AP 2-D ART AND DESIGN
Aaryn Middlebrooks
What is your purpose?
School of the Arts at Central Gwinnett High School, Lawrenceville, Georgia, USA
Height: 12”, Width: 30” | Material(s): Digitally manipulated self-portrait photography shows intensity | Process(es): 3 evils of being a performer: silence, money, & demand using a monochromatic scheme & accent color | Digital Too(s) Used: Phone app to create the B&W palette and Procreate to add yard and other oppressive demands | Curatorial Note: This piece reflects the emotional weight of the masks we wear to navigate everyday life—hiding our true selves to feel safe, often at a personal cost. The haunting beauty lies in how the figures emerge from and recede into darkness, blurring the line between performance and identity.
STUDENT STATEMENT
Does your art connect to or take inspiration from any past or present art styles, techniques, or traditions? If yes, how?
In my portfolio, I often used chiaroscuro as a primary technique to create a more dramatic look, as commonly used in the Renaissance and Baroque periods. Like in its original use, this technique emphasizes emotional drama, which I used to exaggerate feelings of suffocation. My portfolio focuses on the juxtaposition in the power struggle of the performer and the viewer. Dramatic lighting, similar to stage lights, accentuates the overwhelming expectation to perform and produce by observers.
How did applying design skills (elements and principles) help you strengthen both the look (formal qualities) and the meaning (conceptual direction) of your portfolio?
These elements were used to help the viewer visualize my mental state of burnout and misplaced motivation beyond just the facial expressions shown by my self-portrait characters, which were used to represent the many sides of my mind. In my portfolio, the choice of a clown was supposed to be sort of a freeing, fun approach to the heavier themes, but also a way for me to express how it felt making art as someone who aims to please. Similar to Cindy Sherman, I wanted to turn myself into different people, but I also wanted this to be representative of not just me but also other people who struggle with finding their purpose.
Which drawing and/or design skills do you rely on most often in your work, and how do they support your artistic style or message?
As an artist, I’m a big storyteller and extremely interested in creating narratives. To best accomplish this, I rely heavily on the use of color, lighting, and space. Throughout the portfolio, each piece progressively lost color and became more and more monochromatic, representing the change in the performer’s motivation to produce. Additionally, my work focused on a particular figure as the focal point, with an exaggerated sense of space around them, both to show the physicality of the stage’s space and the metaphorical loneliness in that vast space. Often, the audience’s perspective was displayed as the color red.
My work explores my daily performative acts as a student, human, and person as a response to my social audiences
In what ways did your confidence in art making grow during AP Art and Design?
In the beginning, I felt uninspired, creating pieces that I believed would get me a good grade as opposed to making work that truly represented me and my interests. My lack of connection to my work definitely affected the quality of my pieces. After speaking with my AP teacher, he not only agreed that my work wasn’t as strong as it could be, but he also recommended that I look back at old pieces that I enjoyed working on and felt more connected to. In doing so, I found my aha moment by recognizing my strengths in design and lighting and the stories I was truly inspired to share. Ultimately, I used my struggle to help inform my Sustained Investigation (SI) question. Now, I feel more confident in my personal voice and have more resources for making new work.
What kinds of critiques and feedback did you receive in AP Art and Design, and how did they help you strengthen your use of design and/or drawing skills?
During the initial stages of building my portfolio, I struggled to understand my idea fully—more specifically, how to put my thoughts into words and then visualize them. Though I experimented with different styles, techniques, and approaches to art making, nothing quite showcased my vision for my work. During class critiques, the most common feedback I received was about my use of lighting and heavy color to push narrative, so that is something I was confident I wanted to keep. However, it was individual conferencing with my teacher that ultimately guided me to my final SI question. Typically, our time involved my providing my teacher with an update on where I conceptually was and then his giving me resources, thinking prompts, and creative exercises to do independently as part of my self-exploration of my ideas.
What advice would you share with future AP Art and Design students about building drawing and/or design skills?
