NRHS students fashion art for African Heritage Month

Grade 12 advanced International Baccalaureate student Ashley Phinney stands in front of a painting showing an African plain and entitled Hakuna Matata, Swahili for no worries. (Goodwin photo)

ALMA – Students at Northumberland Regional High School have been spending time recently creating artwork to mark African Heritage Month.
Five students are part of a dance troupe that has recorded video numbers they have choreographed for the project.
“It’s a group project called Out of Africa,” says Sarah Cooke.
Other dancers include Hannah Harrison, Sean MacIsaac, Kati Marcott and Morgan Sangster.
The dance takes the form of a dispersal, signifying growing reverence for African heritage in Nova Scotia and elsewhere.
The mounted art forms include a mixed medium likeness of Steve Biko, the renowned anti-Apartheid activist whose torture and death in the 1970s was a clarion call for more vigorous national and world-wide opposition to black subjugation in the then white-dominated South Africa.
It uses items of cloth indigenous to South Africa, says Daniel Watters who, with Casey Fulton, created the piece, which is framed and displayed in the school’s lobby.
“It was challenging, but I felt honoured and appreciated the opportunity to do this,” Watters said. “Steve Biko was the force of their movement.”
Meanwhile, Grade 12 advanced International Baccalaureate student Ashley Phinney and Mexican exchange student Iby Caneles-Moyer collaborated on a painting that depicts an African plain with the title Hakuna Matata, which is Swahili for no worries.
Another art piece on paper shows a series of West African symbols that stand for unity, co-operation and peacemaking.