Arts All State took place on May 30 and 31. The theme was "limits, no limits". Here is the scoop. Two artists mentors work with a group of 17 juniors in high school on an installation in less than 36 hours. There are 7 groups, so there are 7 installations. My partner mentor was Rosa Ibarra (pictured on the right). Each group is only allowed to work with three items (and an unlimited supply of adhesives), two of which the mentors pick out and one suprise item that is assigned by the Arts All State staff. Rosa and I picked mylar and wallpaper. Our Suprise item was cd stack holders. At first I thought that it was a terrible material, but let me say that the group really used them well.

We ate sandwiches and cookies.

In a purely objective opinion, I think that the students I worked with, as a whole, worked so well together, maybe the best group in terms of team cooperation and effort. They came to a concensus on what the concept of the installation should be and all worked to make it happen. There were a few shining shiny stars who were great leaders of there peers.

The day started by Rosa and I taking our group up to a painting called "A Portrait of Gaylord". The portrait is a painting of the head of Gaylord floating over a city block with other little scenes depicting his life surrounding his head. We had a discussion about the piece and its placement in the gallery of other paintings. The group started to compare it to the painting on the wall that was next to it, siting that the structure of elements in each painting was very similart but that the other painting was more negative.

The installation had to do with television and alienation. The group took more visual cues from the Gaylord painting but conceptual cues from the painting they compared it to.