LA PALMA : Drawing Attention to Students’ Diversity

Student Joseph Greenlee was drawing on the sidewalk at John F. Kennedy High School on Thursday. So were Danielle Hill, Sonya Waters and 140 of their schoolmates.

But school officials did not chase them away, they encouraged them.

The students were taking part in the school’s second annual Italian Chalk Art Festival, which was held this year in commemoration of the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ voyage to America.

“What makes this neat is that we have every culture out here working together,” said Cheryl Jensen, chairwoman of the school’s art department and the event’s coordinator.

Jensen pointed out that Kennedy High has one of the most culturally diverse student bodies in the Anaheim Union High School District, “and here we have a cross section of the school, and the kids are all getting along.”

Jensen said sidewalk chalk art was a popular art form in 15th- and 16th-Century Europe, which makes it a natural for a 1492 retrospective.

“The artists were called ‘Madonnari’ because they often drew the Madonna and Christ child,” Jensen said. “The artists were vagabonds and they would travel throughout Europe. The chalk drawings are like pretty flowers--they bloom temporarily and then they are gone.”

The student artists were representing 40 of the school’s clubs and classes, including the cheerleading squad, the Science Club, the boys’ basketball and cross country teams, the English-as-a-second-language class and various art classes.

Each group was assigned a 5-by-6-foot rectangle in which it could work and the members would kneel on pieces of carpet to work with the colored chalk. Many groups did drawings that reflect their club’s purpose, while others did re-creations of traditional Renaissance paintings.

The Black Heritage Club, for example, was hoping its drawing would tell something about Africa in 1492. At the center was a drawing of a black man in a simple headdress that would have been worn in Zimbabwe during that period. The man was surrounded by African symbols--the Great Pyramids, a map of the continent and an onyx, a cross-like symbol that represents peace, love and black pride.

“We want to share with others something about Africa and what it was like then,” said Quincy Burns, a 14-year-old sophomore who designed the drawing.

“This is what affected our people in 1492 and it is a part of us,” said Rashida Swan, a 16-year-old senior and the Black Heritage Club’s vice president.

The MeCHA Club, which represents the school’s Mexican-Americans, was re-creating a work that depicts an Aztec warrior carrying his girlfriend, who has committed suicide after hearing falsely that he had died in combat.

“It’s something like Romeo and Juliet, but in a Spanish and Mexican way,” said Amo E. Enriquez, a 17-year-old junior.

Laura Wald, 14, a freshman who is half Sioux Indian, and the members of her art class were copying a portrait of an Indian girl. The child, who was about 5, had her hair braided with beads and feathers and draped on her shoulder. An impish smile creased her face.

“We should never forget the Indians,” Dena Durniok, a 14-year-old freshman said.