Titled “Common Threads,” the 2024 Pre-K–Grade 8 Art Showcase in Colorado Academy’s Ponzio Arts Center asks visitors to draw connections between student works in much the same way that CA’s arts faculty challenge young artists to think deeply about the “why?” of art—not just what’s visible on the surface.
“The skills and habits of mind our students are developing through our visual arts curriculum are important,” explains Lower School art Instructor Elizabeth Delap, one of the show’s organizers. “But just as significant are expression and voice, making creative choices, and being able to articulate the reasons for those choices, the story that’s being told. Art is a narrative as well as an object.”
As they enter the Ponzio main gallery, guests immediately spy Second Grade’s collaborative alphabet project, based on Maurice Sendak’s alliterative book, Alligators All Around. It’s a perfect example of students stretching to make something that is infused with meaning. Working across numerous class periods, including an October Flex Day dedicated to creativity, Second Grade artists not only had to devise alliterative sentences to illustrate, but also had to choose how to tell a mini-story with just a handful of related symbols, points out Delap.
Lower School and Middle School art Instructor Jorge Muñoz, Delap’s co-organizer, emphasizes that narratives give art life. His Fifth Grade artists’ elaborate dioramas depict alien worlds on which something specific is happening. The students had to complete a prototype for their diorama before tackling the final piece, and, says Muñoz, “They learned a lot about construction methods and storytelling in that first round.”
Muñoz and Delap organized this year’s Art Showcase into four distinct, color-coded sections, so that visitors could think about the “region” they most connected with. Tracing the themes that run through each section, guests add their own meaningful layer to the artists’ efforts, Delap says.
In the yellow zone, for example, student works range from mandalas created by Fourth Grade teams to Middle School ceramic projects and abstract Pre-K watercolors. Meanwhile, a blue thread connects another diverse collection, from Eighth Grade digital posters representing a social or environmental cause, to Kindergartners’ acrylic paintings incorporating symbols and colors inspired by Navajo wearing blankets. And in the red zone, striking three-dimensional masks designed by Third Graders and modeled on the styles of artists such as Georgia O’Keeffe and Jean-Michel Basquiat sit near slices of “cake” crafted by First Graders on decorative “plates” adorned with color and symbolism.
For the artists as well as gallery visitors, notes Delap, seeing the wide variety of artworks created by Pre-Kindergartners through Eighth Graders both dazzles and suggests further connections.
A wall-spanning, mixed-media group project by Pre-K offers an intriguing contrast to the intimately-scaled ceramic dish sets created in the Middle School Ceramics Studio. Delicate Third Grade oil pastel transfer portraits could be the evolution of the impressionistic watercolor-and-salt panels completed by the youngest Pre-K artists.
Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth Graders were given the freedom to choose their own subjects and media, and the results are similarly wide ranging. There are painted landscapes, Warhol-like murals, intricate drawings, and even autobiographical videos created in the new Seventh/Eighth Grade Videography class.
The annual Pre-K–Grade 8 Art Showcase, on display this year from December 13, 2024, to January 17, 2025, is a feast for the eyes as well as the heart and mind, explains Muñoz. “It is truly impactful for our students to see the whole picture of art at CA—both the artists who are younger than they are and those who represent what’s yet to come. So many different ideas, techniques, and skill levels come together every year in this space.”