Arts

A Message from the Director of Arts

Dear Pre-K – Grade 12 Families,

Greetings from Park Arts! I write to welcome you to the 2021-2022 academic year; we in the Pre-K-12 Visual and Performing Arts Departments are truly looking forward to a year of creative work together. A year ago, in the throes of the pandemic, I suggested to you that in many ways, our children and youth needed art more than ever, as art fills so many needs and roles in the human experience. Today, as we look forward to a September return to campus and in-person learning for all of our students, from our youngest to our oldest, I am more convinced than ever that art is an essential part both of education and the human experience. From its unique capacity to “handle” uncertainty and ambiguity, to its ability to help us channel the full range of emotion, art offers us expression and understanding of our shared humanity. As young people continue to navigate complexity and a host of unprecedented challenges, research reassures us that creative exploration and expression support their social-emotional development and overall well-being.

We at Park are fortunate that our students have had and will continue to have access to many different ways to explore creatively and expressively during this time of pandemic. After beginning last year with necessary modifications and precautions in our arts classrooms and studios, including suspending singing for our younger students, we ended the spring term on a series of high notes: from our All-School Art Show (link here), to our outdoor theater performances and music concerts, to our youngest students’ safe and successful return to masked singing, to our wonderful virtual master class with Tony-award-winning playwright David Henry Hwang and our thought-provoking virtual screening and panel discussion of the HBO documentary, Black Art: In the Absence of Light, we collectively celebrated the unique gifts that art can offer, including resilience, the power of community, and joy.

As we look ahead to our work in Park Arts in the coming academic year, I would like to reference the Studio Habits of Mind that undergird our arts pedagogy. The Studio Habits support and inform all our work in the arts at Park, from Pre-Kindergarten through Grade 12.

Studio Habits of Mind

Students of all ages at Park work on developing craft: their teachers offer them experiences that help them to learn to use the tools, materials, and techniques of particular forms. We do so in order to support students’ expression: we hope that they will create work that conveys ideas, feelings, or personal meaning. We invite our students to envision that which does not yet exist: to imagine possible next steps and solutions as they strive to solve creative problems — a skill that seems particularly critical at this time in our collective history. We ask students to observe the world around them, to notice color, line, sound, texture, gesture, and human interaction. Doing so helps students to identify what interests them, and to engage and persist through iterative creative processes, stretching and exploring as they explore playfully and embrace the opportunity to learn from mistakes. And, of course, we offer students regular opportunities to reflect on their and others’ work, striving to connect to and understand the wider arts community.

Health and Safety

In the Lower, Middle, and Upper School arts communities, we will continue to follow CDC and Park health guidelines to ensure that our students’ arts experiences are safe and healthy in the months ahead. We will continue to update you of any changes to our program or practices as they emerge. In addition to our curricular work in our arts classrooms and studios, we will offer extracurricular performing arts opportunities in all three divisions; please consult your divisional mailings for further information. If you have any questions about programming or safety protocols in any of the classes or groups your child is participating in, please reach out to the teacher/director of the group and/or to me at dhull@parkschool.net.

An essential form of safety is emotional safety and health; it is in the spirit of both that I would like to update you on our ongoing work in anti-racist arts education. As a Pre-K-12 Arts Department, we have been planning our curricula, lessons, and programming while asking the following question:

What does anti-racist arts education look and feel like across different arts disciplines and developmental stages?

As we continue to explore this essential question, we will continue to review and examine our arts program and practices through an anti-racist lens. We welcome your questions and feedback at any point.

Finally, a word about how you can support the work of your student artists. Given that art relies on our capacity to focus and be present with ourselves, with each other, and with our world, we ask that you support your children by providing them with distraction-free and supplementary device-free arts work and practice spaces. And we also encourage you to engage in art-making as a family whenever possible, as it will support everyone’s collective well-being: we invite you to paint, sing, dance, sculpt, improvise, build, and play together!

Thank you so much for your ongoing support of your children’s arts education. We wish you a 2021-2022 school year filled with creativity and discovery.

Best wishes,

Deborah

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