Progressive Arts Alliance is one of only 14 members of the National Guild of Community Schools of the Arts and the only organization in Ohio to receive a grant through the MetLife Foundation Partners in Arts Education Program.  The program’s goal is to improve teaching and learning in the arts by supporting and promoting exemplary partnerships between community arts education providers and public schools.  MetLife’s funding will support the PAA-George Washington Carver School Arts-Integrated Residency Partnership that has been in place since the 2006-07 school year, allowing all 462 K-8 students at the school the opportunity to engage in meaningful arts learning activities.

The PAA-Carver Arts-Integrated Residency Partnership pairs professional teaching artists with K-8 classroom teachers at Carver.  Artists and teachers collaboratively create dynamic arts lessons that integrate the arts with non-arts curricula content and meet Ohio Academic Content Standards in Fine Arts and other subjects.  In addition, the funding provides for teachers and artists to participate in arts-integration professional development workshops, and for residency activities to be designed to increase parent and community involvement at the school.  Students engage in a variety of residency activities, including music, printmaking, poetry, and media arts workshops.  Each semester will conclude with a community exhibition/performance to share the students’ achievements.

Please join us in thanking the MetLife Foundation and the National Guild of Community Schools of the Arts for supporting the PAA-Carver partnership, and for enabling more than 11,500 students in 8 cities to participate in quality arts education programs in school.

Teachers and PAA Staff planning at Carver.

by Andre Clayton 

“The Tortoise and the Hare” is the most famous of Aesop’s fables, which uses simple language to teach children the moral lesson that slow and steady wins the race.    

Progressive Arts Alliance artist-educator Jen Craun is teaching Charles Lake Elementary preschoolers and kindergartners twelve of Aesop’s fables, including “The Tortoise and the Hare,” through a more colorful technique than just reading their simple language to them. Craun, who is a professional artist, said since March she has been teaching Charles Lake preschoolers and kindergartners printmaking to create the characters of the twelve Aesop’s fables.  

According to Craun, Charles Lake preschoolers and kindergarteners have been using stencils, brayers, inks, and a printing press to create the fables’ characters, which will be used as a backdrop for a play performed by older students that will be about the fables they have learned. Three additional PAA arts-educators are teaching other Charles Lake Elementary students music, script writing, and acting for the play, which they will perform in front of their classmates and parents at the end of the program in May. (more…)

by Andre Clayton  

On May Day in Canterbury Elementary School’s gymnasium, half of its fourth grade class danced in front of their parents and peers instead of around a maypole and the rest of the fourth grade class rapped, creating a festive new twist to the centuries old tradition.  

Canterbury’s rap and break dance performances were a part of a PAA arts-in-education residency program in Cleveland Heights schools that the Ohio Arts Council helped fund with state tax dollars to encourage economic growth, educational excellence and cultural enrichment for all Ohioans.  (more…)

by Andre Clayton  

After George Washington Carver Elementary School third grade teacher Susan O’Donnell worked with Progressive Arts Alliance (PAA) for the first time this year, she said she got more than she expected when one of her students began a geometry project at home just for fun.  

PAA has been providing schools both in and outside the Cleveland Metropolitan School District with arts-in-education programming since 2002, striving to give students meaningful experiences in the contemporary arts that stimulate critical thinking and promote progressive thought.  

PAA artist-educators worked with O’Donnell’s third grade class for over two months, combining printmaking with her math curriculum and rap with her language arts curriculum.   (more…)

Story by Andre Clayton

What do Arnold Schwarzenegger, Andrew Carnegie, and Charlie Chaplin have in common? School students in Cleveland answered that question in their 35-minute documentary about immigration and migration, “From There to Here: Discovering Immigration and Migration,” in front of an audience of parents and students on April 7 in their school cafeteria; the three men had immigrated to America.

The cafeteria-turned-auditorium, displayed what the students had been cooking up for the past 10 weeks during a residency with Progressive Arts Alliance artist-educators and filmmakers Cindy Penter and Tom Kondilas. The students, fourth through sixth graders, used photography, voiceovers, and stop motion video film techniques, which they had learned from Penter and Kondilas, to describe the miserable experiences 19th and early 20th century impoverished immigrants had to go through during their journey to America, such as being crammed with hundreds of other immigrants in the lower decks of a ship for months and eating rotten food. The audience remained silent as they were drawn in by the students’ vivid film footage.  (more…)

Photo by Patrick Fenner

Text by Andre Clayton

Luiz Muñoz Marin School (LMMS) was named after Puerto Rico’s first elected governor, one of many facts LMMS students learned while making their historical documentary film about the Clark-Fulton and Tremont neighborhoods of  Cleveland.

