Students honor local veterans

Students and faculty at Lincoln Orens Middle School in Island Park honored local veterans with a special ceremony last Monday. The event featured student presentations and personal dedications to veterans, as well as the unveiling of an art project that will now hang permanently in the school's library.

The students began the art project last year, when they were in seventh grade. Art teacher Naomi Seifert said the idea for the project began with a popular poster she had hanging in the art classroom. The poster, by artist Michael Albert, is a collage made in a style he coined “cerealism,” because he creates his work by piecing bits of cereal boxes together into large collages.

Seifert said her students were always interested in the poster, even though they did not immediately recognize the words obscured in the artist's work. When she told her students Albert had spelled out the words to the Pledge of Allegiance using cereal-box cut-outs, they were even more intrigued. After speaking with the student's social studies teacher – who was teaching them about the Bill of Rights at the time – Seifert decided they would try to emulate Albert's work, both in its style and patriotic message.

The idea was to create ten “cerealistic” collages, each spelling out one of the amendments. Nicole Cody, 13, liked the collaborative idea. “It was a really good project to do with all your friends and classmates,” she said. “It's cool you can make a piece of artwork from things laying around.”

Students worked on the project for several weeks, bringing in cereal boxes, cutting out letters and images, sorting them into piles based on color and size, and, finally, breaking into groups to piece together each amendment. As they collaged the amendments in art class, they were learning about the meaning behind the words in social studies.