Students Celebrate The Arts With Festival

Elise Mordick and Megan Dudley are the kind of best friends who show up at school dressed alike without planning it.

Standing in nearly matching earth-tone cords and burgundy T-shirts on the sidewalk outside the Spokane Opera House on Monday, the two North Central High School seniors decided the self-portraits they were assigned would be a collaboration that reflected their friendship.

“Everyone says we are joined at the hip,” said Mordick. “We can talk for one another, think for one another.”

“The one can fit together as two,” said Dudley, pointing to their creation.

The duo-portrait was a pair of fitted four-foot styrofoam squares, carved and sanded to form a face that paired Mordick’s eyes with Dudley’s lips.

“It’s not often that you get to carve a face out of styrofoam,” said Dudley, foam shavings like snow whirling around her pant legs.

Around the wonder twins were 58 other aspiring young artists, honor students hand-picked by District 81 teachers, who were also carving their self-portraits.

They and several hundred of the top student musicians in the district gathered this week at the Spokane Opera House for the Festival of the Arts.

The two-day celebration culminated Tuesday when the musicians played and the self-portraits were painted and stacked on top of each other, twelve feet high, like a thrift store totem pole.

The students got hands-on help from local professionals. Sculptor Ken Spiering, creator of the cougars in the STA Plaza and the Radio Flyer red wagon in Riverfront Park, pointed to an angelic mermaid portrait.

“I come to marvel at the kids,” said Spiering.

Brianna Grangroth, a Rogers High School sophomore, hunched over her work, which looked like an evil Spider Man with fangs and V-shaped eyebrows.

“I like to draw morbid things … like hands going through hearts and stuff,” said Grangroth, a happy, smiling red-head. “I’m different, but who cares.”

Ryan Schroer’s portrait was more of a political statement. Schroer, a Shadle Park student, carved an emaciated man in a gas mask wearing a World War I helmet, modeled from a patch on his worn blue jeans advertising the Seattle punk band Paxton Quiggly.

His T-shirt bore the phrase “Resist - making punk a threat again.”

“It symbolizes, like, revolution,” said Schroer.

Shadle Park art goes international

Creations by Shadle Park High School senior art students Johanna Alexander and Aaron Caprye have gone international.

Alexander’s charcoal still-life and Caprye’s ink contour drawing of weeds will be featured in a calendar produced by Shadle Park’s German sister school, Steinwaldschule.

A representative of the school picked up the two works while they were here in September.

The calendar will include artwork from students in France and England.

NC seniors selling McBucks

North Central High School seniors are selling McDonalds gift certificate - McBucks - to raise money for a senior trip to Mexico.

The McBucks are good at any McDonalds. Fifty cents on every dollar goes to the class fund.

To buy McBucks, call Sarann Graham at 353-5220.

, DataTimes MEMO: Education Notebook is a regular feature of the North Side Voice. If you have news about an interesting program or activity at a North Side school or about the achievements of North Side students, teachers or school staff, please let us know. Write: Jonathan Martin, Education Notebook, North Side Voice, P.O. Box 2160, Spokane, WA 99210. E-mail: jonathanm@spokesman.com. Call: 459-5484. Fax: 459-5482.