Arts

Art for Art’s Sake

Fine Arts is a core piece of our School’s ecosystem—a blank canvas for your imagination. Creative expression is an essential part of human development, and arts programming at St. John’s boasts dozens of offerings in visual and performing arts—all led by teacher-artists. Whether embracing the tactile arena of our ceramics suite, performing in one of our musical ensembles, or workshopping theater genres from antiquity to modern day, learners across our curriculum benefit from the time and agency to become more thoughtful about how they observe the world. 

In Ms. Greenwood’s Honors-level Play Production class at the High School, for instance, class members form their own theatre company to bring an original script to stage, including writing, producing, budgeting, acting, directing, marketing, rehearsal schedules, stage management, theater house management, design, and technical crew. Brought to life following a pitch session to School administrators who serve as executive producers, a public production of the play serves as students’ final assessment .

In Ms. Boncher’s Studio Art classes at the Middle School, meanwhile, students immerse themselves in cross-disciplinary units with the Social Studies, Computer Science and World Languages departments. For example, in that latter collaboration, students use iPad technology to reinterpret masterpieces by Latin American and Spanish painters—filtering, cropping, and manipulating their chosen artist’s work to produce their own creation while exploring the culture and context of the original works.