Digging Deep into Design

Digging Deep As a common practice, professional artists work on projects for extended periods of time, oftentimes years, and sometimes a decade or more. It’s safe to say

Into Design that up until their Senior year, high school students haven’t worked on any one project for more than a few weeks. But that all changes in AP Art and Design. The course is modeled after contemporary artistic practices. Students select a theme or topic intended to sustain them for the entire school year. So it’s important that the topic is both personally meaningful and rich with artistic possibilities.

This year, Angus Ebeling brought the messy aesthetics of urban streets into the clean, white gallery space by tearing up billboards and collaging them into heavy layers of texture and color. Claire Factor examined the objectification of women in mass media and consumerism by flipping the power dynamics of objectification onto men in her meticulously designed photographs. Kai Meyers drew attention to the relationships between the rigors and expectations of school and teen mental health by scaling up the doodles he found in the margins of his class papers and tests.

Students often find it challenging to keep digging into the same topic, again and again, and it’s when they really start to get bored and frustrated with it that they need to stick with it more than ever. This problem forces every artist to dig even deeper, figuratively lashing and flailing at the proverbial white canvas, until a breakthrough in process, technique, or idea emerges from the mess of frustration and confusion. Every dedicated artist is continually searching for that new piece of artistic language that will say what couldn’t be said with the worn out vocabulary and methods. The AP Art and Design curriculum introduces to art and design students this deep, engaging, and rigorous process for the first time in their artistic careers. And if they survive it, personal and artistic growth will happen.