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Pandemic can't keep Stratford Secondary and Elementary Schools' Grade 12 art class exhibit apART – The Beacon Herald

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SSES student Lara Zorgdrager honoured her late grandfather with her piece for the Grade 12 art class exhibit. Cory Smith/The Beacon Herald

COVID-19 wasn’t going to stop Michele Carter’s Grade 12 art students from showing off their work before the end of a unique but challenging school year.

As part of the Stratford Secondary and Elementary Schools’ course, a theme is picked at the beginning of the semester, and students create a variety of pieces before choosing one to display at Gallery Stratford. Now in its fourth year, the collaboration — an exhibit named apART — was forced to move due to the pandemic closing Gallery Stratford’s Romeo Street building.

Gallery curator Angela Brayham found a new space downtown in which pieces could be viewed from outside, while visitors could also browse inside while social distancing twice a week through June.

“It was always a goal to have a gallery show, and of course covid switched that up on us,” Carter said.

Brayham, who would have worked with Carter’s art students in the classroom, found space in Festival Square on Downie Street. The temporary gallery can be seen from Erie Street.

“It was really important to me to give the students the opportunity to show their work, especially since with Grade 12s, more than anyone else, so much that marks finishing high school was taken away from them,” Brayham said. “The art students work hard for this, so I thought it’s one way we can give them something to celebrate and recognizing something they’ve done.”

Twenty-six pieces of all shapes, sizes and styles adorn many of the gallery’s walls.


SSES Grade 12 art students created 26 pieces of all shapes, sizes and styles for their exhibit, apART, which is currently downtown. Cory Smith/The Beacon Herald

jpg, SF

Lara Zorgdrager honoured her late grandfather who immigrated to Canada from Holland in the 1950s. Her piece — “Thought you might like to have this” — aims to change the topic of immigration into a more personal narrative. Zorgdrager sketched her grandfather’s face onto the pages of a book given to him that Zorgdrager found while looking for a photo.

“He was just so excited and so proud of where he was from, but he was also proud of where he ended up,” she said. “I really wish … he could have seen it when he was alive.”

Though she wants to become a lawyer, Zorgdrager said art will always be a passion and something she uses to better understand reality. Having her work in a gallery for the first time fulfilled a dream.

“It doesn’t really feel real,” she said. “It hasn’t sunk in yet. It looks so much different on the wall than my kitchen table.”

Leeah Schoonderwoerd created an abstract piece using Photoshop and a pencil.

“It was easier to do than painting,” she said.

Creating an image using tools she already had made it easier for Schoonderwoerd after classes were postponed in March and never resumed.

“One of my favourite parts of art was going into class and seeing how different everybody’s pieces were,” she said. “It’s cool to see all the diversity of the different pieces.”

Most of the pieces were finished at home, and Carter kept track of her students’ progress during the weeks away. She also made the most of the limited time she had to get back into the school to get supplies students needed to complete their work.

“They wowed me with the ability to continue creatively with getting things done,” she said.

The exhibit never closes from the outside, but anyone can visit for a closer look Fridays from 3-7 p.m. and Saturdays from 12-4 p.m. over the next few weeks.

“In some ways it’s kind of nice because more people have access to this than they would a normal gallery,” Brayham said. “It’s not what we originally intended, but it still feels like a gallery, and it is a gallery, and it’s giving something for the community to be excited about right now.”

For more information, visit https://sites.google.com/ed.amdsb.ca/apart/home

cosmith@postmedia.com

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40 Random Bits of Trivia About Artists and the Artsy Art That They Articulate – Cracked.com

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John Little, whose paintings showed the raw side of Montreal, dies at 96 – CBC.ca

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John Little, whose paintings showed the raw side of Montreal, dies at 96  CBC.ca



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A misspelled memorial to the Brontë sisters gets its dots back at last

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LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.

More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.

The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.

They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.

“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”

It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.

Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”

Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.

“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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