Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, September 29, 1995 TAG: 9509290049
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: CURRENT EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LISA APPLEGATE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: PEARISBURG LENGTH: Medium
"Art," said fourth-grader Casey Reece definitively, "is the only fun in school."
The entire school has been enjoying the creativity of Kelly Gotschalk, a Richmond sculptor who has been working with the pupils to create their ideal community.
Gotschalk sculpts homes and buildings to convey stories about the people who live there. She and the kids have built homes and shops out of 6-foot-tall cardboard boxes.
Eastern Elementary can only provide art classes for grades 1 through 3, and then only once every three weeks. Teachers try to include art for the older pupils with the regular curriculum.
That concerned parent volunteer and architect Jennifer Lovejoy. Children who study art enhance their creativity and learn better, she said.
She applied for and received a $3,500 grant from the Virginia Commission for the Arts. The grant pays for three artists - Gotschalk, folk musician Tina Liza Jones and writer Ben Cleary - to work with students on special two-week projects.
Gotschalk said she hoped the kids learned how to turn anything, even cardboard, into art. Underneath the fun, though, is a lesson about what community means.
"These guys have a pretty good sense of it," she said during a break between classes. "I asked them who's there when they get off the school bus in the afternoon if Mom's a little late getting home - they can name five people who they feel safe with."
That's unusual for inner-city kids. When Gotschalk takes her program to urban schools, quite often they don't feel safe where they live or trust their neighbors.
The classes got to decide things about their houses, such as what colors to paint them (purple trim was quite popular). Pupils from the fourth- and fifth-grade classes, who were selected for a core group to build individual projects, created their own versions of what a home should be.
By the end of the second week, they were creating some impressive art out of nothing more than styrofoam and wire.
Casey created a coffee shop, complete with a huge cardboard cup on the roof. He doesn't particularly like java, but he figures people who hang out at the shops have a good time talking and, well, drinking coffee.
Sammy Williams separated his corn, constructed out of green pipe-cleaners, and some power lines on a hill with a plaster of Paris wall. On his family farm, a power line fell on the corn once, he said.
"Burnt it right up."
The power lines - the connection for a community of homes tucked away in the mountains of Giles County - also appear in Gotschalk's sculpture. She'll donate her wood and toothpick interpretation of Giles County to the school PTA for a fund-raiser.
The cardboard community will be taken to other elementary schools so kids can play inside them, then build their own.
Lovejoy said she hopes to receive another grant to develop an arts-based curriculum for elementary schools that would last longer than two-week projects.
by CNB