Springs’ Otay Ranch Academy for the Arts (ORAA) held its third-quarter Art Expo to celebrate theater and visual arts. Participants included teacher Tamra Santana’s 6th-grade class, who each chose a favorite song and created a record cover for it. Danica Arimany, ORAA art teacher, said, “The students considered what seeing through their ears and hearing through their eyes would be like. They chose a song that spoke to their hearts and created a record cover through translated sound into line, shape, color, and texture.”
Teachers Joe Daniel and Jennifer Clark’s 7th-grade classes painted a four by eight-foot mural inspired by Rivera’s Allegory of California – Alegoria de California (1930-31). In doing so, they underwent an exploration of community, identity, and muralism by collaboration in small groups to design a mural that expressed their group’s ideas of their chosen San Diego theme. They also dug into the visual language the Mexican artist Diego Rivera used in his murals.
Charles Coomber and Kayla Little’s 8th-grade classes created mixed media masks that answered the questions: Who do I feel I am? Who do others perceive me to be? They explored Frida Kahlo’s self-portraits and their own sense of self. They wondered, like Frida, if the parts of themselves they showed the world were the same as the parts of themselves they understood to be true inside.
Diane Weinberger, ORAA’s theater teacher, said that the TK-2nd grades learned many theatre games and had fun trying new things in class. They performed three plays from Dr. Seuss: The Sneetches, Oh! The Places You’ll Go! and Green Eggs and Ham. They were colorful and true expressions of their love for Dr. Seuss’s stories, and his messages of inclusion and individuality.
