Master of Art Education exhibition displays art with a personal touch


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Miami Sunset Senior High art teacher Meredith Kebaili places her paintings on easels in preparation for her thesis defense. Her works, along with those of her fellow Master of Art Education students, will be displayed at the Frost Art Museum from Dec. 14 – Dec. 28.

For any student, walking in the upcoming Commencement ceremonies will be reason enough to cheer. But the four Master of Art Education students graduating this semester will have reason to celebrate a little earlier.

Their artwork – deeply personal paintings and mixed media pieces – will be on display at the 2014 Master in Art Education Exhibition, which kicks off this Friday, Dec. 12, with a reception at 6 p.m. at the Frost Art Museum.

“It’s the culmination of years of hard work,” said Professor David Y. Chang, who guided the students on their years-long journey toward completing their degrees.

For Miami Sunset Senior High art teacher Meredith Kebaili, earning the Master in Art Education was the opportunity to refine her painting skills and to tell the story of the friends and family members who have had an impact on her life.

“Everything in my paintings is symbolic. They’re very personal,” she said. “When someone else looks at them they can see there is an immortal object that makes me think of someone who has had an impact on my life. I make the viewer focus on that one thing.”

Among the life-changing pieces and locations she’s focused on: an antique porcelain lamp that was a gift from a beloved relative, the corner of a room where a good friend inevitably sits when she visits, the spot at the dinner table where her husband Heri unwinds after a long day, and the china cabinet she inherited from her grandmother.

“It lived in her attic and when I was a little girl. I would go up in her attic and play with it. It had an old skeleton key that creaked when you turned it. I would open the cabinet and it had the smell of the old books that were in it. It still has that smell today.”

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Master of Art Education student Joe Guzman inspects his mixed-media art before defending his thesis.

For New Yorker Joe Guzman – a graphic artist at ZooMiami who wants to pursue a career as an art teacher – his master’s thesis consisted of a series of pieces that paid homage to Romantic painters who sought to capture nature’s beauty on the canvas. His work, however, took things in a different direction by incorporating photography.

“The photography took the longest for me because I wanted to get the right shot – mainly to get the lighting just right,” said Guzman, who was always inspired by nature and fell in love with the natural beauty of Florida’s Everglades. “I want students to see things in a different way.”

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Westland Hialeah Senior High art teacher Adrian Barreiro discusses how his love for Greek mythology inspired his works of art.

Westland Hialeah Senior High School art teacher Adrian Barreiro focused his body of work on his passion for Greek mythology.

“Each painting is a story about the creation of some particular art form,” he said. “One of my pieces is about a painting competition, another is on the creation of the first relief.”

But perhaps the most personal works belong to Ileana Lavender, an art teacher at Pinecrest School in Fort Lauderdale, who traced her roots back to her birthplace in France and told her life story in paintings.

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Ileana Lavender hangs her painting on easels prior to defending her master’s thesis.

“It’s a very personal body of work. It’s very emotional actually to go back and visit where you were born and think of your family leaving Cuba,” Lavender said while displaying her pieces before defending her thesis. “This other painting isn’t even about the house where I spend most of time in. It’s about the trees that I painted for my kids. I planted one for each of my kids.

The Master’s in Art Education Exhibition runs through Dec. 28 at the Frost Art Museum on the Modesto A. Maidique Campus.

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