With an artistic flourish, Hoover High School students put their lives in a box.
That is, the students in Doris Kouyias’ art class last week were designing and decorating memory boxes that depicted something about themselves.
“They have to come up with a theme about their life,” Kouyias said.
Using clippings from magazines and newspapers as well as paint, each student decorated the inside and outside of a shoe box to create a unique scene or statement.
Orea Edison, 14, loves basketball and football, so his creation was dedicated to those two sports.
“It’s about my two favorite sports that I’ve played all my life,” Orea said.
He pasted pictures of Los Angeles Laker Kobe Bryant and Green Bay Packers football players to the sides of the shoe box.
Orea thinks he will put mementos from his football- and basketball-playing days in the box, he said.
“It’s good for me to remember,” he said.
Yeraz Kochkarian’s memory box had pictures of windows on the outside. Yeraz had cut out the middle of the windows, offering viewers a peek inside the gift box.
“The theme is ‘Take a look into my head,’ ” she said.
Inside, Yeraz, 14, pasted pictures of furniture.
She plans to put images of her friends and small gifts they have given her inside the box.
Yeraz also plans to put in jewelry in the box, “To show that I’m not plain,” she said.
Yeraz had painted one side in the box the color black to represent her darker moods and sad things that happened in her life, such as the death of an uncle, she said.
“It’s going to show the sides of me,” Yeraz said about the project.
The project provides a way for teenagers to express themselves, Kouyias said.
“Teenagers are in a time of discovering who and what they are,” she said.
Earlier in the summer, students in Kouyias’ class created life-sized paper mache people out of cardboard, newspapers and magazines.
They have also crafted a “peace quilt,” with patches of peace images stitched together.
Students enrolled in the five-hour-a-day summer art class can earn a full year of art credits during the six-week summer session, Kouyias said.
“Every day counts as a week of school,” she said.
