BHS Art and Photography students will once again benefit from the Teach Arts Ohio grant through the Ohio Arts Council. The Appalachian Voices Through Photos project can continue with our own professional artist in residence.
Artist in residence Rebecca Kiger returns to Bellaire High School photography class for the fifth year. Her residency allows the students to not only learn photography and digital computer skills, but results in a year-long capstone project. Their first project, a zine, was written about in The Washington Post. Book collectors from around the world purchased copies, including actress and photographer Jamie Lee Curtis.
During the pandemic, the program collaborated with and received a grant from Unfinished, an international organization that encourages students to pose questions to their community. The self-portraits students made that year were featured in an online program that included the likes of Bruce Springsteen. During another year of the pandemic, students made individual books. Their photographs, alongside work from three other high schools around the country, was featured on NPR.
In 2023, in addition to The Ohio Arts Council artist-residency grant, Ms. Kiger. received a $35,000 grant from the Center for Contemporary Documentation. Part of that grant was used to purchase MacBook Pro computers, which are available to the art department going forward. The 2023 project resulted in a public installation of 12 6'x6' cubes of photographs that told stories and reporting about the environment. The display was featured at The Great Stone Viaduct. In 2024, students photographed and interviewed over 150 community members and helped design a large mural that can be viewed on the Bellaire Local School website. The mural, which was hung downtown on the former BJ Ceramics building, will be reprinted and hung this year.
Ms. Kiger is a graduate of Hampshire College, where she studied photography and education. She also studied post-BA coursework in Spanish and Latin American studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She has been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and has had several stories published in Time Magazine, including a year-long photo essay about the train derailment in East Palestine, OH. That story garnered the cover and became a Time 'special report'. Ms. Kiger lives in Wheeling with her husband, and Kiki, her cat. She loves gardening. Her daughter will continue as a plebe at the Naval Academy come January.
