West Bradford Elementary kindergarten students have collaborated with local artist Rhoda Kahler to create a new art installment at the school. Since the start of the 2019-20 school year, Kahler has served as the artist-in-residence in Mary Frances Giunta's art room at West Bradford. She has taught students from across the district about the artistic process, and together, they have worked to build the new sculpture.
Giunta and Downingtown High School West art teacher Anne Russell were looking for opportunities to bring students from the high school and elementary school together. They brought in Kahler to help facilitate, and they applied for and won a Downingtown Community Education Foundation (DCEF) grant.
DCEF was founded to identify, promote and support innovative educational initiatives for the students in Downingtown Area School District (DASD) and to expand and enrich public education. Its grants support programs, projects, services and other activities that emphasize new approaches to teaching. As of September 2019, DCEF had awarded more than $135,000 in DASD teacher grants.
Recently, the James Lee and Annanette Harper Family Foundation gifted DCEF with funds dedicated to support the arts, culture and humanities.
The DCEF grant supports the work of Kahler, a resident of West Bradford who is her time to support the project. Kahler hopes that the piece will remind the students of the special experiences they had and the topics they learned about in school.
Earlier this school year, Downingtown West students visited the classroom to learn from Kahler and to work with the elementary students. Together, the high school and elementary students created a large cube with intricate details on all six sides. Other pieces included discs, spheres and conical shapes, all with elaborate designs. The pieces will be mounted to metal rods and brought together to form the final sculpture.
As a small part of the larger work, kindergartners made impressions in clay discs. Students got creative with their impressions, using found objects, including their shoes. They used words including "games," "science lab," "cool gadgets" and "spaceships" to describe how the sculpture made them feel.
Kahler is a ceramic artist with a studio in West Chester. Her work has been featured internationally, nationally and regionally in magazines, newspapers and television, including on the Home and Garden Television network (HGTV) and in Crave Magazine. Kahler exhibits in galleries, and her large-scale handmade tile murals and sculptures appear in public and private collections. Notable commissions include the Delaware Art Museum, West Chester University and the Philadelphia Environmental Film Festival. Kahler conducts workshops nationally and participates in a wide range of artist residencies, some of which are the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Inglis House. Kahler is an adjunct faculty member at West Chester University, where she received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1995. To learn more about Kahler, readers may visit http://www.rhodakahler.com.
The West Bradford sculpture is scheduled to be completed in June and will be located outside of gym. To learn more about the DCEF and the grants and programs it offers students and teachers, readers may visit http://www.dasd.org/dcef.
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