Best of Miami Portfolios 2001 - Units.muohio.edu

An Explanatory, Exploratory, or Persuasive Essay—Kristen Price
Art Department—More than Just Pretty Pictures
Walking down the halls of the school, students are never at a loss for something to look at.
The walls of the school are constantly plastered with posters and fliers. More importantly, though,
there are the products of the school’s art department. The paintings, drawings, sketches and
photographs turn bland walls into something to be admired and awed by everyone. And none of
these would be possible without the art department.
The pictures on the wall are not the only things that the department offers the school though.
It provides student artists with a chance to enhance their talents. It provides the artists with training
in various media including acrylic paints, chalk pastels, clay, photography, and much, much more.
Through their artwork, the students can develop an extension of their voice and express themselves
visually. The art department also displays student artwork throughout the building for the faculty
and the community so that everyone recognizes the efforts and skills of the students.
Unfortunately, undue negative light has been shed on the department within the past month.
It is unfortunate to think that all of the accomplishments of the student artists and the teachers could
be so quickly forgotten because of fifteen controversial drawings in the hallway. For fifteen years,
the art teachers have displayed the nude torso drawings in the hallways with no complaints from
the community, but after a single complaint from a board member this year, the principal demanded
that the art teachers remove the drawings from the wall. Suddenly, the art department acquired a
bad name simply because one person thought that drawings of nude statues were inappropriate.
How is it possible that with one comment from one person, people forget how often the art
department has gone above and beyond the call of duty to help the school?
The department benefits more than just its own students. It affects the entire student body
and the community itself. Several major projects have been sponsored and carried out by the
department. One of those projects was a traveling exhibit celebrating cultural diversity. This
project was done in conjunction with Parson’s School of Design in New York.
The department also participated in the Violence Project. For this, students created visual
artwork and wrote essays and poems dealing with violence in American culture. This project was
done in conjunction with the group called Parents of Murdered Children.
They also created life size body casts memorializing victims of violence and community
heroes. Subjects of the casts included the students of Columbine and the slain Cincinnati police
officers Pope and Jeeters. These casts were then sent to memorial sites in the cities where the
violence took place. (Several casts were sent to Columbine High School itself.) Time and time
again, student artists have used their artwork to speak out against violence and take a stand in the
community. They pride themselves in being heard and making a difference.
By far, though, the most important project that the art department sponsors and participates
in is the Day Without Art campaign, an AIDS awareness project that the school participated in
during the beginning of the school year. Day Without Art was taken on by the high school eight
years ago, after several of the teachers from the art department attended the city’s first observance
at the downtown Contemporary Arts Center. Feeling that their students needed to be educated
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