WCC Students Get Creative with Digital Art

The arts have always been an integral part of the Peekskill community. On Wednesday night, students from the Westchester Community College Center for Digital Arts,  (WCC) held a reception and exhibition of their digital and traditional fine art; such as digital imaging, computer illustration, desktop publishing, digital video, multimedia, 2D and 3D animation, and painting and drawing. The exhibition is open to the public until Feb. 28.

The center also offers a music program where they teach digital music classes and recording engineering and also traditional generalized classes. In the summer, they offer a digital arts children’s program in July.

Patch spoke with two students and faculty members about the art show.

“The show is a wide variety of graphic design and illustration and we have a kiosk with web design and we have a filmmaking portion of the show with short animation—we just started offering students a filmmaking degree," explained Lise Prown, lab manager and gallery coordinator at the CDA. “There’s a lot of careers in the digital arts so this is a good place to start building a portfolio to go out into the workforce or go to art school or if you like working creatively with a computer.”

Gerry Katzban is a senior adjunct professor who teaches digital video, motion graphics, animation and Photoshop. It’s his 15^th year teaching at the Peekskill location.

“The students get a fantastic education in a well-maintained state-of-the-art facility to follow their educational desires and dreams—whether that be fine artists, video artists or editors or motion graphic artists, illustrators, graphic designers; I think that as a facility and as an institution it can’t be beat in this region in terms of what students get, especially under the SUNY educational system,” Katzban said. He added, “It’s the quality of the instruction with teachers who are professionals in their field— everybody who ‘s an instructor here teaches what they do so it’s not theoretical or academic.”

Stacie Glazer, of Yorktown and Rachyl Sloan of Dobbs Ferry, are two students pursuing a certificate in the digital arts.

“This was a class I took last fall—I’ve always been interested in the arts, I’m a graphic designer I do a lot of motion graphics and print work and for me coming here was upgrading my computer graphic design skills so it’s a good little spot right here in Peekskill,” Glazer said.

“This is my second year—it’s a long trip but it’s worth it,” Sloan said.  “The teachers are great, they really know their stuff with the computers and it’s just been a terrific experience. I started out as a choreographer and I’m hoping to use my graphic design skills to incorporate it with my choreography to have it as a background and have the dancers interact with the animation or still life behind them—I’ve been choreographing ‘Danceworks’ which is the company at WCC.”

For more information on the WCC Peekskill Center for the Digital Arts, visit their website at: http://www.sunywcc.edu/extension_sites/locations/peekskill/peekskill.htm Or call Gallery Coordinator and Lab Manager, Lise Prown, at (914) 606-7304.