Students Learn By Seeing Art at Chrysler Museum
By Lauren Roth, The Virginian-Pilot, Norfolk, Va.
Feb. 13–NORFOLK — Brick Hill wasn’t much of a museum guy. Until a few weeks ago, the 14-year-old freshman would rather dash home to take apart a CB radio or build a boat frame with his dad.
Now he spends one afternoon a week exploring the Chrysler Museum of Art, learning about Impressionist paintings and how shutter speed affects a photograph.
The visits are part of a new program for high school students that the museum is trying out with Chesapeake Bay Academy.
The academy’s high schoolers are well-suited as test subjects for this venture. Students attend the Virginia Beach independent school because they have learning disabilities or neurological quirks that make a typical classroom setting difficult for them.
Their school has sound-dampening carpets, naturally lit classrooms with big windows and small class sizes to help students learn.
The Chrysler has Scott Howe, the wiry, ebullient resident art educator.
“I try to bombard them with ideas and questions,” he said. When they respond, “it’s a success.”
The Chrysler program is more hands-on and more engaging than traditional classroom programs.
The museum also has educational programs with Lake Taylor and Lafayette-Winona middle schools in Norfolk, but it is pioneering a more intensive high school model with the Chesapeake Bay teens. The school is sending three groups of 10 to the program this year. The Louis S. Haddad Foundation is paying for the program’s costs.
On Thursday, the energetic group started its seventh of eight sessions with a digital camera demonstration. Students compared the results of photographs taken with varying aperture settings and shutter speeds as they posed around a table. One pose bore an uncanny resemblance to The Last Supper.
“We got to be crazy and do photos,” Brick said later. “Who doesn’t like to do photos?”
The group then went upstairs to look at “Soul Sanctuary,” an exhibit of Jason Miccolo Johnson’s photographs in black churches.
“It seems more upbeat than regular church,” Kelly Rose, 19, said. Howe then drew the students into a discussion of black-and-white photography and the difference between artistic and documentary works.
Brick wandered around, looking at the framed shots. “I just wanted to look at it for two seconds and move on,” he said. “I was like ‘Mom, can we go?’ “
The new method, he said, “is a better way to see it.”
— Reach Lauren Roth at (757) 222-5133 or lauren.roth@pilotonline.com.
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Copyright (c) 2007, The Virginian-Pilot, Norfolk, Va.
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News.
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