Engaging young minds
Mar 14, 2009 9:22:33 GMT
Post by bixaorellana on Mar 14, 2009 9:22:33 GMT
Go here to see the slideshow and photos that accompany the article.
March 14, 2009 - the NYTimes
A Is for Artwork That Lures Bronx Schoolchildren to New Libraries
By RANDY KENNEDY
Public School 47 in the Soundview section of the Bronx, a Gothic-inflected pile of a building with a stone owl watching over its main door, is so crowded that almost every inch inside must be used. The gym has been carved into classrooms, lavatories have been turned into assistant principals’ offices, and the old phone booth survives only until someone can figure out what to do with it.
But at the top of the school’s main staircases on the second floor, a new set of doors leads students into a room that somehow seems to keep expanding, like a place out of Harry Potter or Winsor McKay’s comic strips. High above the bookshelves an alphabet runs along the slate-black walls, the letters illustrated by a wonder cabinet of specimens and artifacts: a white cotton dress from Jaipur, India, under “D,” a metal top hat from an old haberdashery sign under “H,” a bunch of beaver-chewed sticks from Idaho under “S,” and a dried devil’s claw seedpod from West Texas under “P,” for plant.
Perhaps even stranger than the display is the fact that the room, a sparkling new 7,000-book library recently completed for the school with the help of the Robin Hood Foundation, is the first proper library the school has had in years.
“A lot of students here have never been in a school library or even a public library,” said Joanne Davis, a P.S. 47 teacher who has been retrained with the foundation’s help to become the school’s librarian.
Over the last nine years the foundation, dedicated to fighting poverty in New York City, and the city’s schools administration have built, with the help of private donors, libraries in 62 schools in low-income neighborhoods. Some of the libraries, including those recently completely at three schools in the Bronx, have also come with grand, permanent works by well-known artists and illustrators that bring to mind the murals of the Works Progress Administration — or, in the case of P.S. 47’s alphabetic conglomeration, created by the illustrator Maira Kalman, a kind of unhinged American Museum of Natural History.
“I go to museums all over the world, and I love natural-history displays, and I wanted something that felt like that,” said Ms. Kalman, a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Times. She said the installation was also intended to conjure the kind of eccentric personal museums that amateur scientists and collectors once built as a means of cataloging the world.
“It is a dreamscape that has a spine,” she said. “The alphabet is a beautiful thing.”
Ms. Davis, the librarian, standing in the apple-green library the other day with the school’s principal, Thomas Guarnieri, said she had not been able to make sense of some of the dozens of objects, which include a lump of unformed glass, a giant 1,000-watt light bulb (“You put that in a porcelain socket, and you couldn’t be happier,” Ms. Kalman said) and a fake coconut cake with a cherry on top.
The library is still being touched up, and the elementary school’s children, 1,150 of them in a building designed for about 800, have not yet begun to use the room. “They can’t wait,” Mr. Guarnieri said. “I come by, and there are all these nose prints and fingerprints on the door glass. And I clean them off because I want this to stay pristine.”
The library was designed by the architect Richard H. Lewis, as were those recently finished in two other schools: P.S. 96, near the New York Botanical Garden in Bedford Park, and P.S. 69, in the Clason Point neighborhood. Responding to the ample space above the bookshelves in the high-ceilinged old schools, the design firm Pentagram, which has been involved with the project since its beginning, helped find artists willing to donate time and resources to create outsize pieces that ring the rooms.
At P.S. 96, Stefan Sagmeister and Yuko Shimizu created a mural with a 70s comic-book vibe that features things like tuxedoed men with ladybug wings and a man riding a horse-size snail, all interwoven with a gnomic message — “Everybody who is honest is interesting” — that has already ignited long debates among 8-year-olds about truth, humor and the pursuit of entertainment. And also, of course, the prospect of rideable snails, which Melissa Feliz, a third grader, in a recent visit to the library, said she would welcome. One of her classmates, Tommy Mendoza, sitting nearby, firmly disagreed, saying, “If I saw a snail that big it would really freak me out.”
At P.S. 69 Christoph Niemann has created a mural that uses images of books serving as almost everything — as Abraham Lincoln’s beard and Mona Lisa’s smile, as a car hood, an eagle’s wings and a dinosaur’s teeth — all organized with Dewey Decimal System numbers in painted bubbles.
“This represents the final transformation of a formerly failing school,” said Alan Cohen, P.S. 69’s principal, who took over six years ago. Like his colleague Marta Garcia, P.S. 96’s principal, he notes that in many schools, libraries had simply, and sadly, come to be considered luxuries.
“We had a room with some books,” Mr. Cohen said, “but nobody ever went in there.”
David Saltzman, Robin Hood’s executive director, said the library project “was something that we looked at as affecting maybe 5 percent of a school’s real estate but 100 percent of its students.” He added that he liked to think that while the libraries’ donated books and computers deliver information, “the murals provide the sense of wonder and inspiration and magic.”
Ms. Kalman’s work also includes an apt bit of encouragement in a struggling school system of more than a million children, a message that Ms. Davis, the librarian, is particularly happy to see when she enters the room. Filed under “W” — for wise words — it is a bright red painting of a British poster from World War II. The message: “Keep Calm and Carry On.”
