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The 31st Graduation of the Altos de Chavón School of Design will be held Saturday, May 23, in Casa de Campo’s Salón Flamboyán. Sixty-six students will don togas and birretes (mortarboards) and march to Nana Mouskouri’s “Libertad”, the Spanish version of the chant of the Hebrew slaves from Verdi’s “Nabucco.”
For the students, the past two years have been grueling, exciting, frustrating, information filled, skill building, celebratory, tense, joyous, and rewarding. Over these years they’ve learned how to live on their own, how to work in teams and independently, how to push their abilities to the breaking point and how to reach much farther than their arm’s length.
All Altos de Chavón students complete a Foundation Year, or Año Básico, designed to develop their visual literacy. For their second, senior year, they focus on one of three majors: Fashion Design, Communication Design, or Fine Arts/Illustration. They graduate at an Associate Degree level, their credits transferable to New York’s Parsons School of Design, with which Altos de Chavón has been affiliated since 1983.
The fruits of the students’ labor will be shown in the Altos de Chavón Gallery from May 20th through to May 23rd, the day of graduation; then it moves to Altos de Chavón School of Design Santo Domingo campus, where it will be on display all summer.
The Fine Arts students have made their final month of studies the ultimate challenge, as they pulled it all together to offer up a stunning show of ability and thought-infused thesis projects. There are demons and baseball players, abstract paintings, cut-outs, panoramas, and prints. The work sparkles with concepts, from a dark, succubus-like, dream vision to raging seas and droll portraits of classmates.
The graduates in Fashion Design have won the ultimate award: an invitation to display their runway-worthy creations at Dominican Fashion Week, in October. Their senior-thesis theme of Russian De-Constructivist style, and De Stijl design inspired a palette of red, black, gray,and white. The garments’ asymmetry and articulation of layers, appendages, and irregular silhouettes make for a visual tour de force. On display are drawings, sketches, and many of the finished pieces, as well as items from several other projects, including a repurposing assignment in which old garments were eviscerated and reanimated into quirky new formulations.
The Communication Design group has done the usual with great style and the unusual with surprises and wonderful solutions. They’ve explored concept and content, animating themselves in black and white video projections, doing justice to poster design and type-face compositions, and producing animated short videos. They’ve clearly learned to make something at once beautiful, elegant, and informational.
All in all, the students’ work is skillful, edgy, funny, and mysterious, as personal as their voices or signatures. It’s on view in the Chavón Gallery for just a few days, so please pass by and enjoy it—or take your time and see it in Santo Domingo.
Article contributed by Stephen Kaplan Stephen Kaplan Rector of the Altos de Chavón School of Art and Design
Altos de Chavón School School of Design Graduation
When: Saturday, May 23rd Where: Salón Flamboyan, Casa de Campo
The School of Design, Senior Art Exhibit
When: Wednesday May 20th – Saturday May 23rd Where: The Gallery, Altos de Chavón Contact: (809) 523-8011 ext. 277/230