Kings County Arts in Action

Arts education, which includes visual arts, music, drama, and media arts, is an important part of a well-rounded education. This newsletter serves to highlight the amazing work with the arts being done by school districts within our county.

At the very end of the 21-22 school year, Mr. Rotella's Drawing 1P students at Lemoore High School used the gridding technique with high-contrast reference images. These beginning drawing students, many with no previous background in art, created some amazing, realistic portraits in graphite.

Students in Mr. Alvarez's class at Corcoran High School have been exploring the use of lines in artwork. One of these pieces is the featured background for this month's newsletter.

Students in Ms. McCaslin's art classes at Pioneer Middle School have jumped into the school year with a variety of art projects. In seventh grade they are focusing on standard 7.VA:Cr1.1 "Apply methods to overcome creative blocks." Ms. McCaslin is working on teaching her students about how art can be anything and that there are infinite styles and approaches to creating art. It is her hope to eliminate some fixed mindsets about "not being good at art". She wants all of her students to feel comfortable trying new art techniques and feel confident in their efforts! They have started off with some simple projects to build confidence and unity. Each student designed one quarter of a circle on their own and then they put them together with the work of their peers to make new, complete, masterpieces that highlight diversity. Students are now learning how to take basic stick figures and improve them by making them more bold and by adding movement. Ms. McCaslin had the students include a repetitive color pattern to help develop muscle memory.

In advanced art, 8th graders are taking on a more involved group project that will also benefit the campus in a few ways. The focus is on standard 8.VA:Cn10 "Make art collaboratively to reflect on and reinforce positive aspects of group identity." All of the eighth grade advanced art students participated in a campus cleanup where they walked and picked up trash they found. The class then cleansed the trash pieces and painted them school colors. Students aren't quite done yet but they are making two large, poster-sized, images in a mosaic style to hang in the front office to show Panther Pride! Their progress so far can be seen below.

JC Montgomery, in partnership with the Kings County Juvenile Center, has an annual, Hip Hop based project called Stories with Style. During this project, students learn about Hip Hop cultural and its impact on the world. They also have the opportunity to create graffiti style art, make beats, and record raps or spoken word poems. Teaching artists Josh "OPTX" Levine, Aesop, Erik Gonzalez (Urbanists Collective) JJ Johnson, and Peter Valdez lend authenticity to the project, and provide creative coaching to students as they tell individual and community stories through art. Stay tuned for the October newsletter, when these projects will be featured. To see the teaching artists in action, check out the video below. To view past student projects, click here.

Over the summer, students had a chance to create a mural with Urbanists Collective artists Erik Gonzalez and Joanna Sanchez. This week long project built both art skills and community. JC Montgomery will be working with Erik later this year to design an augmented reality mural that will be showcased in Kings County. To see the summer mural, check out the video below.

Students in Mr. Case's art class at Hanford West High School have been working on symbol projects using paint in Art III and watercolor and colored pencils in Art I.

Students in Ms. Bejarano's Art I class have been creating personalized posters to share about their identity with classmates.

KIngs River-Hardwick School district in Hanford, CA would like to report an exciting year ahead of them. They have three strong clubs beginning this September. They will be offering Drama (which exclusively supplies all of the site productions with cast & crew throughout the year), a choir featuring some of KRH’s young ladies as well as several awesome young men, and their renowned “Core” Battery squad. All of the clubs have been built from the ground up over the last 14 years and allow 5th grade through 8th grade to join in the fun.

Looking forward, KRH will return to the Historic Hanford Fox theater for their 2022 winter show season as well as some surprise performances.

One of the most popular activities at Liberty Middle School in Lemoore, California is the Liberty jazz ensemble. This ensemble uses traditional band instruments with the inclusion of a rhythm section which includes piano, drum set, bass guitar, electric guitar, and vibraphone. A special thing about this ensemble is they meet every day before school even starts at 7:15am. This group learns The characteristics of jazz music, jazz history, and other styles like rock, funk, Latin, and More and of course, performance! This year‘s group consists of more than 40 students that show up every day ready and raring to learn. This group has had great success over the last two decades including a unanimous superior rating at last year‘s CMEA jazz festival held at Hanford high school! Here’s to a great year!

CCSESA Arts Initiative has provided resources for arts educators to utilize as they navigate the newly adopted arts framework. Here is the link to access these resources.

The VAPA committee has compiled a list of resources for arts educators.

The Kings County Office of Education VAPA website has resources and information about the arts in Kings County.

The next arts newsletter will be published in October. Submissions may be sent to Liz Norris. Districts and sites are responsible for verifying that photos may be publicly released. Photos should be submitted in groupings of three due to the gallery format of S'more (preferably as jpgs or pngs). Videos of live performances may also be accepted.

February 2020

April 2020

September 2020

November 2020

January 2021

March 2021

October 2021

January 2022

March 2022

May 2022