Allan Appel Photo
Teacher Christopher Cozzi atop Arc de Catastrophe.
It’s not every day that high school art and design students get a commission to create a sculpture guaranteed to be seen by 12,000 people and a billboard that will be viewed by hundreds of thousands driving along I‑95.
Christopher Cozzi’s ceramics and and sculpture class fulfilled their commission in just the two weeks allotted. The Co-Op High students rolled out their creations at a festive assembly Friday afternoon.
The 700-pound, 83-inch-high sculpture’s Gallic name is Arc de Catastrophe. It, along with the billboard, are inspired by themes in the Victor Hugo novel-inspired musical Les Miserables.
With a competitive $5,000 grant from the Broadway League [of theaters], folks at the Shubert created what they call an “Art in Action Project.”
They challenged the Co-Op students to make art from ideas in the musical, which is being presented at the Shubert beginning this week.
They had two weeks to work and had conditions attached to the non-paid commission. So the students were getting the unusual and useful experience of serving a client’s needs, said Kelly Wuzzardo, the Shubert’s head of education.
In this case the conditions included pursuing one of Hugo’s themes, applying it to their own lives, and creating something that can move — the sculpture is on wheels — as well as fit into the Shubert’s elevators.
It’s to be on display on the mezzanine level during the run of the show, April 17 to April 21.
The billboard, whose tag line echoes the musical’s “Who Am I?” theme, will be visible beginning Monday, at Exit 42 on I‑95 going northbound into the Elm City.
Junior Kira Podgwaite made her fountain in AP 3D design class.
“In Les Miz the barricade” was poverty, said junior Kira Podgwaite, who contributed the fountain that is dead center in the middle of the piece. She said a friend added the Hebrew text taken from Genesis, which deals with water.
In all 20 kids worked collaboratively on the billboard and the sculpture. Under Cozzi’s guidance they came up with a layering idea in order to convey the human journey from the stone age, the bottom layer of the sculpture, to the techno age at the top. On the tippy top of that is a globe, and its tippy-tippy top, a hopeful optimistic candle lodged inside a broken bottle.
Student spokespeople Chris Giglio and Shelby Simmons explained the materials deployed such as discarded mother boards, plastic bottles, and car parts convey civilization’s evolution from hacking away at stone through the industrial revolution to whatever era we inhabit today.
He also pointed out that along the way of the human journey the environmental barricades to health and happiness seem to go hand in hand with progress. Come on, he said to 200 rapt colleagues: You say you love your electronics, but you toss them all the time, and go on to the next thing. Is that love?
The companion piece, the billboard, seems to be asking: “What is your barricade?” said Mitchell Stockmal, one of the billboard’s designers.
Senior Emilio Cucciniello made the hand.
The double-edged sword of technology, the blessing to some, the curse to others … that comes through with a powerful, non-drip emphasis above Kira’s fountain, where there is a barricade or wall of plastic bottles. Made from fossil fuel material, they suggest problems beyond pollution, including the lack of potable water for so many people in the world, said Cozzi.
The mishmash of stuff and the many youthful hands and eyes involved seem to have turned what might have been a leaden assignment, always the pitfall of occasional art, into something much more lively, a mobile Wunderkammer or cabinet of curiosities. Only the items of which it’s made are not curious or rare at all, but, alas, all too familiar. They are easily available to use and then toss — which is the students’ point.
The result is ironically kooky, ingenious, even humorous. With all the car exhausts parts sticking out, it’s a kind of gangly, new/old version of Robby the Robot from the great 1950s sci film Forbidden Planet.
Although it can’t speak like Robby, Arc de Catastrophe, with its cast-away electronic heart and feet of stone and clay, has a lot to tell us.