Walk into the community room at Norwalk City Hall this week and you'll see a display of sculptures and a mix of hundreds of paintings, drawings and photography completed by students within the Norwalk public school system.
"Each art teacher in the district chooses eight pieces," said Duffy Franco, Norwalk High School art teacher. "So what you're seeing here is a range from kindergarten through 12th grade."
Norwalk's annual city-wide art show kicked off Tuesday night bringing together students and their proud parents and teachers to a gallery of student work.
"You can be creative and you can do whatever you like," said one student.
"I like how you get to make your own thing and you get to use different supplies," said another student.
Nine works will be chosen to be framed and exhibited permanently in the third floor of the Ralph Sloan Gallery at City Hall.
"The nine pieces that you see a green dot on, those are the exhibits that I chose to be permanently framed at the Ralph Sloan Gallery on the third floor here in city hall," said interim superintendent James Connelly. "All of the other hangings will stay here so all the people of Norwalk, not only in City Hall. This room will be open for anyone to come in and really view some creative work done by young people."
Other pieces were chosen by the Norwalk Housing Authority for potential use in its annual calendar.
"As you see the younger grades and they create something, you're thinking, somebody in kindergarten or first grade did that, that's really great," said Norwalk Mayor Harry Rilling. "And then you see first grade and second and third grade and right up the ladder and you watch how things start to grow and get better each year."
About 40 pieces on display were chosen from Norwalk High School alone and teachers say within recent years a trend towards photography has become increasingly popular among students.
"What's interesting about the photography program at Norwalk [High School] is that it's black and white film photography, so the kids are still using the dark room, still developing and printing their own pictures," said Franco. "So it's actually really nice to see them engaged in a traditional field."
"It causes you to see things you wouldn't see before," said Lanie Morenberg, Norwalk High School freshman. "You'll look at things and you'll be like that would be a really good picture and you wouldn't have noticed it otherwise."
"The work I've done was based on New York, the people of New York," said Norwalk High school senior Radu Gheorghe. "And I tried to catch what lies on the sideline mostly. Not what you'd see every day or hear about on the news, the little people that no one actually acknowledges."
