Tyris Bryant had a picture in mind. He sketched his profile and drew himself holding a basketball high in the palm of his left hand.
“And then I saw someone else drawing a basketball player,” Tyris said. “I wanted to do something different. I just thought, ?What else is round that I could use?? ”
The answer, might be obvious in hindsight, but when the Samuel L. Banks High School ninth-grader put the world in his hand, his inspiration took a new shape. He added outlines and more globes, left his face in a black silhouette, and put everything in blue-green sea.
The piece titled “The World Is In Our Hands,” fit perfectly with this year?s As We See It theme, and captured the imagination of the Baltimore City schools art committee. It won the cover of the Baltimore Citywide Art Exhibit 2006 guide.
Tyris? classmate Simon Johnson, a senior accepted into the Philadelphia Institute of Art, worked through a similar process on his entry at the show.
“I had a really big piece I had done, and I just didn?t like,” said Johnson, a student with Tyris in first-year teacher?s Lauren Selig?s visual arts class.
“So I cut it up, threw most of it away ? but took parts of it ? photocopied some of it, painted a little and made it into this collage that?s all about my life.”