Be true to yourself. No one expects you to be the next big thing. Your art should speak to who you are and what you wish to share with the world. Finding your style, the purpose of your work, and what you want to communicate with viewers are the most important parts of making art. It isn’t about what other people want from you but rather about what you want to show others. The only one stopping you from really recognizing your potential is yourself, so don’t let yourself get caught up in what you think you should be making, saying, or sharing, and just create.
TEACHER STATEMENT
Dr. Renato Britto Ferreira
Art and Design Instructor
School of the Arts at Central Gwinnett High School
How often did your class meet?
The students participating in the Art and Design Conservatory program have an alternate afternoon schedule, differing from that of the other students enrolled in the host high school. The alternate schedule allows AP studio courses to meet regularly twice a week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays. However, the students take part in three other studio courses, including AP Art History, where teachers and their curriculum either align with or respond to AP studio requirements, thus allowing students to work on their Sustained Investigation (SI) questions in multiple courses through horizontal curriculum alignment.
Please describe the structure of your AP Art and Design course.
The AP class period is a standalone course from other studio sections. However, I teach both AP 2-D and AP Drawing during the same class period. It is important to note that there is one other AP 2-D and AP Drawing teacher on staff at our school. The other AP instructor focuses on more traditional understandings of 2-D media, such as drawing, painting, printmaking, and cut paper. Both of my sections of AP 2-D and Drawing focus on media-based processes such as digital and film photography, photograms, alternative-process photography, and nontraditional photo media like Polaroid and camera obscura. Additionally, digital-based design processes are also utilized, such as digital drawing, graphic design, digital illustration, and digital collage.
How did you guide students in developing and refining their inquiry statements and portfolio direction during their sustained investigations?
The year before students take their AP section, I meet with them periodically. I explain the premise and rhythm of the course and clarify what a sustained investigation question entails. I also show them how this question should inform all aspects of their portfolio. This gives students time during the summer to consider their interests, techniques, preferred processes, and areas within their SI idea to research.
During the summer, students receive a packet of 10 projects that help them explore different approaches to processes, techniques, materials, experimentation, and ways of thinking. I express that they should not feel pressured to make work specifically for their Sustained Investigation question; rather, they should explore any ideas that they are considering for their portfolio. This freedom helps students to create without overthinking their “why.” By summer’s end, they are able to list what they did and did not enjoy about their work.
When students return to school, I require them to make a mind map for the two ideas they were most drawn to from their summer packets. The mind map encourages them to look holistically at their Sustained Investigation options. They consider materials, processes, concepts, narratives, personal connections, and existing resources. Usually, one idea will stand out as stronger, more interesting, or personally exciting. That idea guides them through seven mini-projects, one per week for seven weeks.
The mini-projects engage students in a range of processes, materials, and ideas. These all align with their general Sustained Investigation ideas. If a student wants to change their Sustained Investigation topic during the mini-projects, I recommend that they create a new mind map. There are several checkpoints with individual meetings. I help students think through ideas, challenge clichés, and put words to their thoughts, and I use their ideas to introduce them to relevant artists. At the conclusion of the mini-projects, students spend a week gathering all their thoughts, ideas, iterations, and artwork into a synthesis presentation, thereby allowing them the time and space to reflect on all they have done since the summer and how to prepare for their portfolio in the best way possible. This constitutes a critical time where students conceptually dig deeply and ponder areas that, up to this point, are seen as strengths or weaknesses as they generally explore their Sustained Investigation questions. For example, a student could say something like, “In mini-project A, I enjoyed the material, but in mini-project D, the concept that I explored seemed to be more of an ‘aha moment.’ However, I did not prefer the technique that I considered in mini-project D, but I was interested in the one from summer project F. Maybe I can combine all these concepts to form my new Sustained Investigation question.”
After presenting the synthesis of their work to the class, the students begin a two-week cycle where they create a new Sustained Investigation project for the remainder of the year to build and complete their portfolio. During these weeks, I confer with students to determine how well they believe that they are performing within their Sustained Investigation questions, including determining the direction of their portfolio, narrowing their concept, and ensuring that they feel confident that their personal voice is resonating through their work.
