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Collaborating Service Organization: Heritage Park
Instructor: André Leon Gray

The Artspace Outreach Program teamed up with Communities In Schools of Wake County (CISWC) at CISWC’s Heritage Park Learning Center. Local artist André Leon Gray led twelve youths through a six-week art program focused on collage. He provided guidance to the CISWC participants as they created individual collages as representations of themselves. Utilizing magazines, photographs, and cut paper, the students learned about collage as an art form – something unfamiliar to them at the start of the program. The program aimed to expand the students' concept and definition of art while at the same time unleashing creativity from within!

André Leon Gray is a self-taught artist from Raleigh, NC. He has been exhibiting his mixed media assemblages and installations throughout the Carolinas, including Rocky Mount Arts Center, the Mary Lou WIlliams Center for Black Culture, Duke University, the Allcott Gallery, UNC-Chapel Hill, and the Hyman Fine Arts Center, Francis Marion University, Florence, SC. Gray was awarded a Regional Artist Project Grant from the United Arts Council of Raleigh and Wake County, and was the inaugural artist in the six-month Regional Emerging Artist-in-Residence program at Artspace. In 2003 he received and Indies Triangle Arts Award from the Independent Weekly for his contribution to the local art community. Gray was recently selected by Eleanor Heartney, New York art critic and curator, as one of 54 southeastern artists to exhibit in Thresholds: Expresssions of Art & Spiritual Life, which opeend in Charleston, SC and will travel to Kentucky, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Florida until Spring 2006.