Students in Aragon’s Advanced Art classes went to the Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University on Dec. 5. The Cantor Center had exhibits by painter Jim Dine, who the class had recently studied.
Art teacher Kathryn Katcher says, “Usually I try to connect it to something in class or have it be pertinent to something they are going to be doing in the future. The work that they have [at Cantor] currently is a big painting [by artist Jim Dine.] These students did tools in his style. He probably did a thousand different tools.”
Even though the Advanced Art classes work solely in two dimensions, the students can still benefit from seeing sculpture and photography. Katcher says, “We are going to be doing a unit on portraiture, and there is a photo exhibit of portraits. That translates with how people are posed and how they chose to portray themselves or the artist to portray them. You can translate the different mediums into whatever we are doing.”
Freshman Diana Gong gained a better understanding of shadow and contrast through sculpture, saying, “I understand the difference between like, light and dark and how they form 3-D [objects].”
The main benefit of the trip was seeing art in person, as opposed to in a book or online. Katcher says, “It has a different impact. You can’t see the richness or depth of the paint when it is a flat surface like in a book.”
In addition, students can examine the art from all angles and distances. Freshman Lydia Villa liked one painting because it changed depending how it was viewed, saying, “It’s oil on canvas, but in the middle, there was kind of this off black, like it was a certain black and then a different black. It’s so close that when you look at it from far away it’s just all black, but when you look it’s like, blind.”
In addition, some art students have never been to a museum. Katcher says, “Just to have the experience and see a collection together, and to know what to look for and how to behave in a museum. And to be able to sketch in a museum. It’s very valuable. So I just think that it is really important for kids to know it’s there and to have the experience of seeing it in person.”
Villa agrees that going to a museum is an enriching experience, saying, “It made you question more of what art really was. It opened our horizons more to the possibilities of art and what it could mean.”
Additionally, students gain a better understanding of types of art that they aren’t familiar with. Senior Caitlin Hilbert says, “I didn’t really know about abstract art. Then I saw it in the Anderson gallery and I kind of got an understanding of what it was supposed to be.”
The advanced art classes go on one or two museum trips a year. Most of the funding for the trips comes from the Aragon Parent Teacher Student Organization.
