Get ready for a touch of nostalgia, Portland art lovers, because the City Arts Program is throwing it back to your kindergarten days. A unique student art exhibit, born from a collaboration between the wide-eyed youths of Rieke Elementary and the more mature hands of Cleveland High School's sculptors, is about to take over the Portland Building.
Here’s the scoop: a decade ago, in the 2013-14 school year, the Arts Education and Access Fund decided to splash a little color onto the bland canvas of elementary schools’ arts education. Now, those kindergarteners from back then are today's 10th graders, and they're ready to exhibit their journey in an art show that sounds like a blast from the surrealist past.
According to a recent release from the City Arts Program, these brainy kids are showcasing an "Exquisite Corpse"—no actual cadavers involved, by the way. It's an artsy game where one kid kicks off with an outlandish head doodle, hides it, and another kid jumps in with a torso, and so on, until you've got a Frankenstein's monster of drawings that Picasso himself would double-take.
But ah, here's the twist, the elementary schoolers passed their drawings to the high schoolers, who've gone full Pygmalion and breathed life into these drawings through sculpture. We’re talking a full-blown metamorphosis of 2D into 3D. An epic multi-level game of telephone where paper sketches become tangible figures that you can, you know, awkwardly bump into and then apologize to.
Mark your calendars: the exhibition unveils its wonders on April 4, with an opening reception offering tiny cheese cubes and punch from 5:00-6:30pm – at least that's the typical fare. Anyone with a soft spot for creativity, or just curious to peep the artistic chops of Portland's youth, is welcome to this shindig. The exhibit will haunt, grace the second floor of the Portland Building through June.
