For Guild Hall's 90th anniversary and the centennial of the Village of East Hampton, the 2021 Student Art Festival at Guild Hall will celebrate this area's history and look to an imagined future.
Anthony Madonna, who oversees arts education at Guild Hall, wanted the show to be about "time and place, especially after the incredible social unrest of the year." The theme is "past, present, future."
The festival, which connected artists with more than 2,000 South Fork students, will be on view from Saturday to Feb. 21, the participants questioning "how we got here and where we're going," Mr. Madonna said.
Thanks to a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, the program was offered at no cost to the participating school districts.
Artists and students who worked together included Scott Bluedorn and East Hampton High School's architecture and sculpture classes; Megan Chaskey and Jeremy Dennis and the Bridgehampton School's studio art class; Ellen Frank and East Hampton's arts honor society; Cindy Pease Roe and the Amagansett School's elementary students, and Almond Zigmund and the Springs School and the East Hampton Middle School.
They explored marine debris upsculpting, futuristic and eco-friendly architecture, the untold stories of ancestral indigenous people and their land, and the ability of public art and design to enliven communal spaces.
Ms. Zigmund impressed upon her students the importance of inviting constituents from a community into the process of making public art — "if not for Covid," that is.
"That's always the tricky thing about public art, it's not going to make everybody happy," she told her students. "You know, that's one of the reasons that there's a lot of art that exists in the public realm that could be deemed neutral."
Her favorite project was a monolithic rendering by Nettie Rattray in the middle of a cornfield. "Just a really beautiful, simple minimal structure, and her idea was kind of a comment on industrialization of space and culture. I saw it as clash of culture and nature."
Ms. Roe worked with third and fourth graders to make futuristic models of East Hampton Village with reused marine debris. "A lot of ice cream shops!" she said. "What I love the most is they had slides going from all the buildings . . . a lot of play built into the buildings themselves."
Liz Paris, the art teacher at the Amagansett School, said she felt Ms. Roe and Mr. Madonna had supported her in her instruction. She projected ideas over a smartboard while students in headphones were also plugged into their Chromebooks for one-on-one work.
The teen zine Tic Tac Toe by the Guild Hall Teen Arts Council, which appears in this issue of The Star, will also be on view at the festival, featuring dystopian micro-fiction and original art and photographs.
In lieu of the festival's annual opening ceremony, a monthlong series of virtual family workshops, children's after-school workshops, and teen events will take place, concluding with a high school awards ceremony. The art can be seen by reserving tickets for one-hour time slots from noon to 5 p.m., Friday through Sunday.
This article has been updated to correct the number of participants in the Student Art Festival.