Students and faculty members attended the annual Artstravaganza during long lunch on April 27 in Nichols Atrium, which highlighted artistic achievements from the school year.

The exhibition featured a wide variety of art ranging from painting to poetry to film-making, created by students who have taken an art course during this school year, as well as award-winning art and writing submissions from the 2016 Scholastic Art & Writing Awards.

“The goal was to make it as big and exciting and circus-like as we could do it, so now we also have folded in the jazz band to play, just to try to get as many creative things happening at once,” said Joshua Martinez, photography and AP Studio Art 2D teacher.

Individuals in first semester were able to choose which piece would go in while teachers chose pieces for second semester art students.

Artists had an extensive range of ideas to develop their projects from, giving them the opportunity to showcase pieces portraying different concepts.

“At the time we did this project, the new Star Wars movie came out, and I’m a huge Star Wars fan,” Raveena Panja (10) said. “It was heavily inspired around space, but it is a time pass scene sort of sequence, just like a girl growing up in space.”

Some students had come up with a collective theme that encompassed their art.

“My concentration is on fluidity and transformation, so all of my pieces had the idea behind both of those,” Chandler Nelson (12) said. “ A lot of times it’s solid turning into liquid or the idea of transformation, turning into something else.”

In addition to the exhibition, members of the Harker Eclectic Literary Magazine (HELM) sold their newly-designed volume 17 during lunch and had a record number of sales that outpaced the total copies printed last year. There was also a reading held in Nichols Auditorium featuring HELM writers and Scholastic award winners.

An element that has changed this year is the way that the art is judged. Previously, a jury would be invited to give rankings for pieces in seven different categories; however, a different system was used for rating this year.

“Instead of ranking student work, we decided that we would ask the jury to just find one work from each category that they felt interested them and provide comments about it so that the artist could kind of hear what they were experiencing,” Martinez said.

Some art students plan on seriously pursuing art after high school, while others intend on keeping art as a passion.

“I might take an art elective in college but I don’t plan on pursuing it actively in college,” Aparna Yellapragada (12) said.

This piece was originally published in the pages of the Winged Post on May 4, 2016.