Bronx high school art teacher Bob Hechler works hard to make his class a refuge for the immigrant students when the demands of learning English or adjusting to life in the U.S. get too heavy.
“English acquisition can be so difficult,” said Hechler, whose school, at Kingsbridge International High School caters exclusively to recently-arrived immigrant students. “To come into a room where you can have some successes right away and also take a breath, it’s really important for me to be that space.”
Student Fatoumata Sanyang's award-winning self-portrait sculpture. (Courtesy of Bob Hechler)
But for some students, art becomes something more: a way to express themselves, creatively solve problems, and think about the world.
That’s what happened for 17-year-old Fatoumata Sanyang and Nadia Akther, 18, both of whom decided to give art a try out of pandemic boredom, and ended up producing original works that were recently recognized in a prestigious citywide competition.
Both students’ self portrait-sculptures, created through months of painstaking molding and reshaping of recycled materials to capture their specific features and identities, will be displayed later this month at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as winners of the citywide P.S. Art competition, which has professional artists judge work from students across the city. An image of Nadia’s sculpture will also be displayed on one of the giant TV screens in Times Square.
“I was surprised,” said Sanyang, who immigrated to the Bronx from Gambia when she was in middle school. “I wasn’t thinking I was going to make it… I was like wait I really did that? It boosted my ego to be honest.”
Both students started experimenting with art as a way to pass the hours during remote learning. But it wasn’t until they returned to full-time in-person school this year and took Hechler’s class that they realized they had a knack for sculpture.
Nadia Akther's award-winning self-portrait sculpture. (Courtesy of Bob Hechler)
The task of creating a sculpture self-portrait required patience, tenacity, and creativity, the teens said.
“Sometimes one part of the nose or eyes takes one or two periods,” Akther said.
“If it dries you can’t really take it off, you have to add more, so it’s kind of frustrating sometimes,” added Sanyang.
The project also turned into a lesson on the remarkable diversity of students at the Bronx school, who hail from countries across the world.
Sanyang spent several classes trying to find the right material to capture the texture of her hair and settled on scrunched up yarn. Akther, a Muslim student who moved to the U.S. from Bangladesh, obsessed over the best way to depict her hijab.
“Everybody has something different about it that represents them,” Sanyang said. “Nadia with the hijab, me with afro... you could tell which is which.”
Kingsbridge International High School is in the Walton Campus at 2780 Reservoir Ave. in the Bronx. (Google)
Hechler said these are exactly the types of lessons he hopes to convey in art class — helping students solve problems, pay close attention to detail, and think about the world and their own identities.
He added that watching students like Akther and Sanyang find success in the arts is especially gratifying, given the often difficult journeys they’ve faced to make it to the U.S.
“These two are what is so great about Kingsbridge International,” he said. “Everybody has a similar story. Everybody is from somewhere else. Nobody’s really a stranger to adversity, but everyone works so hard to overcome it.”
Copyright © 2021, New York Daily News
Copyright © 2021, New York Daily News