Featuring work by the artists of Hyde Park Art Center’s Youth Programs, Homegrown 2001 showcased the collaborative projects from the cornerstone programs of its community outreach initiatives that brought together an array of styles and media from papier mache mobiles and painted textile banners to urban cityscape collages and documentary photography projects. Through Partners in Art: Artists Mentoring Teens, Teens Mentoring Youth program, held in conjunction with the Chicago Park District students worked on a series of large sculptural forms. Students from the art-integration program, Visual learners: Curriculum-Based Art in Schools, applied reading, writing and ‘rithmetic skills to create illustrated map murals.
In conjunction with this exhibition a collateral exhibition of collage works and photographs by Naomi Strom-Avila, an artist and faculty member at the Art Center, was showcased in the Student and Faculty Gallery. Strom-Avila created collages of found images and their phtographic reversals in her series, Transparent- Found Images in Positive and Negative. The images were hung at various heights away from eye level to encourage direct observation and recognition of smaller details in the work.
