Roncalli Art Students “Expand Their Vision”
(March 1 through April 9, 2008)

The Dacotah Prairie Museum announced the opening of a new exhibition highlighting the creative art talents of the Roncalli art students grades three through twelve. The exhibit entitled “Expanding Our Vision” was open through April 9th on the 2nd floor with selected works also on the 1st floor landing.

Laurel Mehrer, art instructor, said, “The students have been working hard to complete and ready their best pieces for the display. They are excited to have their work seen and when we had an informal naming contest for their exhibit, ‘Expanding Our Vision’ seemed to describe the experience well”. 

The third graders donated fanciful drawings of castles, colorful masks, their own version of Native American pictograph stories and 3-dimensional paper sculptures, some of which hang and spin. Fourth graders added portraits from life, watercolor landscape paintings, and the new experiences of paper weaving and potato printing.

Fifth graders contributed perspective drawings of buildings and landscapes, watercolor seascapes, graphic and dyed radial designs and hand built coil pots onto which faces of characters were added for interest. Sixth graders experimented with contour line drawings, rubber band block printing, and wire sculptures in which they were given 17 feet of wire that they could not cut to construct a 3-dimentional object. They also have been working on an acrylic mural to be mounted in the foyer of the Roncalli Elementary School.

Seventh and eighth graders provided clay car models, pottery, wire sculptures, still life drawings, watercolor paintings, pieces of collage work, and some colorful white scratchboard drawings and unique self portrait photography.  High school art students offered acrylic and gouache paintings, pastel drawings, graphite portraits of themselves or fellow students, black sctratchboard drawings, single and multi-colored linoleum block printing and excellent ceramic sculpture.

A selected group of about 50 pieces of Roncalli art were also be shown at the Aberdeen Recreational & Cultural Center for the month of March. They will help celebrate “Youth Art Month” with Aberdeen and surrounding youth contributing work. 

To view other past exhibits, click here.