SCAD professor visits with students in Fashion Design class

Fashion students in Kristen Spano’s Warwick Valley High School classroom learned about indigo dye and its current uses in clothing and materials, as well as its history, during a special visit from Jessica Smith, a fiber arts professor at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD), late last week.

The college has shown interest not only in teaching Warwick Valley students (a few WV art students are headed to SCAD in the fall) but also in working WITH them. This, after SCAD faculty reviewed and loved the WVHS students' portfolio work during a national portfolio review day earlier this year, and then attended the high school’s recent Newspaper Fashion Show, where they saw even more of the students’ completed creations.

Ms. Smith told the students about her professional and personal journey, which included her formal education at multiple colleges across the US, as well as her experiences traveling around the world, which led her to learn more about and eventually teach textiles. Her love of history led her specifically to dive deeper into learning about and teaching natural dyes – one of them being indigo.

She explained that in one of her courses, Textile Futures, her students learn about 3D printing, laser etching, and CNC machines.

“To me, natural dyeing, indigo, what we're going to talk about today, is really just another technology,” she said. “It's chemistry – specifically dye chemistry in terms of the fields.”

She walked through some of the history of indigo’s uses in countries like France and Japan, and then demonstrated how to apply the dye to material using synthetic indigo. She showed the students various techniques, such as rubberbanding and clipping the material, and explained how oxygen is needed in the dyeing process to convert the color from green to blue. The students then used the dyeing techniques to create their own indigo-dyed scarves.

Ms. Spano said the Hudson Valley Portfolio Review Day in Poughkeepsie was just the start of SCAD’s interest in Warwick.

“Savannah School of Art and Design was one of the colleges that was present, and they were truly impressed with our students' creativity and their artwork,” she said.

SCAD faculty then came to the school in February to conduct independent reviews of the students’ work. The school awarded two students full summer scholarships to attend its intensive one-week SCAD Summer Seminar for high school students as part of its pre-college programs. Sophie Quicke will learn about color theory and mixed-media applications, and Aidan Harvey will learn about 3D animation and 3D modeling.

Four graduating seniors will be attending SCAD next fall: Riley Portka for illustration/sequential art; Arthur Liao for sequential art; Erik Augusta for illustration visual development; and Finn Kennedy for dramatic arts.