Alameda High Art Students' Work Shines in 'Faces and Places' Show

The K Gallery at was abuzz Friday for the opening reception of Faces and Places, an annual art show. 

Parents, guests and young artists mingled and chatted as students showed off their projects.

Charlie Milgrim, an Alameda High art teacher, organized the show with the help of K Gallery curator  d'Arci Bruno. The show features the foam board architectural models and self-portrait mosaics of Milgrim's students as well as her own works.

Milgrim’s advanced art students worked in class for months to design and construct architectural models using only foamcore, pins and X-acto knives.

Dorothy Tung, an Alameda high senior, collaborated with junior Gabi Dumagin to build a model of a seaside-inspired house, its white exterior walls capped with a bright blue dome. They imagined that a real home like the one they modeled would be "nestled somewhere in the Mediterranean," Tung said.

“The dome was the most difficult to get just right. We had to rebuild it several times and get the proportions right,” Tung said. Despite the challenges, this project allowed Tung to explore architecture—a major she may study at UC Irvine this upcoming fall.

Looking to bungalow and adobe homes for inspiration, sophomore Cielo Carassco teamed up with senior Alex Kofman to blend the two styles. The result is a unique residential home that resembles a submarine. A row of circular windows run down the walls, and light shines into the living space through an enormous skylight.

“I furnished the rooms with a miniature television set, coffee table and couch — all made out of foamcore,” Carrasco said proudly.

Milgrim said she has been impressed with the quality and imagination of her students’ foamcore models, especially because they were forced to work more quickly than in past because of a school year shortened by district-wide furloughs.

While the architectural models were innovative, the mosaic self-poraits were the color of the show — literally. Students used paint chip samples as mosaic tiles, so almost every color in the spectrum could be spotted in the portraits.

“We drew a self-portrait from a photograph, then cut paint chips and used them to fill in our drawn faces,” said Lionell Lacamlale. An aspiring auto mechanic, the sophomore enjoyed the hands-on projects, which, he said, “took a lot of focus to get all the shapes and skin tones right.”

Intricate and elaborate, some mosaic portraits were painstakingly accurate. "It blew me away," Lacamlale said.

Though most of Milgrim’s art students created mosaic self-portraits, Sarah Raphael’s watercolor portrait was an exception. Her painting depicted a girl’s face with cascading hair and closed eyes floating surreally amid tree branches.

“To be honest, I did not prepare a plan for this painting—it just sort of happened. I added things as I went along. There’s no set formula,” said Raphael, who drew the face with a brown-ink UPS pen, her trademark art utensil.   

From sculpture inspired by the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (Gyre) to drawings of nuclear power plants, a thread of environmental and cultural issues runs through all Milgrim's own works at the show.

For a sculpture from a series called "Spiral Jetsam," Milgrim collected old cell phones from students and arranged them in a spiral composition reminiscent of Robert Smithson’s famous “Spiral Jetty.”

The turnout for the show was higher than in prior years, and the gallery was crowded at the peak of the evening.

"It's great because students have an opportunity to see their work in a public gallery," said Milgram. And their work is "pretty darn grand."