Students' electronic art gallery offers medium for idea exchange

By Melissa Mitchell

While critics of the Internet complain that the medium should be regulated
to prevent children from being exposed to pictures of questionable content,
high school art teacher Karen Hellyer is exposing her students to the
positive side of digital-image transmission.

For well over a year, Hellyer's students at the UI Laboratory High School -
Uni High, as it's more commonly known - have been exhibiting their
drawings, paintings, photographs and other forms of original art in an
electronic gallery called ArtSpace. Anyone with access to the Internet's
World Wide Web can visit ArtSpace, which Hellyer said was the first high
school art gallery on the Net. She designed the on-line gallery with the
hope that it would stimulate a cross-fertilization of ideas that would
extend not only to students, but to art educators worldwide.

"I wanted to have a place where people could access examples of student
work, and where students could exhibit work in a non-threatening
environment," Hellyer said. Student work included in the gallery is
accompanied by class assignments. That educational component meshes well
with Uni's mission, Hellyer said, because "part of the job at a lab school
is distributing curriculum information to the world."

On-line galleries are just one way art students and educators are learning
to use network technologies to exchange ideas and support educational
goals, said the art teacher, who recently demonstrated the benefits to
peers at the National Art Education Association's convention in Houston.
For example, teachers can tap into networks to download software and images
for classroom use or learn to design independent-study experiences using
Hypertext Markup Language, or HTML, format used to create Web documents.
The potential for artistic collaboration is limited only by the
imagination.

Hellyer's students proved her point recently when they created works based
on the ideas of Stephan Shrem, a New York artist, musician, songwriter and
poet who creates three-dimensional sculptures called "Shremagraphs," which
he exhibits online.

"The kids found the site on the Web, and I seized the moment and said,
'Hey, this would be a great project,' "Hellyer said. After studying Shrem's
on-line images, the students made sketches, then created their own
Shremagraphs. Next, the students' work will be photographed, scanned and
forwarded electronically to the artist for his perusal. Hellyer, who
contacted Shrem at the outset of the project to gauge his interest, said,
"He thought it was cool."

Beyond the hipness and the hype, however, there is nothing particularly
extraordinary about artists' desire to master the electronic media, Hellyer
said. "Artists always have taken advantage of technology. When acrylic
paint was developed, that was a breakthrough from using oil or tempera.
It's your job as an artist to find out what your medium can do best that no
other medium can do."

ArtSpace's Web address is http://www.uni.uiuc.edu/uniartspace.html. For
more art-education resources, go to:
http://www.uni.uiuc.edu/departments/finearts/art/docfiles/handpix.html.