create the black box art as part of an exploration into the work of the late, renowned abstract sculptor, Louise Nevelson. The Loma Vista students made more than 60 small, wooden boxes, painted them black and glued black-painted odds and ends of things inside. Rosales’s box items included strings, plastic beads and small blocks of wood.
Loma Vista student, Antonio Lemus, age 14, and a class partner glued 20 items inside a box. Lemus, who likes to draw in his free time, enjoyed seeing the class’s artistic efforts exhibited in the auditorium. “It was pretty cool. People were taking pictures and looking at them [boxes],” he said.
The La Sierra students worked with the middle school in fulfillment of service-learning requirements for a painting class and a ‘worship in painting’ class. Service-learning is a campus-wide program that marries classes across a variety of disciplines with community service. The university recently garnered national recognition for its service-learning and other community activities, winning a spot on the President’s Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll with Distinction. The Honor Roll is a program of the Corporation for National and Community Service.
“It was really, really fun working with the kids,” said La Sierra senior art major Justin Baker. He helped a special education class at Loma Vista with their art and assisted in putting together the sculpture of black boxes created by other students. In the special education classes, Baker noticed students’ disabilities sometimes enhanced their creativity. One girl couldn’t hold pastels in the desired way, so she usually held more than one and chose colors that worked together. “It was really interesting to see their take on art,” he said.
La Sierra art students also created and exhibited their own paintings, three-dimensional art and other works designed with an allusion to the music performed by the philharmonic.
Baker designed a mixed media piece involving a lap harp. His artistic approach included painting the harp with different chemicals and paint to create a rustic, classic look.
The weekend’s exhibit was the fourth yearly, service-learning collaboration between La Sierra painting classes and the philharmonic. However this was the first year the exhibit has incorporated the works of others along with La Sierra’s student artists.
“The unique thing was the outreach and relationship between college students and middle school students,” said philharmonic Executive Director Wayne Hinton. “This goes to the increased interest the philharmonic has in having a bigger role in education as part of our mission.”
“We haven’t done this with any other art department,” Hinton said. “Beatriz uses the music the philharmonic is performing as a tool guiding the creation of what the students are doing.”
The orchestra provided 210 free tickets to Loma Vista and La Sierra students and their families for the April 6 performance. The Loma Vista/La Sierra exhibit was promoted on a large screen before the concert, and in a half-page announcement in the concert program.
The interaction with La Sierra students was a pilot project for Loma Vista, and an experience Loma Vista art teacher Froukje Schaafsma-Smith hopes to repeat.
Loma Vista has about 1,200 students enrolled and art classes average 22 youngsters each. The La Sierra students worked one-on-one with the middle-schoolers, providing them additional and important individual attention, Schaafsma-Smith said.
“It worked out fabulously. …We’re looking forward to doing it again,” she said.
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