How did you help students strengthen technical skills and apply design knowledge
(elements and principles) while also developing creative problem-solving habits?
Because of the nature of our school’s conservatory program, the art and design team has scaffolded the first two years of the students’ art education experience to better equip them in their AP studio work through vertical alignment and technical skill building and by addressing personal voice through conceptual understandings of narrative. For example, students participating in the early stages of the photography program are taught the fundamental elements and principles of design, followed by the rules of composition, such as the rule of thirds and S- or C-curve compositions. Then, the conversation shifts to applying the foundational tools within intentional design by understanding practical design building blocks such as alignment, intensity, hierarchy, and so forth. During every step of this foundational skill building, students are engaged in meaning making within their work, considering what they are trying to communicate through their piece and the problems that need to be creatively addressed, and determining whether there are other perspectives that have not yet been considered. This structure—of balancing content knowledge, building technical skills, and applying personal voice into studio work—continues in every art course in which the students are enrolled.
In what ways did you structure opportunities for practice, experimentation, and revision
into your curriculum?
When addressing students regarding their enrollment in an AP studio course, we encourage them to select a medium or process that they are extremely comfortable with and in which they naturally make strong work. Oftentimes, students ask about utilizing a medium or process that they are excited to learn about, and I suggest that they postpone that impulse until they are deeper within the AP curriculum. Additionally, I explain to them that, because of the rigor in the AP curriculum and scoring, they should work within their strengths, specifically because this will allow them to gain a better understanding of how they can practice with purpose, experiment intentionally, and revise critically. If I have a student who is well-versed in a wide range of photographic processes (e.g., digital, analog, and alternative processes), but I limit them to considering one primary or narrow approach to their art making, then, contrary to the assumption that they are confined to one way of thinking, they instead avail themselves of a vast range of options regarding the way in which they interpret and apply their medium or process. For example, a student might express that they want to make cyanotype prints of family members to honor and celebrate their heritage. Because that is a specific perspective, the student and I may utilize a wide range of ways to interpret that prompt, while enjoying various directions in which to proceed. That student could incorporate a multiple-step process, such as creating their cyanotype, scanning the image, and then digitally collaging symbolic elements into the piece. Additionally, the student can expose a cyanotype design on an article of clothing, which a family member then wears during a photoshoot. Another idea could be selecting a family member to act as the photogram and lie on the sensitized surface to create a direct portrait. Lastly, the student could decide to use the cyanotype solution as an aqueous drawing material, similar to India ink, and create portraits of their family members and then expose their images to the sun. When students limit themselves to a specific process or medium of their strength, they gain the clearest vision of how they can experiment within their narrow artistic lane more effectively, which then also translates to the way in which they practice and revise their work.
How did you scaffold writing into students’ art making and thinking processes?
Before taking an AP course, students are used to writing about their work as a requirement for all the art shows they participate in, including shows at both the school and at the district level. Of course, this includes their name, grade level, and medium used. However, students are also required to write a three-to-six-page artist statement about their work, focusing on a combination of technique, process, and concept. During the initial stages of the AP course (summer work and the first seven mini-projects), students are encouraged to write about, jot down, sketch, and note anything that they are inspired by or at least interested in within their daily lives. This can range from a quote in a book that they are reading or a line in a movie to an image that they observed at a restaurant. When the time comes to begin the early stages of their writing, they already have a sketchbook full of idea prompts, sentence starters, and images to inform their writing when/if they find themselves at a loss for words.
When students work on their Sustained Investigation projects (which they have two weeks to complete), they submit writing with their work, which should include the height, width, materials, and process. Admittedly, the initial document does not fully encompass the richness of what the student has done and most likely will not be copied and pasted onto the final portfolio. However, requiring students to engage early in writing starts to build their writing muscles so that, later in the school year, they are able to go back and clearly revise their writing. Practically, I have the students read their writing out loud to make sure there is clarity in what they have written, thus allowing them to write as much as they would like and to disregard the character count limit. Subsequently, I print their written documents and have the students clump words and sentences together to summarize their thoughts—specifically, to aid in consolidating their words to better address the character count. Finally, I provide shorthand writing tips to help with their character count—for example, using “w/” for “with,” “+” for “and” or “also,” and avoiding unnecessary punctuation marks, like the apostrophe in “dont” and a period at the end of the last sentence. Using shorthand for the sentence mechanics ultimately allows students to address more about the piece within the required character count.
