Art Outside the Classroom

The art room at Cardigan is a wonderful assault on the visual senses. Racks of paint bottles in primary colors stand in the middle of the room, ready for the next art class to begin. At the other end of the classroom every inch of a floor-to-ceiling chalkboard is covered in inspirational sayings in countless types and fonts. Weaving around and folding into each other, the sayings have an urgency: “Try new things;” “Be creative;” “Step out of your comfort zone.” The walls of the classroom inspire too, with portraits of famous artists, steps to freeing one’s creative spirit, vocabulary for talking about art, and messages of positive engagement. Curated and decorated by art department chair Nina Silitch P’19,’21, the art room is a safe place for taking creative chances and developing one’s artistic passions. And that same energy is spilling out into the rest of campus more and more as Ms. Silitch sets about proving her conviction that celebrating the arts builds community. 

Take for instance the displays she often creates for national holidays. On Veterans Day, she helped students to create paintings of poppies in the style of Georgia O’Keefe. And for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, she divided a portrait of Rev. King into a grid, and asked students to paint the individual sections. The final mosaics, one in shades of green and one in shades of blue, were hung in the Commons and outside Humann Theatre. Now for Black History Month, Ms. Silitch has challenged teachers to decorate the doors of their classrooms with the stories of Black Americans who have helped shape history.

“I’m hoping the project will spark conversations in our community, uniting our diverse cultures and backgrounds,” says Ms. Silitch.

Ms. Silitch also tries to organize events and opportunities that physically bring people together. Before Winter Family Weekend, she invited students and faculty alike to join her in the art room during morning break and help her paint a poster with the word KIND written in large letters. With painter markers in brilliant colors, students and faculty--including Head of School Chris Day!—decorated the poster. Later, Ms. Silitch had students stand in front of the poster, replacing the letter “I” and representing the idea that students should “Be the I in KIND.”

What’s important to note here is that many of the projects Ms. Silitch organizes occur outside of classroom hours. During morning snack breaks, on Thursday afternoons during club time, on weekends when she is on duty, Ms. Silitch opens the art room to interested students and adults. Through campus-wide emails she invites the community to join her in embracing art—acknowledging that sometimes that can get messy but is always worth the effort.

Ms. Silitch also organized a gallery event in November. In addition to hanging student artwork from the fall term on the walls of the Needham Gallery, she collaborated with Music Director Kevin Franco to schedule student musicians to play during the gallery openings. The event drew people from all over campus to Bronfman Hall. From the Advancement Office to Admissions to the students in their classrooms, the community joined together in an appreciation of art, not because they were required to be there but because they wanted to be—to admire the students’ art pieces and listen to the students’ musical accomplishments.

“I love seeing other kids looking at their classmate’s artwork,” says Ms. Silitch. “They have a chance to see others in ways they never have before.”

Another collaborative art project that Ms. Silitch began in September and hopes to display somewhere on campus soon, is a mosaic made of domino tiles. Throughout the fall, she invited students in their advisory groups as well as staff and administrators to decorate the blank sides of individual domino tiles with something that represented them. She then took all the tiles and, with the help of her Thursday art club students, glued them together into the mosaic of a mountain, a symbol that parallels this year’s school-wide theme, “Respect the Climb.”

“When I can, I like to tie projects to the themes and values of the school,” says Ms. Silitch. “I also like projects in which the creations of individuals can come together in one masterpiece. It allows for reflection and can ultimately make the community stronger.”

Next year, our newest academic building, Wallach, will be open and ready for classes, and Ms. Silitch will have a new space for sparking creativity. She will also have a new gallery—the Tsui Yee Gallery—where no doubt she will invite the community to celebrate art of all kinds. But no matter what the new space brings, the focus will remain the same—using art to build community and invite all to embrace their creative spirit.