Stealing Art!
The Art Crimes and Van Gogh classes played an art stealing board game where they pretended they were bidding on art pieces and attempting to build the most valuable art exhibit collection to win the game.
Humanities
Field Trip to the Taubman Museum of Art
As a school we visited the Taubman Museum of Art to see the Ruth E. Carter: Afrofuturism in Costume Design exhibit.
Academy Award-winning costume designer Ruth E. Carter is an expert storyteller who harnesses the power of visual communication to share narratives of culture, race, and politics. Creating costumes for generation-defining films like Black Panther, Coming 2 America, Selma, and Do the Right Thing, she brings vibrancy, nuance, color, and texture to each of her culture-shifting characters. Afrofuturism in Costume Design features unforgettable designs from nearly four decades of her career within an Afrofuturistic installation incorporating original artwork by artist Brandon Sadler, whose murals were prominently featured in Black Panther.
— Taubman Museum of Art.
Lord of the Manor
The Lord of the Manor Class finished out the semester with a High Tea including finger sandwiches, scones, clotted cream, and jam. Afterwards, they took turns whacking Leo’s homemade pinata filled with rollos.
Absurdity Event
As first semester drew to a close, the “Nonsense, Absurdity, and the Irrational” class planned and performed a surprise event for the school community during lunchtime. While vigorously absurd and without any rational goal or ‘meaning’, the raucous multimedia performance evoked many historical and cultural manifestations of the irrational, including the medieval “Ship of Fools”, Edward Lear’s “The Jumblies”, performances of the Dada movement, noise music, and Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty. A confusing time was had by all.
Greek Fest!
Opa! The Athens and Democracy class put together a delicious fest complete with “wine”, hummus, kalamata olives, dolmas, “babies on a stick”, cookies, Greek chocolates, Turkish delight, homemade loukoumades, and homemade baklava.
Trip to Washington, DC
Several students from Sebastian’s International Relations class and Warren’s World Geography class embarked on an informal self-guided tour of George Washington University. They also saw many nearby points of interest including the White House, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the Watergate Complex, the Kennedy Center, and the Organization of American States. They also visited the National Archives, where they viewed and learned about the Founding Documents and the fight for passage of the 19th Amendment. This field trip provided a variety of experiences.
Cartography
Warren’s Geography class took a creative hands-on approach to explore methods of cartography which included charting geographic location, choosing symbolization strategies, and studying how landforms interact across the surface of the earth. It was a challenge of visual communication skills and hand-eye coordination.
The students also had to coordinate where their landmasses end up on the class global map, making sure that they do not overlap with any of their peers’ creations.
The Bookmasters Class Shares Their Research
Click here to read the independent research blogs from the 2020 fall semester’s Bookmasters Class. Most of the students chose to draw upon topics and methodologies from across the whole school curriculum, with many of their topics inspired by previous classes.
Our Last Friday Activity of the Semester was Coordinated with Olchar’s “Becoming a Bookmaster” Class
Olchar brought in some of the strangest, rarest, oldest, nicest, and most fun examples from his archival libraries of underground and countercultural books from the 18th-20th Centuries. From 18th Century newspapers, to an abolitionist book drawn by kids in 1850, to a one-of-a-kind Serbian Surrealist collaged book, to contemporary avant-garde Russian zines, we informally browsed and explored stacks of volumes (carefully), talked about the stories behind them, and experienced the wide variety of books in their forms, contexts, and meanings to the people who own and read them.
