Friday, January 4, 2013

Teens Reinvent Glass Art

A Germantown High School student places pieces of colored stained glass at the First United Methodist Church of Germantown on Wednesday, December 19, 2012.  The Stained Glass Project, is a after school workshop at the church, to teach the kids to design and make stained glass windows.  ( Yong Kim / Staff Photographer ) MG1WINDOW09P

When Janai Dallas was younger, she spent Sunday mornings staring at the stained glass windows of New Covenant Church in Germantown. Babies. Angels. Jesus. She never thought about who made the windows or how they stuck those little panes of glass together. The images were just a colorful distraction from a boring sermon.

That was before Dallas, 19, began spending Wednesday afternoons in the basement of a different church, learning to select, score, cut, grind, and solder glass into her own stained glass panels. Before she created windows that now hang in schools in South Africa and New Orleans. Before the Stained Glass Project: Windows That Open Doors changed the way she sees art, the world, and herself.

The project, now in its seventh year, started small: a handful of students from Germantown High School making pendants and picture frames from scraps of donated glass. But its founders - glass sculptor Paula Mandel and digital artist Joan Myerson Shrager - had a bigger vision: What if windows created by teenagers in a rough part of Germantown could become sources of beauty and connection for kids in rough places elsewhere in the world?

The first set of 18 windows went to a primary school in Durban, South Africa, whose 1,000 students include some who live in shacks without running water or electricity. The second batch went to an elementary school in New Orleans resurrected after Hurricane Katrina.

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To learn more about an amazing fine art exhibition, please visit Love Unlimited Film Festival and Art Exhibition.

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