Community Arts Stories

Partnership with Drexel’s ExCITe Center and ISTE

Remix Interactive 2 was a large-scale multimedia event staged especially for the 2015 International Society of Technology in Education (ISTE) conference and created by students from a consortium of schools in Philadelphia. Students guided the large conference hall audience through different types of interactive activities in this fast-paced seven-minute piece. The types of interaction ranged from participatory clapping and singing to downloading an app that flashed colors and sounds and could be used to play along with the student musical performance. For more information, see the Tumblr site at http://remixinteractive.tumblr.com.

Partnership with Boys’ Latin, Drexel’s ExCITe Center, and Play On, Philly!

The 2014 Philadelphia Science Festival opened with an event for the history books: a music and high-tech light show created and produced by more than 50 highly talented teens from SCH Academy, Boys’ Latin of Philadelphia, and the Saint Francis de Sales School youth orchestra Play On, Philly! Remix Interactive was a student-led public art initiative combining music and technology and providing a powerful real-world learning experience. Not only did the students get hands-on experience in creative collaboration, music composition, a range of new media, performance, and software design, they also learned firsthand the challenges, frustrations, and excitement of producing a large-scale public art event. “At SCH we look for opportunities that give our students a chance to apply their knowledge in non-academic settings,” explains Ellen Fishman-Johnson, chair of The Arts and New Media Department at SCH. “The authenticity of these experiences tends to deepen their learning and make it more long lasting.”

Partnership with Mural Artist Ann Northrup

Mural artist Ann Northrup worked with students from SCH and the John Story Jenks School in the School District of Philadelphia to create a companion mural to her “Wissahickon Crossing,” which graces the exterior wall of Bredenbeck Bakery in Chestnut Hill. The student mural, titled “Bridging the Future: One Mural, Two Schools,” mirrors the mural commissioned by the Mural Arts Program.

Partnership with Manayunk Special Services District

Springside Chestnut Hill Academy, in conjunction with Manayunk Special Services District, wrapped 14 Big-Belly Solar Compactors in spectacular art pieces that line Main Street in Manayunk. The project, dubbed “Smart Partners in Art,” takes a wonderful civic initiative and pairs it with a green one with an artistic flair. Each piece of art featured on the skins that wrap the trash compactors includes an animal indigenous to the Schuylkill River created in the style of a well-known artist. An Andy Warhol-styled frog envelopes one, a Van Gogh-inspired fish embellishes another, and the magic realism of Henri Rousseau’s goose in flight is captured on another.

Partnership with the Mural Arts Program

A team of students at Springside Chestnut Hill Academy and the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program worked together over a period of weeks to create and produce Mural in Motion, a 40x100-foot digital animation projected onto the exterior wall of the Fabric Workshop building at 1214 Arch Street in Philadelphia. The projection weaved student-created music, animation, and video into eight minutes of dynamic original footage. Mural in Motion’s debut was timed to begin immediately after the Opening Keynote of the 2011 International Society for Technology in Education’s (ISTE) annual conference, when it would be visible to the more than 15,000 attendees exiting the conference.

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