Subject Spotlight: Fine Arts @ DA
Video by Jesse Paddock | Story By Dylan Howlett
Before he achieved renown as one of the more gifted sculptors of the 20th century, Alberto Giacometti felt a thorn dig into him, the one that jabs anyone who dares to wield a brush, or a prop, or a guitar. How is it possible — using nothing other than bare hands and blunt instruments — to turn a creative premonition into something another can see? Giacometti needn’t look far for inspiration. He was born in Switzerland to a father who painted. One of his brothers designed furniture; another became an architect. But too many of his sculptures, Giacometti believed, were far too surreal to articulate what he really wanted to say.
He abandoned surrealism for expressionism, yearning to cross a threshold of emotion in his works that would reveal something about the human condition. Giacometti kneaded clay and plaster into spindly renderings of human forms in motion. They looked ghoulish in their elongated nature, yet strong in spite of their skeletal frailty. “The one thing that fills me with enthusiasm,” Giacometti said, “is to try, despite everything, to get nearer to those visions that seem so hard to express.” And that is why, some 75 years after the peak of a Swiss sculptor’s career, an art room full of Durham Academy fourth-graders delighted in saying the man’s name.
“Let’s say ‘Giacometti,’” says Pamela McKenney, the Lower School’s visual arts teacher. “JAH-koh-MEH-dee,” says a chorus of fourth-graders in an Italian lilt. The class had gathered around McKenney at a table in the front of the room after some time away from their papier-mâché Giacometti-inspired sculptures; Lower School classes attend art class twice within each eight-day rotation. Their sculpture, McKenney reminded them, should contort into the shape of their chosen action. And they should, in spite of their gangly state, mimic human anatomy. “Think about how we move,” McKenney said. She pointed to the bend in the joints of her own Giacometti creation.
Art, of course, is not merely imagination. It is also tactile. McKenney laughs as she compares the consistency of her papier-mâché mixture to Cream of Wheat. One student joins in with his own giggle. “It looks like my sister’s puke,” he says. But from repulsion comes beauty. McKenney braves the bile-like substance and dips her hand into a container, modeling for the fourth-grade Comets — the nickname for Jean Coene’s homeroom — the art of “squeegeeing.” She wrings out the goop from strips of newspaper before fastening the papier-mâché to her wiry model made of tinfoil.
The Comets soon leap from the table to tend to their own figurines. They are in various poses: arms spread, legs splayed, hands and feet twisted into skeletally aberrant shapes. Ricky chose his favorite swimming stroke — the breast stroke — for his figurine. Chizi opted for the “scorpion,” a high leg kick common in dance and gymnastics. Another student molds his figurine into a two-armed flex over its head. It matters little that the stew of mixed flour and water drips from the emaciated form of the figurine. In art, you can convey strength where there appears to be none.
Art is strong, too, at DA, where sculptures and cacophonies and performance intermingle across the four divisions. The flourish of deliberate creativity — highlighted in no small part by the Upper School winter musical, Into the Woods, which opens tonight in Kenan Auditorium — is thanks to thoughtful faculty members with decades of experience and expertise. These teaching artists guide students in doing it all: creating, thinking, capturing, experimenting, revising, striving and believing in the boundless forces of their singular artistic vision.
“That’s the argument for folks who are asking all over our culture right now of what value is the humanities?” says Kristen Klein, the associate head of school. “And it really is about making us more human, developing our humanity, developing our ability to connect with one another, to have understanding across differences.”
Join us on a tour of fine arts at Durham Academy, where every day, students inch nearer and nearer toward those visions that seem so hard to express.
Fine Arts @ DA
Preschool Arts
Preschoolers explore a variety of arts through both Enrichment classes and in their regular classrooms. Here, Preschool visual art and cooking teacher Elizabeth McCleod leads kindergartners through the Paralympics project, a dynamic painting exercise that has fast become a favorite kindergarten tradition. The Preschool arts curriculum introduces a variety of media for exploration, including drawing, painting, collage, printmaking, clay and sculpture. All Preschool students participate in visual art class twice a week.
Preschoolers also enjoy music class — which integrates song, speech, instruments and movement — twice a week. And class plays — typically adapted from a beloved children’s book or folk tale, with each student playing a speaking part — offer pre-kindergarten and kindergarten students the chance to begin honing their theatrical chops.
Step Inside a Kindergarten Art Class
Lower School Arts
Each year, fourth-graders learn about sculptor Alberto Giacometti, who kneaded clay and plaster into spindly renderings of human forms in motion. The exercise helps students think about how humans move and how their artistic vision can convey action. In Lower School, students learn a balance of art history and elements of art. Creative projects are often integrated with students’ classroom curriculum, other enrichment classes or tied into the vibrant arts community of the Triangle.
In addition to visual art, Lower Schoolers explore drama and music (with elements of movement) via Enrichment classes.
Middle School Arts
In this sampling of Middle School arts offerings, students use myriad instruments — voices and clarinets, leg muscles and paint rollers, and, of course, their minds — to develop an appreciation for the arts. These years offer an opportunity for students to experiment, take risks, explore and expand their own artistic identities in a supportive space.
In fifth and sixth grades, all students are exposed to each arts discipline — instrumental music, movement, theater, visual art and vocal music — via Explorations trimester classes. Seventh- and eighth-graders have an opportunity to further develop and practice skills in a specific discipline for a yearlong course of study via the Electives program.
Explore Middle School Arts Offerings
Upper School Arts
This snapshot of fine, visual and performing arts in the Upper School takes us to a class meeting/rehearsal for auditioned music ensemble In The Pocket, as well as Intermediate Dance, Introduction to Photography, Acting Studio and Explorations in Ceramics and Sculpture classes.
In addition to the disciplines represented here, the Upper School offers courses in music theory, two-dimensional art, digital art and design, dramatic writing and technical theatre.
Take a Tour of Upper School Arts Courses
“Sorry, this is really gross,” Mikaela says. She is covering her tinfoil figurine in another strip of gelatinous newspaper, arranging her Giacometti sculpture into the shape of a skydiver in flight. Her table partner picks up his own piece of newspaper and peers into the globules of the papier-mâché mixture. “I actually like it!” he says, and he isn’t alone.
McKenney breaks the rapt attention with the sound of a chime. She provides some reminders based on what she’s seen around the room. Don’t forget the fingers and the toes, she says: Use paper-mâché to fold over a longer strip that stretches over the edge of the hand or foot, then fold it over to create more angularity. No tinfoil should be showing, and extremities shouldn’t be squared off.
Izzy examines the edges of her figurine closely. She has eschewed the more sporting leanings of her classmates for a form of contemplation that Giacometti surely would have applauded. Izzy loves to read, particularly the “Amulet” series, and she has sculpted a character who leans against a wall while they read a book. “I’m happy with it,” she says.
The sculpture, of course, isn’t done. It’s ready for the next stage once a student leaves their seat and finds McKenney at the front of the room. Any figurine that stands on its own tinfoil legs becomes stapled to a stand, while any other figurine that finds itself otherwise prone — Ricky’s swimmer, for instance, or Mikaela’s skydiver — receives a rod that rises from the middle of the stand.
The fourth-graders huddle around McKenney as she staples and mounts. They watch figments become something real, their visions so easy and joyful to express.
Learn more about Durham Academy’s arts offerings across all divisions at www.da.org/arts.
Check out the first two installments of our Subject Spotlights: