ICA video shows 'What's on Kids' Minds'

With all the excitement and anticipation of a Hollywood movie premiere, the University's Institute of Contemporary Art unveiled the video "What's on Kids' Minds" Friday, in front of an enthusiastic audience of 100 people. The 20 minute video is the first in a series of artist-student collaborations commissioned by the ICA as part of its two-year-old "More Than Meets the Eye" community outreach program. Bill Adair, ICA coordinator of education, proposed the project to video artists Connie Coleman and Alan Powell two years ago. Coleman and Powell selected the Bache-Martin School because they live in the Fairmount neighborhood, where the school is located. Coleman and Powell, a husband and wife duo who have worked with the community for the past 15 years, met with 60 fourth graders from Bache-Martin once a week for four months. The couple used camcorders to digitize the students' voices and artwork onto Amiga Computers. They also interviewed the children and had them tell stories about their daily lives. Coleman and Powell animated the drawings and integrated them into comical scenes at their Fairmount studio. Students from the University of the Arts helped with 11 sequences as part of a first semester assignment. Local composer Gareth Downs added jazz rhythms to the video. Powell said that the video provided him with the opportunity to reach out to a poor, predominantly black neighborhood. "Breaking through the [socioeconomic and racial] lines that divide us was an important goal of the project," he said. The bulk of the video contained scenes created from the students' digitized drawings. As the fourth graders watched the video, they began to recognize their dance steps, drawings, and voices on the television. Cries of "That's me!" erupted from the audience, accompanied by laughter and grinning. In one of video's more humorous sections, students stood in a line in their classroom as their hair grew to the ceiling and changed color. In the meantime, one girl rose off the ground and soared around the classroom as her ponytail rotated like the blades of a helicopter. Powell said the biggest challenge of the project was to retain the children's voices while trying to produce a piece of sophisticated artwork. Coleman and Powell succeeded in maintaining this balance. The children's voices were especially apparent during a series of interviews, most of which were hilarious. In his interview, Victor Nunez talked about a bully in his neighborhood and how he planned to deal with him. "I need to learn karate," he said. Coleman and Powell asked a second student what she wanted to do when she grew up. "I don't want to have 18 kids like my grandmother. But I want to have at least five," she said. Adair was pleased with the success of the video. He said that it helped to develop young audiences for art. "It was delightful to see the results of a two-year project and to see how successfully a museum and a community organization can work together," Adair said. "On top of that, we made a really terrific piece of art." Joy Kurtz, principal of the Bache-Martin School, said that the video was fulfilling from the perspective of an educator. "The children were so eager to learn; they looked forward to each session [with Coleman and Powell]," she said. "Generating that kind of excitement is what education needs to be about." The video will be aired in its entirety for two weeks at 4 p.m. on Roxborough Public Television Station WYBE, Channel 35. The video will also be exhibited at the ICA.

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