Kulanu hosts arts fest

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Highlighting the creative work of about 40 students was the primary mission behind the sixth annual “Imagination & Innovation is Everywhere,” a spring arts and science festival at Kulanu last week.
“This was a forum to showcase artwork that we’ve incorporated into our daily curriculum,” said Ray Guarneri, technology teacher at Kulanu, a Cedarhurst school for special-needs individuals.
Projects ranged from poetry about the different seasons to photography with mixed media. The students, aged 11-21, incorporated art into their social studies, math, science and English Language Arts lessons.
Lauren Portela’s Career Exploration students worked on projects that studied artists with disabilities. “I teach 15- to 18-year-olds, and we studied artists like Peter Longstaff,” she said. “He has no arms, so he paints his art using a paintbrush with his foot. My students painted their artwork using the paintbrush in their mouths.”
Deborah Lang, a middle school Language Arts teacher who helped coordinate the event, said she recycled last year’s theme, which was the three R’s: reduce, reuse and recycle for this year. “We did biographies about historical figures like King Tut and Abraham Lincoln,” she said. “We used Styrofoam, yarn and soda bottles — recycled materials — to make bottle dolls of their historical figures to go with their biographies.”
Star Wars fan Jonah Goldstein, 18, wrote about his favorite movie by recreating fiction and relating it to the planets in the solar system through a written paragraph and a mixed media painting. “My project is about space and the planets,” he said. “I also put spaceships, Darth Maul, Skywalker, and the planets into my picture. I liked making pictures like this because I am an artist.”

Vanessa Parker is a reporter for the Nassau Herald.