Kearny student artists off to soaring start
A Northern Liberties schools focus on art and science is on display at Philadelphia International Airport through October
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DIAMOND ALSTON seemed a bit surprised at all of the attention.
"I never considered myself an artist," she said.
Yet there she was, an eighth-grader from Gen. Philip Kearny School, along with 34 fellow classmates, being feted at Philadelphia International Airport on Wednesday during the opening reception for their student art exhibit.
The paintings, including watercolors and batiks, are on display at the airport's Youth Gallery, in Terminal A-East baggage claim, through October.
Alston, 14, calls her painting The Angry Ham.
Like several of the other works, Alston's was based on a cow horn from the Wagner Free Institute of Science, a museum in North Philadelphia.
"But mine looks like it has eyes, and it looks like an angry ham," Alston said.
Other students' paintings were based on fossils of starfish, snails, leaves, and one skeletal hand.
Simon Bradstreet, 14, said he got the idea to make a skeletal drawing of his left hand from the fossils a Wagner teacher brought to his school.
And Cashmere Adams, also 14, drew a starfish that sort of looks like it is out for a run.
In addition to being welcomed by the airport's CEO, Chellie Cameron, the students got to tour the airfield after the reception.
Over the past school year, the Kearny students took part in Wagner's art program - Science, Nature and Art in Philadelphia, or SNAP.
Wagner hired art teacher Martha Knox to use art to enhance science education, while working alongside the students' regular science teacher, Mark Nicollela.
The SNAP program this year had 111 sixth- through eighth-graders at Kearny, a K-8 school in Northern Liberties, on Fairmount Avenue near Sixth Street.
An additional 53 seventh- and eighth-graders at Robert Morris School, on Thompson Street at 26th in North Philadelphia, are also enrolled in SNAP.
But the 62 pieces of art on display at the airport's Youth Gallery are the work of the eighth-graders at Kearny.
At the start of the school year, the students made their own paint from baking soda, vinegar, and corn syrup, with different food coloring mixed in later.
"I tried to make it fun," Knox said. "It's easier to get the informational element, the scientific content, across if you come up with an activity or way that engages them and makes it fun."
Nicollela said it was heartening to see the students grow in confidence.
"At first, they were saying, 'I've never painted before,' or 'I can't do this,' " he said. As the end of the school year approaches, he added, the students are excited to see what they accomplished.
Kearny principal Daniel Kurtz said the school recently became an "arts-themed" school, where art is used throughout the curriculum for its 440 pupils.
"We're doing a lot of things to try and bring art and the arts into the building," Kurtz said.
Part of the art focus is linked to Northern Liberties' reputation for artists and galleries.
But the main reason, he added, is that research has shown that students, especially those from low-income areas, who have exposure to the arts can have "tremendously improved outcomes."
The Kearny arts program is open to fifth through eighth-graders citywide.
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