PRINCETON: Washington and Lincoln in arts and crafts

By Philip Sean Curran, Staff Writer
   Maria Evans stood by a table covered with glue containers, buttons and other objects that included photo cutouts of past presidents that little people would turn into little pieces of art.
   ”We’re making presidential pennants,” the artistic director of the Arts Council of Princeton told a child who had come to the Paul Robeson Center for a morning session of arts and crafts on Monday tied around the Presidents Day theme.
   Children made pennants with small cutout photos of presidents, Abraham Lincoln finger puppets out of black construction paper and a penny facing heads up and other crafts inside the center’s Solley Theater.
   This was the first of its kind. Originally, the Arts Council was planning to have a Valentine’s Day workshop, but that got cancelled because of the recent snowstorm, said Laura Borawski, program coordinator. So instead, the council went with something that had a Founding Fathers-patriotic theme.
   At tables staffed with helpers, children could pick what they wanted to do, be it doing origami, making paper beads or other projects.
   Four-year-old Sahana Manikandan of West Windsor used some blue glitter glue to embellish her George Washington pennant, the image taken from the famous Gilbert Stuart painting. Among the children, the nation’s first president was number one, although Lincoln and Barack Obama were popular too.
   Still, Julie Boisvert’s two daughters, Mia and Zoe of Princeton, were split on the issue. Mia said she favored Washington, while Zoe said Lincoln was her favorite.
   The center set aside two sessions, one in the morning and the other in the afternoon, for children between the ages of 3 and 7. Twenty of them were signed up for each, although there appeared to be fewer than that Monday morning. Helping out were students from Princeton High School, there to fulfill their community service requirement.
   Monday was just one of the events the Arts Council does for children through the year, with other activities for older youth as well.