Students debut on First Friday

Works of students artwork during First Friday

Bali Mshar was all dressed up for her first gallery showing during First Friday last week in the first-floor hallway of the downtown branch of the Spokane Public Library.

She was there with her family, who took pictures of her standing next to her exhibited painting of three colorful birds.

But Mshar isn’t a full-time artist. She’s a fifth-grader at Mullan Road Elementary School showing off her talent for the first time.

“We did it in class,” she said of her work. “It took, like, a few hours.”

The exhibit is filled with the works of students from every elementary school in Spokane Public Schools. It was the first time the district has been involved with the First Friday events, which is Spokane’s monthly gala to celebrate local art.

Patricia Ratcliffe, an art teacher at Audubon, Garfield and Holmes elementary schools, helped to organize the exhibit with the other eight elementary art specialists in the district – Molly Adolfae, Nancy Betts, Ruth Gfeller, Anne Handler, Kit Jagoda, Cynthia Moore, Carolyn Schmitz and Jacob Wendel. The teachers visit anywhere from three to five schools over two weeks and some of the teachers have more than 800 students in grades four through six. Each student gets 18 hours of art instruction.

“After you’ve been in a school for a while, you do know their names,” said Jagoda.

Each teacher selected 20 to 30 pieces of art to exhibit at the library and displayed the pieces on the walls of the first floor hallway for visitors to see.

Sienna Tanner from Audubon Elementary School was there with her parents and younger sister. She had a paper sculpture on the wall and was showing it off to her parents. Like every other student, she had never had a piece of her artwork exhibited and was excited to see it.

She said it took her a little longer than the hour she had in class to work on her sculpture, but she took it home and worked on it there.

Her mother, Laura Whetstone, was impressed with the artwork on the walls from the other students involved. She pointed out a painting of a corncob as her favorite.

“I like a lot of what I see,” Whetstone said.

Several students were running up to different places on the walls exclaiming, “That’s mine, that’s mine, look,” while their parents took out their cameras with obvious pride of their child’s work.

“I’m thrilled that so many families came,” Ratcliffe said. She said parental support was valuable in a child’s education and helps the students build an identity as a creative person.

Kimbrah Dawson of Jefferson Elementary, not only had a piece on exhibit, but also brought in a sculpture of a fist. The sculpture worked as a vase as well, and she added fresh flowers to it. She had made it the afternoon before the opening of the exhibit.

Ratcliffe suggested she put the sculpture on the podium, where students from Sara Devins’s and Kim Johnson’s fourth-grade class at Hutton read poetry they had written.

The podium was a little too tall for many of the students, but they thought it was cool, so their teacher found them a stepstool.

“They had the verve to decide to come and do this tonight,” Devins told the audience full of parents sitting as close to the front as they could.

“They’ve written it all,” Devins said. “It’s kind of amazing.”

The exhibit will be available for public viewing through May 30 during the library’s business hours. The library is open Tuesdays and Wednesdays from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. and Thursdays through Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.