CHATTANOOGA, TN (WDEF) – The Chattanooga High School Center for Creative Arts more than lives up to its name when it comes to its latest visual arts exhibit. The theme for the display is “Flight”. What the students came up with is a soaring example of what’s right with our schools.
Chad Burnette is the Arts teacher at CCA.
He says, ” Instead of having football games on Friday nights, we have musical theater performances, we have dances, things like that. For visual arts, we put on art
shows that this is how we perform. This is sort of our stage, the art gallery.”
Andrew Freeman is Junior at CCA.
Andrew says, ” I think art is very like broad. So, like you can do so many things like this project for instance. So, a lot of people are taking flowers, grass. So many people are taking brass and just making something out of it that isn’t what it is, is. I think that’s kind of what I think art is, that you should take something that is something else and make into something else.”
Emalyne Howard is also a Junior at CCA.
She says, ” There’s so much you can do with art. It doesn’t have to be painting. It can be sculpting ceramics, painting, drawing, collages, and there’s
so many forms of art that you can do. It’s not just restricted to one certain thing.”
Mr. Burnette chips in, “So, we have about five shows a year. The theme is flight, and so the kids were asked to make different artworks that incorporated this theme.”
CCA Senior Hope Daan says, “When I think of flight, I think it’s like a very whimsical thing. So, I wanted to create something that was more fantastical. So. it’s made of mostly cardboard and then, like, construction paper and then, like, wooden skewers and that’s kind of all that I used to make it.”
He sister Faith says, ” I came up with a spaceship that had a bunch of protruding parts, and I wanted to portray movement in it. That’s why I have a character flying out and the helmet sort of floating off.”
Mr. Burnette concludes, ” We also have some art projects that we had in class that would support that theme as well. Just sort of add to it. A lot of the show up here today was sort of started that way as an afterschool city arts program that we’re doing through the Creative Discovery Museum. So, some of these pieces were created to travel around the city and to be shown different places. There’s not a prize. The kids that work in the afterschool program, they actually get paid to work on artwork, so they get paid hourly to do it. So, it’s a great opportunity for them to associate art with a job and something that they’ll do for a living, and so that we’re excited to get them those opportunities.”