The students in Regina Hogan’s Graphic Communications pathways program at the Cranston Area Career and Technical Center had a unique opportunity recently when they connected with artist Giana Sacco (occipitalnyc.com) to help with her “Kinaesthetics” art gallery display being shown at the OneWay Gallery 140 Boon Street, Narragansett now through January 30, 2019.

“My main reason for wanting to work with the program was because I remember being a student.  I had completed projects that had real-life prompts but sat in a folder and I really wanted the student to see their final work in public; in real-life,” Sacco said.

The students worked both in class and in the gallery itself to make the exhibit come to life. “It took about a month for the whole process,” said Olivia Conti, one of the students in the program. “We took her images and vectorized them in Illustrator.” For those unfamiliar with the term, to vectorize an image means to turn a regular image into a solid black or solid white image, digitally adjusting them, according to student Sarah Danella.

Danella explained that as a class, they were split up into groups having different roles for the project.

“Some of us had to do the wallpaper, some of us did floor to ceiling wall stickers,” she said. “We added details that Giana wanted us to add.

Megan Anderson explained that Sacco gave guidelines to the students but they had some freedom to do their work as well, and Sacco would check in along the way to give some feedback and revisions.

The project allowed the students to take what they had learned in class, and apply it to a real-world situation, which is the goal in education.

“This was a lot of stuff that we’d already learned how to do, and now we were applying it to a real-life situation,” said Danella.

Once the work was done in class, the entire class headed to Narragansett to help install the exhibit at the gallery.

“For the most part, it went very smoothly,” said Conti.

The students had the pleasure of seeing their own work in a real-life situation.

“It was so cool to see,” said Anderson.

Seeing each group’s project results as a whole was rewarding for the students as well.

“We didn’t think it would all come together, but once all the pieces were up altogether, it looked cool,” said Danella.

“It also allowed us to collaborate and work with people we would not always work with,” said Anderson.

Conti agreed.

“It brought our class a lot closer, because of all the teamwork.”

Working for a real person outside of the school was also a rewarding experience for the students, and Sacco was pleased with the partnership, which even allowed her to add an additional component to the project.

“I enjoyed seeing how enthusiastic the students were to work on this exhibition,” she said. “They took the projects given to them and had it spark ideas for more, which is why we added the merchandise.”   

The students, all juniors this year, agreed that they would readily participate in a project such as this one again in the future and look forward to the next opportunity to put their learned skills to work out in the real world.