At the Granoff Center for the Creative Arts, the new PantherArt exhibition showcases works from promising young artists — but not from artists at Brown.
Instead, the artwork of over 400 elementary school students from Pleasant View Elementary School, located in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood of Providence, is on display until October 6.
The PantherArt exhibition is part of Brown Arts Institute’s IGNITE PVD+ series, which highlights artists based in Rhode Island. Pleasant View students from Pre-K through Grade 5, under the tutelage of their art teacher Robert Boerner, worked to create a colorful and kaleidoscopic collection of artworks spanning several styles and mediums.
At the exhibition, there are guitars made out of cardboard, paper towel rolls, tape and string. There are several dioramas of quaint scenes, including a Christmas village. There is a large patchwork-style arrangement of tiles created by several students.
Boerner, the art teacher, helped organize the show.
He referred to the PantherArt exhibition as “the big show” for his students, though he only had thirty minutes a week with his students to work on the pieces before they were exhibited.
“If you include entering the class, instruction and clean-up, we're talking about a 15 minute class, if we're lucky,” Boerner said.
Discussing his pedagogy under the time constraints, he continued, “we experiment a lot. Generally, I will showcase an artist, an art material or style, or an art idea, and ask the students to try creating something based on that.”
“Some will run with the proposed 'try this' and create wonderful things while others run in a completely contrary direction and create something I would never have asked for no matter how much time I had with them,” Boerner added.
Jason Goodman ’24, producing assistant at the Brown Arts Institute, also helped organize the exhibition.
“This focus on communal art-making as a theme was definitely a guiding principle throughout the curatorial process,” Goodman said, commenting on the goals of the project and the challenges of trying to feature works from as many students as possible.
Goodman also discussed the care with which Boerner worked with his students. He stated, “He sees so much beauty and artistic value in every piece created in his classroom, so much so that he's often pulling things out of the trash or saving pieces that the students themselves had just left behind.“
Elliot Smith ’26, who visited the exhibition, said, “I think it’s important for Brown to engage with the Providence community, and this exhibit is a great way to see the work of local elementary school students.”
During class, Pleasant View students were asked to explain what art means to them and their answers were displayed at the exhibition.
One student, TJ, answered, “It is something that makes you feel something.”
