From the February 10, 2006 Issue of The Cape Codder

Cape Cod Lighthouse Charter School News

S.N.A.K.E. ART

Friday, February 10, 2006

Eleven students are participating this term in S.N.A.K.E. ART, or Salient Neuro-Artistic Kinesis Experiments, one of approximately 20 seminars offered each term at CCLCS. The seminars are cross-graded and allow teachers and students to explore in depth a subject that might not be covered under the parameters of a traditional middle school curriculum. This course is taught by Susan Lyman and Vicky Tomayko, artists-in-residence at the school. The seminar focuses on self-expression through experimentation with obsessive doodling, automatic drawing, painting, writing and curating art. The students are looking at primitive art, outsider art, the art of the insane, and modern art, particularly surrealism, to better understand how an artist develops personal imagery, and what diverse forms expression may take.

Next week, the students will immerse themselves in an all-day museum experience at Provincetown Art Association and Museum where they will curate an exhibition from the museum's permanent collection. This is the third year CCLCS has collaborated with PAAM through the seminar program. The students will participate in interpretive and creative writing activities centered around their responses to the work of art they each select. They will also make prints in the newly renovated Museum School space, which just opened in January. On their return to CCLCS, the students will make a painting or other art work that responds to or reinterprets the painting they chose for the exhibition. Their art will be exhibited alongside their writing and selections from the collection. The students will also visit with two Visual Arts Fellows from Provincetown's Fine Arts Work Center who will discuss their work currently on view in the museum.

The seminar students will have input into how the exhibition will look by spotting the exhibition with the museum staff. They will also be invited to a pubic reception and potluck with their family and friends on March 10. The exhibition will run March 3 through 26.

This collaborative program with PAAM is just one of many off-campus experiences that are woven into the art curriculum at CCLCS. For 11 years now, seventh- and eighth-grade students have spent the first day of school at the Cape Museum of Fine Arts in Dennis, another community resource partner with CCLCS. They visit and write about the three or four exhibitions on view and then interpret their experiences in the first art project back at school. In other art seminars, students visit an artist's studio or make temporary installations of environmental art in Nickerson State Park. The boundaries between school and community are broken, and the students get an inside view into the rich natural and cultural environment around them.