LMMS fourth, fifth, and sixth graders spent three months as documentary filmmakers, under the supervision of Progressive Arts Alliance artist-educators, Joshua Johnston and Patrick Fenner, as they interviewed prominent Clark-Fulton and Tremont history experts and filmed the historical places that make Clark-Fulton and Tremont unique places to live.

LMMS students showed their final work on April 2 in front of their classmates, teachers, and community members in the Lincoln West High School Auditorium. The West Side Market, Cleveland City Hospital, which is now a MetroHealth Hospital, the house used in the movie “A Christmas Story,” St. Michael’s Church, Carnegie Libraries, and Cleveland Metroparks Zoo were chosen topics for the documentary. The LMMS students also filmed their school and the history of immigration in Clark-Fulton and Tremont.

(more…)

As we complete our fall semester in-school programming, we’d like to share images of some of the hands that have been at work this semester …

Among our programming during this semester has been a dynamic mural installation at Lincoln-West High School; printmaking, filmmaking, creative writing, and drumming at Charles Lake; web site design at George Washington Carver; after-school programming at the CHAMPS program at Noble, Wiley, Roxboro, and Monticello schools in Cleveland Hts.; and hip-hop music writing and production workshops at Upward Bound at Cuyahoga Community College’s Metro Campus.

Looking forward to creating more exciting opportunities to see hands at work from students of all ages in 2008!

For immediate release:

(Cleveland, Ohio – October 2, 2007) Students at Lincoln-West High School, a part of the Cleveland Metropolitan School District (CMSD), will participate in the collaborative creation of a mural to be painted on the south side of the school together with internationally-acclaimed painter and pop culture icon Lee Quiñones, October 3 through October 13. The mural will be unveiled in a public, outdoor event Saturday, October 13 at 2:30 pm at Lincoln-West High School, 3202 West 30th Street, Cleveland.

Quiñones is also scheduled to speak at Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio where he will present slides of his work this Friday, October 5 at 4:30 pm in the West Lecture Hall of The Oberlin Science Center, 119 Woodland St. at Lorain (OH-511), on the Oberlin campus. This free event is open to the public.

Lee Quiñones (b. 1960, Ponce de Leon, Puerto Rico) has been painting since the 1970s, first on New York City’s streets and subway cars, and then shifting to a studio-based practice. Along with Keith Harring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, Quiñones was one of the key innovators during the early days of New York’s street-art movement. In keeping with his tradition of innovation, Quiñones was also one of the first street artists to transition away from creating murals on trains and begin creating canvas-based paintings. The 1979 exhibition of his canvases at Claudio Bruni’s Galleria La Medusa in Rome introduced street art to the rest of the world. In 1981 he starred in the influential hip-hop film Wild Style and helped introduce the burgeoning New York hip-hop scene to the world. He was also featured in Blondie’s “Rapture” music video. He was a 2004 VH1 Hip-Hop Honors honoree and co-presenter with Debbie Harry of Blondie and Fab 5 Freddy.

He has had numerous solo shows and has exhibited internationally. Quiñones is an inductee of the permanent collection at the Whitney Museum of American Art (NYC). His work has been featured in world-renowned venues including The New Museum Of Contemporary Art (NYC), Museum of National Monuments (Paris, France), Museum of Modern Art (NYC), and the Institute for North American Studies (Barcelona, Spain). All of the paintings in his recent show at the famed P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in New York were purchased by legendary musician Eric Clapton, a long-time fan of Quiñones’ work.

In 2005, he took a 1,500 mile bike trip from New York City to Miami, Florida to raise money for Hurricane Katrina victims through the Boys and Girls Clubs of America. Artwork he created during his journey was featured in a Miami exhibit that donated the proceeds to Katrina relief.

The Lincoln-West mural project is a part of Progressive Arts Alliance’s Murals in the Schools program that conducts in-school residencies that work with students of all ages to create a mural for their school. Students and their teachers engage in a dynamic group project that creates a mural collaboratively with a professional mural artist from Progressive Arts Alliance (PAA). Mural-making allows students to learn about teamwork, problem solving, mathematics, and art through experiential learning. Students learn about the powerful impact of community revitalization through the arts. Other CMSD schools that have PAA murals include Orchard School, Michael R. White School, and George Washington Carver School.

“I think it’s great that someone is finally coming to fix our mural on the outside of our building,” explained Jose Pagañ, 11th grader at Lincoln-West, referring to a peeling, dilapidated mural that will be replaced by the project. He added, “It’s also great that Lee Quiñones is coming to work with us.”

Support for the Lincoln-West mural project has been provided by The Thomas H. White Foundation, The Abington Foundation, and Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities, Case Western Reserve University.