About the Program

About the Art Program

Curriculum

The art program at MAT provides students with serious, practical, and relevant training in visual arts. The program’s new instructor, Yotam Zohar, presents curricula that focus on cultivating skills in problem solving and are pertinent to the future of MAT’s diverse and highly capable student community.

Students in both the Major and Core programs are exposed to rigorous lesson content, which in addition to observational drawing includes color theory, technical drawing, wire and cardboard sculpture, art history and art theory, shadow puppetry, and game design. Sixth graders may participate in an Enrichment class, which contains projects that are meant to introduce inquiry into the arts learning process by providing more freedom within simple constraints. Fifth graders at MAT take art classes in the Middle School program, enabling them to accelerate their art learning with such content as elements of visual communication, observational drawing, process-based art, and a unit that incorporates some basic robotics.

Students who are considering applying to high schools with merit-based admissions procedures, such as the Specialized High Schools, may participate in an extracurricular Portfolio workshop. In Portfolio, the students work both as a group and individually on special intensive assignments to strengthen their admissions portfolios and help prepare them for the audition process. Portfolio students meet extremely high standards in their work and are intrinsically motivated to produce work outside of school and on their own time.

Learning Goals

The learning goals for the middle school art program are divided into two broad categories: "hard" skills and "soft" skills. To a certain extent, these goals overlap.

"Hard" skills include the technical skills involved in the conceptualization, creation or production, presentation, and assessment of fine art. They can be applied outwardly to other disciplines in the form of visual, abstract, and nonlinear problem-solving. The acquisition of these skills is emphasized over rote demonstration.

"Soft" skills include following directions, task and project management, and collaboration and teamwork. We emphasize the universal need to acquire and internalize these skills, regardless of the outcome of art projects, in the interests of preparedness for the remainder of schooling, extracurricular pursuits, and the world beyond.

Scheduling

The Middle School Art Program includes 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th grades.

5th grade students take art class in a rotating schedule that affords them the opportunity to be active in the classroom either one or two days per week.

6th, 7th, and 8th grade students have art either twice (Core) or three times (Major) per week.

Some 6th graders may take the Enrichment class, which meets two additional times per week.

Students nearing the end of 7th grade or just starting 8th grade who are planning to apply to high schools requiring merit-based admissions procedures, such as the Specialized High Schools, should consider participating in the Portfolio workshop. Portfolio meets twice a week after school, although students are expected to complete additional work outside of school.

The Instructor

Yotam Zohar ("Mr. Zohar", or "Mr. Z", to his students) is an internationally recognized oil painter whose work has been collected in Europe, Asia, and North America. (To see his work, visit his website.) He lives just across the river in Brooklyn with his wife, son, and cat.

In addition to a growing career as a professional artist and working in the commercial gallery world, Mr. Zohar has been a professional and technical consultant to other artists on their work, including some high-profile projects. He has been an art instructor since 2008 and has taught an exceptionally diverse body of students from all ages and backgrounds, always innovating curriculum for maximal effectiveness—for Mr. Zohar, teaching and designing curriculum are an art form within themselves, one which he practices diligently. In the summer of 2019 Mr. Zohar earned his K-12 Visual Art teaching certification in New York State and is very proud (and very fortunate) that MAT is his first public school appointment.

Alongside his passion for art and art teaching, Mr. Zohar enjoys writing, camping, animals, cooking, cosmology and space science, playing soccer, creating music, and reading devastating reviews of the cultural items he loves most. Every school morning since the beginning of the 2016 school year he has drawn a picture to slip into his son's lunchbox. You can view all the drawings here on Instagram.

Mr. Zohar founded and co-administrates a forum about art on the knowledge-sharing website Quora called Art in Reality, with tens of thousands of followers.