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For 15 art students from the Phillipsburg and Belvidere, N.J., areas, it all started with spider webs and, in five months, has built to billboards.
The students, 12 from Phillipsburg High School and three from Belvidere High School, travel twice each week to Lafayette’s Williams Visual Arts Building in downtown Easton for studio classes with Jim Toia, director of the College’s Community-Based Teaching program and of the Richard A. and Rissa W. Grossman Gallery in the WVAB.
“We focus on a lot of idea-based work and theory,” says Toia, whose first project assignment involved the use of spider webs in art. “We used actual spider webs as a jumping off point for art that could be based on using the actual webs or using the architectural structure of the web to create something that implies or relates to those things.”
Toia said he and the students’ high school art teachers, Chris Coyle from Belvidere and Bob Jiorle and Jennnifer Schilling from Phillipsburg, “try to develop their intellectual capacity for making art.”
“We don’t focus on teaching art skills,” he says. “We provide them with language and we teach them how to discuss work by giving them art-related problems to solve.”
Toia says the spider-web exercise helped students learn to take an idea or symbol “and consider that object in a much more detailed, deeper fashion.”
“We got a wide variety of results,” he says, explaining that several students transferred actual webs to paper or glass, while others focused on themes such as “the entrapment of society.”
The students, who meet from 2 to 3:30 p.m. each Tuesday and Thursday at the visual arts building, and each Wednesday at their home schools, have met and worked with Ross Gay ’96, who recently published his first book of poetry, and Ken Kewley, whose exhibit Collages and Drawings is on view through Feb. 24 in the Grossman Gallery.
And this semester, they’re working on a much bigger project—creating designs for four art-related billboards.
Adams Outdoor Advertising, a national firm with local headquarters in Bethlehem, has agreed to provide the students access to billboard space at four locations throughout the Lehigh Valley during the month of May.
“We met with their chief designer and one of their marketing people and are now in the process of trying to get the students to convey ideas that are important to them in a way that makes a universal or broad-based statement,” Toia says.
Already, Toia says, one student has come up with a design that combines blocks of color and mathematical symbols to convey a powerful message: “red + blue = purple, red + yellow = orange, black + white = racism.”
“Anything that they come up with, we always bring back to a movement in art or a movement in society,” he says. “I’m constantly pushing them to articulate their ideas and push their work further.”