High School Hairstyles Documented and Defined:

In January 2010, artist Julian Montague began a collaboration with the visual arts students and faculty at his alma mater, the Buffalo Academy for Visual and Performing Arts (BAVPA). Ninth-11^th grade art majors in Kerry Chiodo, Liz Larrabee and Rachel Lyons’ classes participated.

The original concept for the project was to document and categorize the diverse hairstyles found in the school environment. This was prompted by Montague’s observation that while there are a number of terms for hairstyles and elements of hairstyles, there is nothing in the way of a standardized nomenclature. In his artwork, Montague has used the process of classifying mundane phenomena as a way to explore the ways in which scientific classification constructs meaning and imposes order through language.

Each student was asked to make several silhouette-style depictions of hairstyles. The media, which varied between the art classes, included drawings, prints and paper cuts. After the creation of the illustrations, class discussions were held where students proposed terms that described the hairstyles they had documented. The results were a set of seven main categories, 26 subcategories and 33 subcategory subdivisions that could be combined and numerically indicated to accurately “name” any hairstyle one might encounter.

Viewed together, the images of disembodied hair arrangements form a cohesive art installation, hovering on the border of abstraction, that present a selective portrait of a community. The system of descriptive terms for hairstyles articulates seemingly familiar elements of style with a level of detail that encourages the viewer to recognize the layers of complexity that can be found in all aspects of everyday life.

Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center's Empire State Partnership (ESP) with BAVPA was made possible in part with a 2010 grant of public funds from the Arts in Education program of the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA).