Seeing Things Differently: The Picker Art Gallery Turns Things Upside Down for Hamilton Central School Fourth-Graders

When Galileo proposed that the earth moved around the sun instead of the other way around, he turned radically inverted conventional thinking about the universe.  4th-Graders at nearby Hamilton Central School (www.hamiltoncentral.org) have adopted an equally revolutionary point of view as they experience the "Dialogue of the Geocentric and the Heliocentric Universe", a facet of the multi-school arts integration project "Galileo's Universe", now in its third year at HCS.

This year's program has been enhanced by a partnership with the Picker Art Gallery. In September, educator Melissa Davies first introduced the idea of seeing things differently by presenting discussions structured around Visual Thinking Strategies (www.vue.org) — and some spatially wacky artworks! In October, students saw the neighborhoods of Hamilton turned upside-down as they rode in artist Simon Lee's Bus Obscura, a bus transformed by the insertion of 1,000 pin-hole cameras in its windows into a moving natural cinema (a project co-sponsored by Colgate's Institute for the Creative and Performing Arts and ArtsMix).  In November, students created their own lens for seeing the world—a pin-hole camera. After loading a handmade shoe-box camera body with light-sensitive paper, and exposing it by peeling off a masking-tape shutter, each student had a chance to develop his or her pin-hole photo in the darkroom of the University's photography studio. Davies, along with the students and teaching artists Holly Adams and Glenn McClure (www.artforbrains.com), will extend the program this spring in a collaborative theater piece that will bring the idea of seeing things differently back to Galileo's revolutionary proposal.

Funding for these partnerships has been granted through Partners for Arts Education School Arts Partnership program(www.arts4ed.org), made possible in part by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts (www.nysca.org), a state agency.