Oil paintings in production sit in Jane Autry’s classroom Thursday at Grantsville High School for the school’s arts festival. The festival takes place Monday at 5 p.m. in the GHS auditorium.
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Loading...Grantsville High School is hosting its first ever arts festival Monday evening.
Jane Autry, GHS art department head, said each week department heads get together to collaborate on ways to increase students’ learning through their professional learning community meetings.
“This year, we decided we wanted to do an arts festival at the high school and include a variety of different departments,” she said. “Tooele High School has done something like this for the last two years, and we wanted to adapt and do something like what they have.”
The theme for the festival is “Worlds Apart.” Autry said students from the art, music, drama and English departments will address civil rights issues prevalent during the time period of 1830 to 1930.
“There are probably around 400 kids participating and showing some type of work,” she said. “All the kids have an English class so it’s quite a big percentage of our students if their English class is participating.”
Freshman to junior English students have created bookmark banners to illustrate novels from this time period, such as “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “Huck Finn” and “Of Mice and Men.” They have been hung in the commons at GHS.
Art students who are in drawing, painting or pottery classes are completing projects by copying masters from that time period.
“Many of my drawing and painting students are recreating Grant Wood’s work in the regionalism category,” Autry said. “There were up to 12 artists the kids could choose from. They’re drawing with pencil or colored pencil and painting with watercolor or oil paints.”
Wood is best known for his paintings depicting the rural American Midwest, particularly the painting titled “American Gothic,” which shows a man holding a pitchfork while standing next to his wife in front of their home.
In addition to this type of art, students from the music department will also perform through song, dance and orchestra. Students who are part of the drama department will perform monologues.
“The choirs will be doing musical numbers from that era,” Autry said. “There’s even a teacher group that’s singing ‘Worlds Apart,’ which is a song from that era.”
The arts festival will be presented to the student body and their families on March 18 from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. in the GHS commons. The performing arts portion of the festival will take place in the GHS auditorium from 5 p.m. to 6 p.m. Admission is free.
