A celebration of school arts
Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn and Albert Einstein will all make special appearances at the Huntington Beach Art Center’s annual exhibition, Creative Visions, from Friday through April 11.
That is, they will be there in the form of paintings and sketches.
The community arts and cultural center’s latest collection will feature work by students in kindergarten through 12th grade from three local school districts.
The student-focused event began 11 years ago with the participation of the Huntington Beach Union High School District and grew to include the Huntington Beach City School District and Ocean View School District.
At the beginning of the 2014-15 school year, children in the three districts were instructed by their teachers to create a piece of art to be showcased at the center.
The hundreds of original pieces being displayed in the center’s three galleries represent a variety of media, including acrylic paintings, ceramics, drawings, photographs and computer graphics.
They are being displayed by age group. In the center of the gallery will be preschool and kindergarten art featuring a variety of paper cut-out butterflies, painted rainbows, kites and portraits of Abraham Lincoln.
First- through third-graders created snowman-themed stories and pictures. Fourth-grade students designed collages and mosaics of missions, fifth-graders illustrated well-known phrases — like hold your horses — and crafted colonial-inspired stitcheries, and sixth-graders dabbled in ceramic masks. Seventh- to eighth-grade students created artwork using computer programs.
As for high school students, their artwork ranges from shaved toilet paper rolls in the form of an abstract structure to a ceramics display of a 1958 Chevrolet Impala.
As the displays took shape last week, the gallery’s white walls were being lined with paintings and drawings of John Lennon, Miley Cyrus and Steve Jobs along with sketches of students’ grandparents and classmates.
“It’s amazing to see what comes from a child’s imagination,” said Kate Hoffman, the Huntington Beach Art Center’s director. “I enjoy watching the evolution of a child’s imagination and seeing that they are all sophisticated at their own level.”
The works for the unthemed exhibition were selected by teachers in the three districts. Teachers and volunteers then installed and mounted the works.
Hoffman said she was impressed with the teachers’ enthusiasm about their students’ work.
To celebrate the young artists, the center will host a reception with musical and vocal performances by kindergarten through eighth-grade students in its concert room.
Hoffman said the exhibition is organized by teachers who represent their districts as art coordinators,as well as representatives of the Arts Advantage program, an Orange County Department of Education initiative seeking to support and improve art education.
It’s at the 19-year-old art center, she said, where students can feel like professionals, exposing their work in a museum setting.
Paul Coulter, as Arts Advantage representive at the Huntington Beach City School District, said the exhibition is a celebration in which the community can participate by recognizing and appreciating students’ visual and performing arts.
“What I’ve seen is the enthusiastic support of friends of the students and the community for what’s within the exhibition,” Coulter said.
Coulter, who helped install several pieces in the museum, taught art for 12 years at Sowers Middle School and became part of Arts Advantage when the initiative was rolled out nine years ago.
Hoffman said she is proud to house the show in the Huntington Beach Art Center because it helps to ensure that all students receive a high quality and comprehensive arts education.
“There’s a need to promote and foster a child’s creativity, and this may find a new Picasso or even a new engineer,” Hoffman said. “When the parents are here looking at their children’s art, it just becomes such a wonderful, happy and chaotic experience.”
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If You Go
What: “Creative Visions”
Where: Huntington Beach Art Center, 538 Main St.
When: Public reception 5 to 8 p.m. Friday; display is on exhibit until April 11, and center hours are noon to 8 p.m. Tuesdays through Thursdays, noon to 6 p.m. Fridays and noon to 5 p.m. Saturdays
Information: (714) 374-1650 or huntingtonbeachartcenter.org