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Huntington students make real-world art

BY ARIELLE BRECHISCI | arielle.brechisci@newsday.com

8:12 AM EDT, July 27, 2008

Students and their art teacher in the corporate lobby where their work hangs.

When David Saginaw, commercial director for McQuilling in Garden City, looked at the plain brick walls of the company's atrium, he went to Huntington High School for a solution.

Now the walls are adorned with five 8-by-8-foot panels, created by Kasmira Mohanty's advanced graphic design students as part of a "project-based learning" opportunity.

The five students, Ryan Loscalzo, Johanna Clifford, Daniel Rabinowitz, Brian Riggs and Marissa Rosenfeld, met with McQuilling, a company involved in shipping oil, to come up with their designs. The images, created on computers using Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, all have oil-production themes, but each piece incorporates the individual style of the artists.

Clifford, a 10th-grader, said her piece has "a geometric feel," while Loscalzo's has "a watercolor feel."

Each piece was printed out on four 4-by-4-foot sections and then assembled into one image.

Saginaw contacted the district in the fall, and then the school set out to find a teacher interested in heading the project. Mohanty said some art teachers opted out because of the size of the project and concerns about staying within the $5,000 budget. "It came down to me," said Mohanty, who said she could do the project "very cost-efficiently." When the project was finished, the team had $3,000 left over, which McQuilling donated to the high school Art Honor Society. "What we like most is that the pieces have really brought a lot of color and variety to the space, and really brightened and livened it up," said Saginaw, whose two children attend Southdown Primary School and Woodhull Intermediate School in Huntington.

In lieu of their regular art assignments, the students worked on the project during class from February to May.

"It was a huge honor," Loscalzo, 16, said of being chosen for the project. "I was excited that I could get critiqued by different people instead of just teachers." Before completing the assignment the students met with McQuilling officials to tweak the images to the company's liking, such as changing colors. Loscalzo hopes he can apply his graphic-design skills to a career in marketing.

At a reception held at McQuilling's office on July 2, the students signed their artwork and received a certificate for outstanding achievement.

"The big excitement is that the education world today is telling us that for kids to be really engaged in learning, it has to be relevant and it has to be something real," Joan Fretz, director of fine and performing arts for Huntington Schools, said of project-based assignments.

"And when you do that, the level of thinking and 21st-century skills that develop is mind-boggling. That's what's going to make kids want to be lifelong learners and creative professionals."

Mohanty, who worked for 13 years in the graphic design field, has taught at Huntington High School for seven years.

"They exceeded my expectations," said Mohanty, who chose the students for the project based on their talent and ability to handle the pressure and criticism the assignment entailed.

It took a carpentry team, Mohanty and the students an entire day to hang the pictures in the atrium.