Visual Arts

Students begin their year working on drawing skills in a variety of media. In-class art projects include studies in line, shape and value. Subject matter ranges from still life to figure drawing and self-portraits. Students visit The Metropolitan Museum of Art to explore the ancient Egyptian and Greek halls. A yearlong collaborative project that incorporates visual art with history, creative writing, and music. Students write scripts on ancient cultures in their humanities classes and transform their scripts into an opera in music class. In their visual arts class, they design and create puppets of their characters as well as backdrops and props. They then rehearse for their performance. This yearlong, interdisciplinary project allows students to explore a variety of media in the visual arts while learning various skills and techniques along the way. Areas of art explored, but not limited to, are:  art history, design, drawing, color theory, painting, sculpting, sewing and performance with puppets. At the end of the school year, the students put on their original puppet opera for their parents and teachers.

In sixth grade, students begin developing their drawing skills using different types of media. They work on various subjects, including still life, figure drawing, and self-portraits. To connect with their thematic focus on the Hudson River Valley, students have the opportunity to study the Hudson River School of Art. This includes a visit to the American Wing of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, where they can see paintings created by landscape artists from the mid- to late 1800s. After this inspiring experience, students return to the art studio to create their own watercolor landscapes, drawing inspiration from these historical artists. In addition to watercolor landscapes, students also explore other art projects including site-specific sculpture designs and models. This curriculum helps students express their creativity while connecting to important artistic movements and cultural themes.

Students learn about Brunelleschi’s linear perspective and the science of creating a tri-dimensional space such as a city or a town. Emphasis is placed on the methodology and the understanding of the light and shadow relationships of the cube and a sphere in a given space. Students learn to create more complex cube shapes that resemble buildings and houses to create an illusion of towns and cities in a linear perspective. Architectural features to describe various buildings are introduced. Students study elements of architecture and learn to identify features that describe many public buildings and Victorian houses around our towns.  

Students develop drawing skills in a variety of media. In-class art projects include studies in line, shape and value.  Subject matter ranges from still life to figure drawing and self-portraits. In the fall, students study elements of black and white photography. They take a class trip to Philadelphia, capturing images at historic sites that have thoughtful content and composition. Eighth graders also learn how to use one and two-point perspective drawing techniques to give the illusion of depth to their drawings, creating landscapes and cities and then interior spaces.  A collaboration with arts and humanities occurs in the last portion of the year where the students divide into rock band groups in their music class. In visual arts, students learn to brand their music group by creating a band logo, a concert poster, an album cover and a group band photo.