Fine Art at Blair

The fine arts thrive at Blair Academy!

Blair’s fine arts department offers courses that support and enhance the artistic lives of our students. Offerings include architecture, art history, ceramics, drawing, elements of art, graphic arts, painting, traditional photography, digital photography, sculpture and video. Students master art skills and experience new media through individualized instruction, where each student is challenged to find his or her own creative voice and expand their problem solving skills. By creating, discussing, and viewing artwork on a regular basis, Blair students are better able to contextualize their visual world.

Student work can be seen all over campus in impromptu installations and framed exhibitions in the corridors of the admission hallway, academic classrooms, and hallways of The Commons. Student art is celebrated throughout the year in informal art displays in Chestnutt Chapel and Clinton Hall, as well as curated art shows of advanced, AP, and senior artists in The Black Canteen. The spring season culminates with a student art show in The Romano Gallery, which is by all accounts, a “must see” event.

Opportunities in the fine arts abound outside the confines of the classroom, as well. A student-run art club brings fun, community building projects to a wide variety of artist-adventurers on campus. We sponsor monthly art openings in the Romano Gallery where students have the opportunity to meet and discuss art topics with visiting artists. In addition to viewing the artwork on campus, a hallmark of the Blair art experience is our commitment to taking students out of the Blair “bubble” and connecting them to the events of the larger art world. In the past year alone, Blair’s fine arts department has sponsored student trips to visit sculptor Steve Tobin, photographer Jim Rimi, the Whitney, Cooper-Hewitt, Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Barnes Foundation, the Met and MOMA.

Our classroom-studios are active and well-appointed spaces. We utilize a traditional dark room for developing photography, a ceramics/sculpture studio with multiple electric kilns and a gas fired raku kiln, separate rooms for drawing and painting, and a designated space for our AP and Portfolio students. Our PC lab is loaded with the InDesign CS3 Suite for graphic design, while our Mac lab is outfitted with Final Cut Pro for video editing and Macromedia Dreamweaver for web design.

If you have any questions about fine arts at Blair, please do not hesitate to contact Kate Sykes, chair of the fine arts department, as she will be happy to tell you more about the exciting experience you can have as a fine artist at Blair Academy: sykesk@blair.edu. And please return to this webpage often, as links to fine arts news events will be posted here regularly.

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