Experimentations in Creating Art and Community

On the third floor of the High School, the expansive hallway sometimes doubles as an art gallery. But early in the school year, before students’ artwork is ready to be exhibited, the walls and white pedestals of varying heights can feel noticeably empty. Students pass through it throughout the day on their way to class, their footsteps and conversations filling the broad, open space. What could be a place for viewing, lingering, and learning becomes simply a transient space through which to pass from one class to another.

“The gallery is an amazing space, but it’s so sad when it’s empty,”  said High School Studio Arts Teacher and Department Chair Sarah Riley. She sought to change this. She wanted students’ first impressions of the space to be that of an active gallery, with something inspiring and thought-provoking in it to greet them as they walked back and forth to classes.

Connecting with Faculty

Being relatively new to GDS, Sarah also wanted to get to know her fellow faculty better. She knew some of them were practicing artists like herself. Others had expressed interest in trying out some of the artistic disciplines offered to students in the department.

Questions and comments that began with “I took this class this one time… Oh, do you guys have this kind of supply? I'm doing this workshop and like hearing about other people's creative practices” were frequent. They gave Sarah the idea of making the space an active gallery early in the school year by inviting the faculty to submit their work. She thought the students could benefit from seeing the diversity of media and approaches, and it could help them to get to know their teachers better. “Last year, I put the ask out and hoped for the best,” said Sarah. “And we had a lot of teachers make submissions.” 

To gauge reactions to the works from the students, she pulled a desk into the studio space and worked there for a while, overhearing them commenting with surprise when they found that some of their teachers were also artists. “It’s a way for them to see their teachers as people outside of that limited 70-minute classroom window,” she said. 

Growing the Experiment

Mirroring an educational philosophy that is currently being explored and applied in the Lower Middle School, in which educators use different environments as teaching tools, the art faculty are working on using the gallery space as a classroom. “It's a great resource to be able to have work on display. Especially when the artists put out artist statements and write about their work,” Sarah said. “There's a lot of different disciplines being shared, and the practice of close observation is applicable and strengthened across the disciplines.” 

This year, Sarah and the other HS Studio Arts faculty decided to expand the show to include UL students too. In an effort to better align their UL classes, and in order to create a starting point for the students who are developing a portfolio, they felt that exhibiting their past work would be a good way to start. 

“I was also curious to see what it would feel like to have student work and faculty work in conversation together. So this year was sort of an experiment,” said Sarah, who admitted that it may have made some of the faculty a little uncomfortable to have their hobby work displayed alongside works from the advanced students. “I think if I could go back, I might have communicated that at the beginning, but honestly, the show just evolved, [and the idea to add the UL art came later.]” But she thinks a little discomfort is a good thing. “We push students out of their comfort zone all the time. So now the adults are being pushed too,” she said, and it’s outside the comfort zone where growth happens. 

The Importance of Building Community

The Art Department’s faculty see the value for the students in building a strong community around them, and in creating connections amongst different departments and disciplines. They model the kind of collaborative learning environment that allows students to develop not only their artistic and critical-thinking skills, but also their capacity to listen and engage with different perspectives. 

In line with this, Sarah sees a lot of opportunity in using the gallery space for teaching both the students and the faculty, whether they're in an art class or not, about how to visit a gallery, how to best go about approaching and viewing the works, and what questions to ask. “That's a whole skill set. There’s a lot of room for building out either programming or events that let that be a teaching tool for everyone in the community.”

Ceramics and Graphic Design teacher Kieun Song recently put out a call to faculty and staff who might be interested in learning ceramics. In her first year at GDS, she recognized an opportunity for faculty to try their hand at a medium the department offered to students, so she created a faculty workshop. While she couldn’t accommodate everyone who was interested, it created a meaningful bridge between the Art Department and other areas of the school, providing opportunities to learn from each other’s disciplines, and to ultimately bring those experiences back to the students.

Collaboration and Cross-pollination

Utilizing the gallery space for more than strictly studio art works by the students appears to have also planted some seeds for collaboration and cross-pollination. “HS English teacher Nadia Mahdi, expressed an interest in displaying some of her creative writing [in the gallery next year], and that spurred a conversation about her work, which turned out to be water-themed. And then that led to some inspiration for a possible future creative collaboration with ceramics students creating vessels that could hold water,” said Sarah. Connecting work in this way across disciplines promotes a deeper understanding of the art and of the process, allowing students to see how ideas can move between forms and how a concept explored through writing, for example, can inspire new ways of thinking and creating visually. 

In another example, Latin teacher Ellis Mucchetti painted flower pots with his Latin students. “In Foundations I in Latin, students explore the iconography and cultural significance of myth in the ancient Greco-Roman world by painting terra cotta pots in the Archaic Greek style,” said Ellis. “We discuss the hallmarks of this style in class. Students also learn about the Archaic Greek alphabet, and sign their names and label their characters in Greek.” He and Sarah discussed their common interests in art, and though they don't yet have specific plans to teach in each others' classrooms, Sarah has supported art in the Latin classroom by providing materials. She has also thought of asking Ellis to be a guest artist to talk about his painting style with the ceramic students when they begin to do surface decoration.

An Invitation

Sarah’s currently working on ideas to continue the experiment and grow next year’s faculty/student opening show as well. “The next iteration, I would definitely like to put the call out at the same time, so the art [by students and teachers] could be even more mixed, and to intensify the conversations [between works] by putting them right next to each other.” 

Ultimately, she hopes that students, and others, will take away from the show that creativity is a practice that one can engage with at any entry point or skill level. “I think that's what's fun about the show because some of the work is extremely high level, while also some of it is exploratory,” she said. Ultimately, she sees the work as offering viewers an opportunity to engage with a part of themselves. “It’s a thing that can be used to connect people. I want folks to walk away feeling like they have an invitation now to come back into the space, to come into the studios, to flex their own creative muscles, and to try something new.”

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