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Campus Favorites: the Student Art
Shows in the Nesto Gallery
By Gordon Chase, Chair, Visual Arts Department
Artwork, from top to bottom, is by by students Randy Ryan
(I), Naja Baldwin (I), Jieming Sun (III) and Randi Spoon (I).
The 2005 Mid-Year Show holds 300 works: drawings, mixed media
pieces, prints, sculptures in  clay
and metal, paintings, and photographs. Some exciting themes
are expressed, especially with the various exam projects.
They included nostalgia for childhood, reacting to troubles
in the world, and celebrating comic absurdity. Paul Menneg's
sculpture students were given generic cigar boxes and asked
to interpret "Fear" with a transformation of each
box. One holds the devastation of the recent tsunami (John
Lingos-Webb, I), another a scorched nuclear landscape (Nate
Danforth, II). AP Studio Art students captured their identities
in mixed media pieces depicting the heroic lacrosse player
(Pieter Dudley, II), the defenseless student pulled out of
bed by a giant clock (Rachel Konowitz, III), a personal island
city in the shape of a head (Ken Lin), a younger child with
a head covered with  three-dimensional
flowers (Emilia Rinaldini, III), or a struggling, stoical
but faceless figure with clothes torn and pulled by unidentified
hands (Robert St. Laurence, III).
Some of our most advanced students were challenged by Anne
Neely to create a piece in the style of a famous artist from
another culture or time and to address a contemporary issue.
 These
included Class I students Randy Ryan's tsunami drawing inspired
by Diego Rivera, Martha Pitt's personal crisis image based
on the work of Albrecht Durer, and Emma Sando's haunting portrait
of a starving African child inspired by Sebastio Salgado.
Gordon Chase's Adv. Drawing students interpreted the "lives
of children" as seen as a younger child facing an impending
storm (Laura Will, I), the face of a young woman surrounded
by images of war (Alex Rodman, II), and the encounter with
a Disney-esque fantasy in overwhelming color (Andre Dregalla,
II). Bryan Cheney's photo students present classical studies
of light and form in the  color
of fall and winter moments, lovely close ups by Susie Stone
(I), Mae Ryan (I), and others.
The show also includes comically absurd metamorphoses - a
giant pencil turns into a snake (Ben Whitman, III), a tiny
figure seated on a plush chair is absorbed right into the
chair (Sarah Steiner. III), and a garden hose rises up and
squirts out miniature human figures (Annie LaVigne, III).
Much of the work in this show is narrative or symbolic in
nature. Having begun the year with more basic work on still-lives,
landscape, and anatomy these pieces explore ideas, intense
emotional moments. personal symbols and scenes, and make statements
about the world.
The visual arts department has mounted the Mid-Year and End-of-Year
Student Art Shows in the Nesto Gallery for over 25 years.
With an average of 200 works per show, we have displayed about
10,000 works in these shows over the years— in addition
to ongoing displays of student art throughout the School
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