Arts & More: The Differentiation Of NMS Students To Be Celebrated

By Shannon Hicks

Newtown Middle School will open its hallways to the public one night next week for an annual fête called “Celebration of the Arts.” As NMS art teacher Claudia Mitchell pointed out this week, however, the now-expanded evening could just as well be called “A Celebration of the Arts & Beyond.”

What began a few years ago as a showcase for the art faculty’s students has grown this year to include the traditional student art show and demonstrations, musical performances, drama club performances, and poetry readings, as well as sewing projects by home economics students, projects from industrial arts students, the annual presentation of eighth grade students’ Rube Goldberg machines, Science Horizons projects, “Lifeline & Anti-Advertisement” projects from the health classes, and a wall-climbing exhibition by Project Adventure students, among other presentations.

The celebration will take place Thursday, May 3, from 6 to 8 pm, at Newtown Middle School.

“This is an opportunity for students to demonstrate all types of brain learning, both right and left,” middle school art teacher Arlene Spoonfeather mentioned this week. In the past, Celebration of the Arts has been just that: A presentation of student projects done in music, drawings and paintings, sculpture, and the written word. This year’s addition of so many additional aspects of student thinking and creativity follows the entire school’s efforts in celebrating the different talents and strengths of the full student body.

“We try to represent every student,” Mrs Spoonfeather added. “What’s exciting this year is how all the others are being involved as well.”

Art teachers will begin hanging student projects this week. There will be just over 1,000 projects on view by the time parents, teachers, school board members, friends, and the public visit the school next Thursday evening.

One of the new art projects visitors will encounter is the series called “Class of 2001.” Eighth grade students were presented with the challenge of doing a self-portrait, but dressing and styling their hair (or using a period hat) for the Renaissance period. The profiles in tondo (within a circle) are each accompanied by a banner offering an illumination of each artist’s last name, along with their choice of three words that best describe themselves.

Seventh grade art students will be represented by architectural facades from ancient Greece and Rome, while sixth graders have created foreshortened, or observational, drawings of teddy bears.

“This was their first major impossible task,” Mrs Mitchell said this week. The students drew the figures to look as if an arm or leg were coming out at the viewer. “They did a great job. The drawings really have a feel to them.”

Eighth grade Art Enrichment students will have a display of kimono designs in cloth, while their seventh grade counterparts have created Egyptian figures in clay reliefs. Art students who participated in a recent student docent program at Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Ridgefield will also have work in the celebration. These students just spent their April vacation working on paper creations loosely based on their response to an exhibition at the Ridgefield museum called “Paper.”

“They did very ingenious things with this,” Mrs Mitchell said, while pointing out one student’s mobile-like creation of a kokopeli figure, and another student’s sun-like sculpture. The students used the catalogs of the exhibition, which were printed on heavy stock newsprint, as the base for their works. “They thought about these a lot,” she added.

Music teacher Liz Cook will have performances by The Celebration Kids, her eighth grade ensembles who have been practicing before and after school. There will be performances by members of the 8th Grade Orchestra, 8th Grade Musical Ensembles, Concert Choir, Jazz Band, and 6th Grade Musical Ensembles.

Students of music teacher Lou Ianello will also be featured, with performances by sixth grade clarinet players and eighth grade students who have written their own blues songs.

Eighth grade Discovery students will be presenting their annual Rube Goldberg projects next Thursday night. These projects are usually entertaining and elaborate machines created by small groups of students to provide a solution to a simple process.

Recent contests have had students placing golf balls on top of tees, turn off an alarm clock, even plant a tree seedling in a container of dirt. Visitors should expect this year’s challenge, and the subsequent machines, to be as spellbinding and imaginative as ever.

There will also be technology demonstrations, including the use of a “Wireless I-Book.” Students who participate in the Spanish-American Culture Project, an after school club led by NMS Spanish teacher Sarito Chandler, will be showing off their hand-made maracas.

“People really seemed to enjoy having students working on their projects as well as seeing the finished results last year,” Mrs Spoonfeather said this week. “So this year we’re including even more students, so people can not only watch the students but talk to them during the celebration.”