BLOOMFIELD — The Bloomfield Summer Arts Workshop, headed by Michelle Lampert, concluded its 48th year last week with an art exhibition, singing performances, acting and dance. The final gala featured students from all the instrument disciplines offered by the program. A majority of the instructors were district teachers.
The workshops, for students in grades 5-12, were during July at the middle school and were extensive. In music, stringed instruments were taught to the band, as well as woodwinds. There was also a musical theater program. The visual arts were drawing, painting and sculpture. The children were from the township and surrounding communities and scholarships were offered.
One instructor was Angelo Putullo, who teaches K-6 art at Franklin and Berkeley elementary schools. His initial goal when teaching children, he said, is to find out their interests.
“It’s fortunate for me, because they’re into comic books and media games,” said Putullo, who self-published a comic book.
His job, he said, is teaching children how to create – how to get from Point A to Point B.
“If I show them an example of work, I’ll show them how to create it using easy elements of art and design,” he said. “Fortunately, here, everybody in the workshop is into art. A lot of what the kids create is character designs. I can give them a character and they’ll create their own. One thing we did was a cubism project.”
Cubism is an influential, early 20th-century art movement, depicting an object or even a landscape broken into parts and viewed from different points of view.
“The kids took a character and used geometrical shapes and created a cubist design,” Putullo said.
Everything the children created in Putullo’s workshop begins with a sketch.
“This way, the kids aren’t going about it blindly,” he said. “It’s nice to make art randomly, but that’s how things get wasted. You have to make the most of your inventory.”
Four projects were completed during the month, although there were versions of the same one. There was abstract paper sculpture; street art, which involved the construction of a paper house and covering it with graffiti; pinch pots, which were small vessels made by pinching clay into fantastic faces with gaping mouths and fattened, snake-like tongues; and, on safer ground, the children made color wheels. But even these were imbued with a child’s playful imagination.
Down the hallway was the classroom where the longest-termed teacher in the workshops worked. This was Bloomfield native Patrick Burns, who is in his 28th year in the summer program. Burns teaches woodwinds. During the school year, he is not a district teacher, but teaches at Kean and Montclair State universities.
“I came to these summer arts workshops myself in 1981 and 1982,” he said. “I had scholarships and it was my first experience with the program. I’ve been teaching here since 1998.”
The summer programs, he said, now have fewer children from surrounding towns, fewer children playing an instrument, but more voice students.
“In 1986, I created the Bloomfield Youth Band,” he said, with a smile. “I was 17. I’ve run it from the beginning. It sounds strange.”
He said so many great things have come from the youth band, which just had its 40th anniversary.
“In the youth band, there’re typically 50 students,” he said. “They’re mostly high school students, maybe 85 percent, some college and middle school students.”
The Bloomfield Youth Band was one of the first groups to be practicing and playing during the pandemic, he said.
“Literally, we were one of the first groups in the country,” he continued. “I know; I followed the trends and I had friends doing this. Very few groups were doing this, but Bloomfield was amenable to it.”
At the time, for safety, Burns consulted with two physicians, alumni of the arts workshop band program.
“Who better to know?” he said. “They were wind players and we made the protocol sensible. We played from April to October and made it work. People from all over were playing with us because they couldn’t play anywhere else. Some towns lost their bands permanently. But this town was super-supportive. They were great with that stuff.”
And so for another year, these arts workshops are in recess.
Photos by Daniel Jackovino
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