In what ways does your school leadership support AP Art and Design students and the
broader art program?
I am proud to report that my administration is extremely supportive of not only my AP curriculum but also all the AP courses presented by the art department. It is an honor to work with them as we collectively empower and equip all fine arts courses at our school. It is amazing! Specific to Art and Design, our school leadership trusts their teachers to be masters of their content and grants fine arts instructors autonomy over their courses. Consequently, I am empowered to mold my curriculum to the specific needs of my students and continually orchestrate contemporary, relevant, and meaningful visual arts instruction. Practically, my administration listens when teachers express concerns regarding student placement, class size, class purity (i.e., exclusively allowing AP students into the classroom without mixing other courses into the period), and general scheduling so that all of the art studios in the department are essentially open for the AP students to utilize (meaning non-AP teachers have a planning period, so the only art courses occurring during third period are AP classes). I did not realize that scheduling greatly impacts student success until I began teaching AP studios here and experienced it firsthand. Having AP 2-D, 3-D, and Drawing taught during the same period allows students to collaborate with other AP students, hold more meaningful critiques, conduct conferences with me and the other art teachers, and utilize various studio spaces to better practice, experiment, and revise their work (such as taking their newly enlarged photo from the darkroom to the 2-D studio because they want to hand-tint their work or to the 3-D studio to transfer their film onto a wheel-thrown vessel).
What advice would you offer to other AP Art and Design teachers?
First, our art and design team has collaborated to form seven core mindsets that inform not only our program but also our individual curriculum. They are (1) curiosity—the basis of creativity in the exploration of “what else is out there?”; (2) awareness—who am I?; (3) communication—what do I have to say?; (4) honesty and ownership—where am I?; (5) deep thinking—how can I have a scholarly approach to my work?; (6) practice and experimentation—are there other ways of accomplishing my goal?; and (7) grit—what do I do when faced with a challenge? Embedding these mindsets into the curriculum allows all conversations to be funneled through healthy ways of thinking like an artist. There are countless times that these seven core mindsets have come in handy, and I highly recommend that all art teachers explore what they consider their mindsets to be.
Second, cultivate a culture of continuous improvement. Do not settle for what is already known or understood. Model being a lifelong learner, refine your teaching practice, pursue excellence in all you do, and grow in your curriculum and instruction. This will model healthy best practices for students as they approach building their portfolios and continue their art practice after they have left your class.
Third, have fun with your students. Not only does it help your curriculum and instruction, but it also encourages students to make stronger work.
PRINCIPAL STATEMENT
Shane Orr
Principal
School of the Arts at Central Gwinnett High School
What makes you most proud of your school’s AP Art and Design program and its impact on your students and teacher(s)?
I am most proud of the high level of inquiry and experimentation that is encouraged each day by our outstanding teachers. I am also proud of the ever-growing creativity and skills of our students. Plus, this amazing acknowledgment of Aaryn makes me proud, too!
What actions or priorities have you implemented to strengthen visual arts programming at your school?
We support arts programming by providing a large variety of classes and giving students the opportunity to take multiple art classes during each year of high school. We have even created new art classes and curricula to support the growing needs and interests of our students. We are proud to have implemented an Art & Design Conservatory program in which students spend most of their day taking art classes and preparing for college and career opportunities in the visual arts.
What advice would you share with other school leaders about building and sustaining strong AP Art and Design programs?
Building strong AP Art and Design programs begins with trusting teachers and communicating goals with students and families. I would also highly recommend looking for opportunities to engage with the community (especially with your local elementary and middle schools) to build excitement for visual arts.
Aaryn Middlebrooks
