The Blue Valley art department has undergone many new renovations this year. You might have seen the new display cases in the main hall, but there are lots of other improvements that most students don’t know about.
“The most obvious ones to the school community probably include the two new display cases outside of room 551 and 450 because they’re in the hallway,” graphic design and jewelry teacher Madi Sedillo said. “Then 450 used to be the gifted room and was totally remodeled to be the new intro to visual art [room].”
The new 3D art room in 552 is a massive improvement from the old room, which used to be shared between visual art and jewelry, and was remodeled to be solely for the classes of jewelry and sculpture.
“The logistics of sharing a classroom amongst intro to visual art and jewelry and metalsmithing was a disaster,” Sedillo said. “My stuff was always in their way, their stuff was in our way. It was much needed for a long time.”
With the new room, students are able to do more with the new torches, better ventilation, and multiple buffing machines.
“The most obvious improvement is the amount of heat we can get from these torches — our old little hand held butane torches produce such a small flame, so it limited the size of what students could produce,” Sedillo said. “We would need two or three torches just to solder a simple band ring closed if you were using hard solder, but with these torches, we’re going to be able to solder larger-scale work without any safety hazards.”
Just like the 3D room, the photography room underwent similar improvements, allowing more space for more students.
“In my film photography classes, our old dark room butts up to what was the old journalism dark room, so we were able to cut through that wall and expand our dark room to accommodate three additional workstations,” photography teacher Kristen Pickell said. “I’m able to have bigger class sizes and more access to equipment for my photography I and II students, which is one of our most popular classes.”
The new display cases will be for 2D projects, like photographs, drawings, and paintings.
“We’ve designed them in a way that they’re going to showcase the work that is going on in that classroom,” Pickell said. “For my case, [Room] 551, that’ll be both photography I and photography II students, allowing their work to be made visible to the school and can also be used for critique purposes.
The new display cases are helping students’ art become recognized.
“There’s a lot more students pausing looking at the work in the cases,” Pickell said. “Not everyone necessarily walks through the Avenue of the Arts, so being able to have that work near the art room has been really important.”
Displaying artwork is very beneficial, especially for motivating student artists.
“If no one’s going to see the art, what’s the point in putting any effort into the presentation,” Sedillo said. “It gives students the opportunity to experience the pride in their work they deserve after putting so much time and effort into something.”
Sophomore Olivia Wang is one of the many students who has had art displayed and who is excited about the new display installations.
“When you know you’re supposed to hang something up, you try a little harder on it,” Wang said. “You know that people are going to see it.”
The art department is also looking toward possible future installments of more display cases.
“I have not proposed it, but I like the idea of potentially [having] the lockers to be removed on the opposite side of the hallway,” Pickell said. “That could be another really beneficial space for both 2D and 3D work, where we could really have that whole main hallway leading to all the classes with more display space.”
