Four Years of Art, Taught by Artists

In most high schools, art has a shelf life. A student takes a required semester or two somewhere around ninth or tenth grade, and then the schedule tightens and the art room becomes a place other people go.

That’s a loss, and not mainly an artistic one. Between fourteen and eighteen, students are figuring out who they are and art can play a critical role in that process of discovery.

Developing a sense of self

Skill in any art form compounds in a way that one semester can’t show you. Whatever the art form, over the years TNS students learn to see their work with a critical eye and they make adjustments without being told. A student who has been through four years of critique knows the difference between “I don’t like this” and “this isn’t doing what you wanted it to do” — and knows how to hear the second one without falling apart.

That last part is identity work as much as craft. It takes a reasonably sturdy sense of who you are to hear a hard note about something you made and not mistake it for a verdict on yourself. Four years of making and showing art develops a certain kind of nerve.

Practice makes progress

No matter the art form, students follow a similar path: Make something. Show it to people. Get feedback. Decide what you think about that. Go back in.

Most teenagers feel they have little proof of their own growth but a senior here can hold up four years of work and say: that was me then, this is me now, and I can see exactly what changed. Very little else in a high school career hands a young person that.

Taught by people who still make the work

At The New School, students take art all four years, and it’s taught by people who still make the work themselves. Working artists are still learning and TNS students often get to see that process in action. Teachers who are working artists reframe a creative life as a practice vs a finish line.

Here are some of our art teachers:

Shawn Moore, who teaches Art + Design, spent his career as a creative director at Turner. A critique from him comes from someone who has defended creative decisions to clients with real money on the line, which is a different conversation than “I think it needs more blue.”

Marc Casey teaches filmmaking and works as an underwater cinematographer — about the least forgiving camera work there is. The light changes, the air runs out, and nothing gets reshot because you felt like it. Students learn to plan from someone for whom planning is survival.

Eric Thompson is an audio engineer who records across a wide range of musicians and styles. He teaches the part of music most programs skip: how a recording actually gets made, and how many decisions sit between a good take and a finished track.

Jeff Adler teaches drama as a creative partner of Horizon Theatre, the professional company in Little Five Points. Students work alongside people whose day job is making theater for paying audiences.

None of them is teaching the arts as a break from the real curriculum. They’re teaching their own working standards to teenagers — and modeling the most useful thing a teenager can witness: an adult who is still becoming someone.

Sharing the work matters

TNS students here present their art work publicly twice a year, to audiences not obligated to be kind. Something shifts in a sixteen-year-old who gets known by a room for something they made, rather than for a GPA or whatever category high school assigned them on the first day. And when students want something that doesn’t exist yet, they start it: the Art Club, the fashion club, and both rock bands were started by students who saw a need. Starting something is its own claim about who you are.

By senior year, some are inside the city’s arts institutions for the whole year. Recent seniors have interned at Horizon Theatre and the Atlanta Opera — not a simulation of a creative career, but the actual thing, with a desk, a supervisor, and something due Friday.

“But my student isn’t an art kid”

While some TNS students end up in the most selective art schools in the country, most don’t see themselves as artists. Either way, they all benefit from the lessons that four years of practicing can yield. They can try out every art form or they can fall in love with one discipline and go deep. TNS helps all students develop their inherent creativity which strengthens them no matter where they go after graduation.

Join us for our next semester-end Exhibition and see what students are creating.

Mary Campbell Jenkins