New Haven Independent

Each year, the wide-ranging student work completed through the schools’ Comprehensive Arts Program turns the Board of Ed’s otherwise grayish chambers into a gallery celebrating color, composition, and visual joie de vivre The exhibit opened at Monday night’s Board of Ed meeting..

Renna’s work is a spider monkey of the rain forest, she said, made of oil painted sections that are movable and connected by shiny fasteners. All three kids have work in the show, and all are students at King/Robinson Interdistrict Magnet School.

“I like the head best,” Renna said, when asked how she viewed the work now that it was hung in the BOE’s transformed gallery space. She said she liked the arms least when she noticed that the paws at the end of each arm looked too different one from the other.

Art, she said, is her favorite class/She wants to grow up to be a professional practitioner.

Superintendent Reginald Mayo, along with the other BOE members, could be forgiven for taking in some of the kids’ art work that surrounded them as they listened to deliberations about the BOE’s budget for fiscal 08-09.

“We are praying on our knees about the CMTs, which we’re in the midst of” Mayo said of the standardized Connecticut Mastery Tests. “But look around you. These wonderful pictures attest to the fact that tests aren’t everything. Maybe there’s a Michelangelo among them.”

According to Nilda Morales, the school system’s supervisor for art, every child in the schools has art class at least once a week, and some schools twice. It’s a state requirement for kids in K through 8, and an elective in high school. However, a minimum of half a credit in art is required for graduation.

This John Martinez fifth-grader, David Aldaz, is, we predict, going to have far more than half a credit before he finishes high school. His oil pastel and water color composition is based on a day dream he had. One house is tilted on a hill and another flat and a blue river runs between into a horizon with lots of weather happening above. He loves the colors, he indicated, more than the representational elements.

So do a lot of other people. This image, which was hung in the NHPS show last year, is already a success story. Nilda Morales explained that last year, when David was a fourth-grader, Sax Arts and Crafts Company came by to see what the kids were up to.

“I showed the salesman maybe a dozen examples of student work, and the next thing I knew, two months later, the salesman called and said he had shown David’s work to the company.” Today, David’s picture appears on the Sax catalog of art supplies for elementary level artists. “And,” Morales added, “I hear David is going to get paid for it!”

Among a crew of artists who were already winners of various competitions on the way to the art show are, in order next to Aldaz, Abdul Yusif, a 7th grader from Roberto Clemente, whose work is a regional winner in the National AAA Traffic Safety Poster Contest; Eric Padilla, a fifth grader form East Rock, and, beside him, Zeltzin Corona, a fourth grader from Clinton, the first and second place winners in the New Haven County Fire Prevention Poster Contest.

Their works weren’t available for the admiration of the Board of Education members and the public because they had been entered at the state level. Earlier in the day, about 300 parents of the artists came to a reception in honor of the grand opening of their kids’ work.

Morales says that about 100 of the works at the BOE headquarters will be selected by curators from the Yale University Art Gallery and the Yale Center for British Art for framing and inclusion in a show at City Hall to run from May 12 to June 5.

Many of the works will also be included, along with literary contributions, in the Comprehensive Arts Program’s annual and award-winning journal “Artful,” to be published in May.

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