NewCourtland and CFEVA Bring Seniors and Students Together to Create Stunning Works of Art

• Posted on Oct 15, 2015

NewCourtland Senior Services and CFEVA (Center for Emerging Visual Artists) are collaborating for the 8th year in a row to bring local senior citizens and students together under the tutelage of high profile artists.

The NewCourtland Artist Fellowship typically produces five to ten projects annually, making sure to give a wide range of classes to participants interested in the arts. The fellowship is funded by NewCourtland, so the program comes at no cost to participating seniors or students, and the classes are taught by artists from CFEVA.

“When people look at the finished pieces they say ‘Seniors did that?’ The works of art that are created are really pretty amazing,” says Genevieve Coutroubis, Director of the Regional Community Arts Program. “We’re uniquely positioned to recruit artists of the highest caliber, and the artists create the class concepts themselves.”

This fall, for example, the class “Portraiture and Place” is being taught by Lori Waselchuk, a freelance photographer who has had her photographs published in magazines and newspapers such as LIFE, The New York Times, and The Los Angeles Times.

Participants from the Philadelphia Senior Center on the Avenue of the Arts are pairing with students from Lansdowne Friends School to create portraits of each other as well as photographic studies of environments and objects. The teams learn basic framing techniques, how to edit images and create visual relationships among photographs, and how to assemble their final framed piece.

Other classes being offered this year include: Collecting Stories, where students create a collection of photographs that form a narrative, and Credit Card Mandala, where students create mosaics out of old ID, medical, bank, and gift cards.