March 14, 2009 - the NYTimes
A Is for Artwork That Lures Bronx Schoolchildren to New Libraries
By RANDY KENNEDY
Public School 47 in the Soundview section of the Bronx, a Gothic-inflected pile of a building with a stone owl watching over its main door, is so crowded that almost every inch inside must be used. The gym has been carved into classrooms, lavatories have been turned into assistant principals’ offices, and the old phone booth survives only until someone can figure out what to do with it.
But at the top of the school’s main staircases on the second floor, a new set of doors leads students into a room that somehow seems to keep expanding, like a place out of Harry Potter or Winsor McKay’s comic strips. High above the bookshelves an alphabet runs along the slate-black walls, the letters illustrated by a wonder cabinet of specimens and artifacts: a white cotton dress from Jaipur, India, under “D,” a metal top hat from an old haberdashery sign under “H,” a bunch of beaver-chewed sticks from Idaho under “S,” and a dried devil’s claw seedpod from West Texas under “P,” for plant.
Perhaps even stranger than the display is the fact that the room, a sparkling new 7,000-book library recently completed for the school with the help of the Robin Hood Foundation, is the first proper library the school has had in years.
“A lot of students here have never been in a school library or even a public library,” said Joanne Davis, a P.S. 47 teacher who has been retrained with the foundation’s help to become the school’s librarian.
Over the last nine years the foundation, dedicated to fighting poverty in New York City, and the city’s schools administration have built, with the help of private donors, libraries in 62 schools in low-income neighborhoods. Some of the libraries, including those recently completely at three schools in the Bronx, have also come with grand, permanent works by well-known artists and illustrators that bring to mind the murals of the Works Progress Administration — or, in the case of P.S. 47’s alphabetic conglomeration, created by the illustrator Maira Kalman, a kind of unhinged American Museum of Natural History.
“I go to museums all over the world, and I love natural-history displays, and I wanted something that felt like that,” said Ms. Kalman, a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Times. She said the installation was also intended to conjure the kind of eccentric personal museums that amateur scientists and collectors once built as a means of cataloging the world.
“It is a dreamscape that has a spine,” she said. “The alphabet is a beautiful thing.”
Ms. Davis, the librarian, standing in the apple-green library the other day with the school’s principal, Thomas Guarnieri, said she had not been able to make sense of some of the dozens of objects, which include a lump of unformed glass, a giant 1,000-watt light bulb (“You put that in a porcelain socket, and you couldn’t be happier,” Ms. Kalman said) and a fake coconut cake with a cherry on top.
The library is still being touched up, and the elementary school’s children, 1,150 of them in a building designed for about 800, have not yet begun to use the room. “They can’t wait,” Mr. Guarnieri said. “I come by, and there are all these nose prints and fingerprints on the door glass. And I clean them off because I want this to stay pristine.”
The library was designed by the architect Richard H. Lewis, as were those recently finished in two other schools: P.S. 96, near the New York Botanical Garden in Bedford Park, and P.S. 69, in the Clason Point neighborhood. Responding to the ample space above the bookshelves in the high-ceilinged old schools, the design firm Pentagram, which has been involved with the project since its beginning, helped find artists willing to donate time and resources to create outsize pieces that ring the rooms.
At P.S. 96, Stefan Sagmeister and Yuko Shimizu created a mural with a 70s comic-book vibe that features things like tuxedoed men with ladybug wings and a man riding a horse-size snail, all interwoven with a gnomic message — “Everybody who is honest is interesting” — that has already ignited long debates among 8-year-olds about truth, humor and the pursuit of entertainment. And also, of course, the prospect of rideable snails, which Melissa Feliz, a third grader, in a recent visit to the library, said she would welcome. One of her classmates, Tommy Mendoza, sitting nearby, firmly disagreed, saying, “If I saw a snail that big it would really freak me out.”
At P.S. 69 Christoph Niemann has created a mural that uses images of books serving as almost everything — as Abraham Lincoln’s beard and Mona Lisa’s smile, as a car hood, an eagle’s wings and a dinosaur’s teeth — all organized with Dewey Decimal System numbers in painted bubbles.
“This represents the final transformation of a formerly failing school,” said Alan Cohen, P.S. 69’s principal, who took over six years ago. Like his colleague Marta Garcia, P.S. 96’s principal, he notes that in many schools, libraries had simply, and sadly, come to be considered luxuries.
“We had a room with some books,” Mr. Cohen said, “but nobody ever went in there.”
David Saltzman, Robin Hood’s executive director, said the library project “was something that we looked at as affecting maybe 5 percent of a school’s real estate but 100 percent of its students.” He added that he liked to think that while the libraries’ donated books and computers deliver information, “the murals provide the sense of wonder and inspiration and magic.”
Ms. Kalman’s work also includes an apt bit of encouragement in a struggling school system of more than a million children, a message that Ms. Davis, the librarian, is particularly happy to see when she enters the room. Filed under “W” — for wise words — it is a bright red painting of a British poster from World War II. The message: “Keep Calm and Carry On.”