Art for Our Sake

Seeking virtue and excellence where I know I have found it in the past, I went searching for that life-affirming, creative élan vital that every school has the capacity to bring forth and offer to its community, and I found it here on our hallway walls.

 

Throughout the year our students from Pre-K (mixed-media robots) to Grade 12 (AP Art Portfolios) are encouraged to explore and express their creative humors in our classrooms that frame Middlesex Road. They are exhorted to develop a variety of skills and habits of mind that help them produce art. Then they write, perform, sing, dance, play, photograph, film, weave, paint, draw, build, and sculpt it. In their work, the students use cameras, computers, hammers, power tools, 3-D printers, engravers, paint brushes, and pencils among other tools available to them to express themselves in 2-D and 3-D visual formats. They use instruments, their voices, and their bodies to perform art as well. They use parts of their being or their whole being— their mouths, their hands and feet, their eyes and ears, and their hearts and minds—to create, design, and construct impressive works of art. 

 

Our students do this work as part of their studies, but it is also very much of themselves. Their teachers guide them and offer feedback, but the art truly comes from within them. Their peers often play a role as well, particularly in their Middle and Upper School years, when students share their work and offer thoughtful appreciation’s and critiques to one another to help each grow as artists. They share their thoughts with each other as they work side-by-side at a table in the classroom. They also frequently provide insights and analysis formally using a rubric and with guidance from their teachers at the end of a project or the end of the semester. Using the language of the discipline—photography, drawing, painting, music, sculpture, digital cinema, acting, etc.— students relate what they see, hear, and feel in an individual or collaborative piece; these are valuable learning moments.

 

When May rolls around each year, our visual arts students choose a piece that they would like to have displayed at the annual All-School Creative Arts Festival, and then Mrs. Clamage, Mrs. Lee, and Mr. Ridge get busy hanging and displaying installations of more than a half dozen class projects and over 350 individual student pieces. Their work to display their students’ art is an impressive work of art as well, and as a result, for the Arts Festival last week, our walls became a mosaic of eye-bedazzling images and sculptures crafted with crayon, charcoal, graphite, ink marker, paint—acrylic, pastel, tempura, watercolor— and pencil, or some combination of these in a mixed-media mélange. These works covered the gamut of titles from untitled (really, there wasn’t any title) to “Banana Balloon Five Head Boom Smash” (super-duper titled!) The student artists delicately incorporated or purposefully amalgamated colorful paper, fabric, foam, clay, plastic, and cloth to capture a still life, draw a portrait, build a model, or form a sculpture that led the viewer to a “Hmmm” or an “Ohhh" or a “Wow!”

 

In addition to the individual pieces there were a number of group displays of artworks inspired by and integrate with academic curricula. Lower School paintings, drawings, and mixed media pieces reinforced social studies, science, geography, and biology connections. Budding Pre-K designers created imaginative, multi-media robots. Kindergarten artists investigated continents—Africa, Antarctica, Australia—and Grade 1 students crafted art that depicted elements of the sky. Grade 2 artists explored Brazil, Grade 3 applied their creative spirit to images of Kenya or insects, and Grade 4 offered images of the Silk Road. In the two preceding days, Grade 5 students presented skillfully crafted collages that illustrated the strength of character of the individuals they researched for the Capstone Project.

 

The Middle and Upper School offered several class or cross-curricular projects as well. These were grouped together with descriptions provided explaining the art in connection with the poetry, history, science, algebra, and geometry studied. And some were ‘just’ studies in visual art!  

 

Grade 7 students illustrated poems, and students in Grades 8 and 9 were able to incorporate art into their science and math studies to produce graphs, tables, collages, and maps. Algebra I students completed “lit” (both in the word’s Webster’s and Urban Dictionary usage) “Visualizing Data” linear graphs of pandemic data. In addition, this year’s eighth graders  commenced the building of the Periodic Table, with each student choosing one of the 118 chemical elements and adding their own 'element of style’ to its depiction on the wall. This art of science display will continue to be developed in the next few years as future classes work to complete the table. In their Creative Arts class, these same eighth graders also created individual pieces for the head-and-tail-lights-a-flashing, auto-themed “Traffic Jam Car-llage” mixed media art piece. 

 

Students in Grade 9 World History I and Geometry used their imaginations and CAD technology to map the world with block print stamps and created QR codes that linked to research papers to complete an expansive world map art piece titled “Traveling Through the Islamic World.” Finally, students in the Upper School Drawing class designed and built “optical illusion hallways” that demonstrated their skill in creating perspective in their artwork that drew the observer into a second world.

 

For that art that resplendently adorns our walls during the All-School Creative Arts festival once again this year, I am very thankful. Our students' optimistic, expressive aims and intentions were made vivid through the skillful and thoughtful application of both learned and instinctive abilities stimulated by outstanding teaching and coaching. I found the virtue and excellence and it is our students and faculty, right there on our walls.