By Matthew Monks
It's why Kirsten Semenkewitz, 18, of Whitestone, said she was lucky to attend to the Long Island City high school. “If you're artistically minded, you don't see a lot of people that are thinking like you – that act crazy” at a regular city high school, said Semenkewitz, who was among the 138 seniors graduating Monday. “You come here and there's people running down the hallways … reciting monologues, so it's very different.”Astoria native Tony Bennett founded the public school in 2001 as a place for aspiring artists to master their crafts. Its 532 students – 70 percent of whom are from Queens – are currently housed on two floors of LaGuardia Community College, where they study singing, fine arts, drama and dance. The school is slated to move to a new $80 million campus near Kaufman Astoria Studios in Astoria in 2007. The class of 2005 is the first to spend all four years at the school – a distinction that made 18-year-old James Fry of Bayside proud. “I feel like I started something that's bigger than me and will go on after me,” said Fry, who will study at Columbia University in the fall. “It's a really exciting feeling.”Fry and his peers beamed in their blue cap and gowns during the commencement in LaGuardia's theater, giving standing ovations to their small faculty, Bennett and former Gov. Mario Cuomo, a South Jamaica native who told them they will make the world a better place. “You represent the arts and the arts are something special because (they) give us something all the other disciplines do not: The arts give you soul,” Cuomo said. “The arts are here for us to try and understand ourselves … You will give the nation the soul that it needs.”Commencement speaker Wynton Marsalis, the renowned jazz musician, urged the class “to live a life in the arts” wherever their careers take them. “For most of us, we're going to be frustrated. We're not going to be on television. We're going to be somewhere saying 'I could have made it,'” Marsalis said. “I want you to continue to share your art with the people in your community, the people in your family … I want you to understand the responsibility of being an artist – to uplift humanity – and realize that you don't have to have some big name to do that.” Reach Matthew Monks at news@timesledger.com or phone at 718-229-0300, Ext. 156.
