INUVIK
The students from the East Three Secondary School's Art Travel Club might have had to revise their trip on short notice, but they still made it a work of art.

The members of the East Three Secondary School's Art Travel Club recently returned from a tour of San Francisco. Pictured at the Keith Haring Sculpture in front of the De Young Museum in the front row are Alexandra Winchester, Karly King Simpson and Sarah Seward. In the back row are Amy Badgley, Brianna Kirby, Jennifer White, Dawson Smith and Ben Kaufman. - photo courtesy of Deborah Reid

The club returned from San Francisco recently deeply impressed with what they saw.

Club members had originally planned to visit Italy, but when it became clear their fundraising estimates weren't going to be successful enough to go there, they regrouped and picked the American city.

Karly King Simpson and Ben Kaufman were two of the students on the trip.

"San Francisco was amazing ... and super-warm," King Simpson said. "It was a back-up plan for us."

"It was so enjoyable," Kaufman chipped in. "There was a lot of anticipation for the trip, since we'd been fundraising for more than a year-and-a-half. It was really exciting to just go there."

King Simpson said her favourite part was visiting the former prison on Alcatraz, which is now a park, and an art exhibit there.

The exhibit focuses on political prisoners, she and Kaufman said, so that's the relevance to the prison.

"It was insane to see that, and it focused on all the political prisoners around the world," she said.

King Simpson said it was fascinating to see some of the art personally, rather than just from books and photos.

"We saw art we've been studying and replicating in art class," she said. "There were people whose work we recognized."

Steve Wagar, a teacher at East Three, was one of the chaperones on the trip.

"It's always fun taking students to new places," he said. "There was not one complaint from the entire trip. There was not one negative issue, and these students were great ambassadors of the North."

Alexandra Winchester, the art teacher at East Three Secondary School and staff liaison with the club, spoke at some length about the art the students saw.

She pointed to the Alcatraz exhibit, highlighting prisoners of conscience as one of the favourite parts of the trip.

"They're mostly from countries where you're not allowed to speak out against your government," she said. "So it was about personal freedoms, making the prison a great place to exhibit the work."

All of the club members wrote postcards to political prisoners around the world as part of an Amnesty International initiative, Winchester added.

"Some are in jail for creating art. Some are artists," she said.

The club members also saw "a lot of modern art," Winchester said, as well as some more classic art and textile art.

Interestingly, one exhibit that proved intriguing to the students was one of Arctic art, principally from Alaska.

"It was carvings, and lot of things to do with aboriginal art in the North," Winchester said. "It was great to see an entire exhibit of that. It's interesting to see stuff that we see regularly at home in an art gallery there."

The students also saw art exhibits from up-and-coming artists, Winchester said, some of which "made no sense" to them.

"But sometimes that's the point of art," she added with a laugh. "It's to create your own intent."

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