About 60 art pieces are currently on display in the main gallery at the Rosenzweig Arts Center in downtown Columbus.
That, in itself, is not unusual — the center has about 12 gallery shows per year, Columbus Arts Council Director Jan Miller said. What’s unusual about the newest exhibit is the artists themselves: all local elementary students between the third and fifth grades.
“This is going to be our future,” Miller told the students, along with their families, teachers and others who came out to support the budding artists at a reception for the kids at the center Thursday night. “These are going to be the people we contract with to come in.”
The students came from Caledonia Elementary School, Joe Cook Elementary School, Annunciation Catholic School and New Hope Elementary School, submitting pieces that ranged from sketches of blue dogs and paintings of paint brushes to landscapes and drawings of musicians, depending on the child’s interest and the assignment from their art teacher. All art students in grades 3-5 submitted artwork, and teachers from each school chose a handful of pieces to be in the exhibit.
“It made my daughter feel really special,” said Melissa Cooper, whose daughter Lola is in the third grade at Annunciation Catholic School and had art on display at the gallery.
“My kids already love art, but Katie (McDill, the art teacher at Annunciation) is just really helping them develop it,” she added.
McDill is one of the art teachers who helped organize the event, along with Caledonia Elementary School teacher Alika Logan. Logan said most of the area elementary art teachers in town know each other from doing shows together. Some of them had arranged for student art to be shown at Rosenzweig, she said, but never as an exhibit in the main gallery.
“I thought it would be a good idea to do the show, so I contacted Katie McDill and pitched this idea to her,” Logan said. “And we both thought it would be a great idea to get all of the schools together just to kind of highlight the children’s work and try to show what we’re all about with the elementary schools, and what we do with the art programs.”
‘All children are artists’
CAC Gallery Manager Karen Arzamendi said the reception in particular was a good chance for the students to get an idea of how artists show and talk about their work at galleries.
“Any budding artist has certain things they learn about how the whole process works in showing, and having opening receptions for a show is just part of the process that goes along with showing your art,” she said. “Maybe for some of them, maybe for most of them, this will be their first experience attending their opening reception for their work. And it’s just a good opportunity for people looking at their work to ask them questions and get to know them better.”
It was one of the reasons she was so excited to see extended family members, school administrators and teachers of subjects besides art at the reception to talk to the students — to say nothing of the kids themselves, who were tugging friends by the arm to show each other their drawings and posing for pictures together in front of the art.
Jasmine Hill, whose son Christan is in the fifth grade at Cook, said she thought the show was a good idea and all the art was pretty. But, of course, she loved talking about Christan’s talent.
“He loves to draw,” she said. “Constantly, every day, I run out of paper.”
Standing by his drawing of three jazz musicians, she said his love of art runs in the family.
“I like to draw, and it was cool to have a child follow my footsteps that way,” she said. “And he’s done more than I had ever done at this age, and that makes me so proud.”
Jeremy Clay has two daughters with artwork at the show — fifth grader Caroline’s picture of owl eyes and third grader Audrey’s piece of “an abstract moose,” she said. Clay said he was glad their school, New Hope, participated.
“It’s a good thing for them to see their art on display like this and see their friends,” he said.
Arzamendi said she was blown away by the talent some of the kids showed in their artwork.
“It’s amazing that there’s third, fourth and fifth graders and some of the third grade art is fabulous,” she said. “I think at that age they haven’t learned anything negative about being an artist yet. I don’t know what artist it is that said, ‘All children are artists, it’s just that when they grow up they learn that they’re not.’ And I think that the younger they are, the more likely you are to get something incredible out of them.”
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Related Photos
New Hope Elementary student Caroline Clay, right, shows her drawing of owl eyes to her younger sister, third grader Audrey Clay, at the Rosenzweig Arts Center in downtown Columbus Thursday evening. The sisters both had artwork displayed at a gallery of art by local elementary students, put on by teachers from four area schools. Audrey said her picture is of “an abstract moose.” Photo by: Isabelle Altman/Dispatch Staff
