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Posted: June 11th, 2012 Liz Bertrand

“A little bit off the beaten path” is the way Director of Galleries Crista Cammaroto describes the location of UNC Charlotte Center City's Projective Eye Gallery but she could have just as easily been describing the art inside.

The gallery housed in this strikingly modern building located at 9^th and Brevard streets is dedicated to presenting interdisciplinary and multimedia works – including digital art, sound space installation, and video – created by nationally and locally known artists. On Sat, June 2 the College of Arts + Architecture of UNC Charlotte invited kids and their families to explore the latest exhibition, “Concurrent Rhythms,” and create their own artwork at a special event called “Art in the House.”

“We're a gallery that geared up when a lot of the galleries were closing uptown,” says Cammaroto. She has been eager to find ways to connect with the community through outreach events since assuming her position at the helm of UNCC's gallery system last July. While opening nights have been popular “happenings” with music, art, and food, she wanted to find other ways during the run of a show to engage people with the art.

A $500 A.C.T. (“Achieving Community Today”) grant from Crossroads Charlotte provided the perfect opportunity. It helped fund “Art in the House,” the gallery's first outreach class for families through hands-on activities at the gallery.

Kids aged 3 to 13 participated in the workshop alongside their parents as they learned about the fundamentals of digital collage and animation from artists Erin Penland and Sarah Hartley respectively. Both artists are recent graduates of UNCC and have their work featured in Concurrent Rhythms.

As kids and adults clicked away with their scissors and sorted through colorful scraps of paper, multimedia artist Penland encouraged them to follow their own instincts while creating their collage masks: “Art – it's all about you. You decide what you like and what's nice... you can find inspiration and imagination from everything.”

A little while later, Caroline Palmer, a seventh grader at Northwest School of the Arts, sat next to her dad and eagerly sketched a series of drawings to create her own animated flip book. Palmer is passionate about drawing and cartoons.

“It does take a little bit longer than I expected,” she says, grinning through her braces, after learning that a whimsical 10 second animation of a telephone mutating into an octopus created by artist Hartley took 30 hours of work.

This is just the type of experience that Palmer's dad has been seeking for his daughter. He's found that most art programs only offer instruction in animation and digital art to college-aged students.

Cammaroto is gratified to see kids and parents enjoying this experience together. Too often, she thinks, enrichment activities fail to engage parents, who simply drop their kids off at an activity and leave. Cammaroto sees potential in creating opportunities for families to experience innovative art together and hopes that she will ultimately be able to create a regular Saturday Morning Art Café based on this pilot project.

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