AP Studio Art Show Going On Now At Medfield High School

“AP Studio Art has a rigorous curriculum that students put in a tremendous amount of time and effort to meet and they should be proud of their accomplishments.” So says Ms. Meg Drew, the teacher for Advanced Placement Studio Art among many other art classes at Medfield High School.

This year’s twenty AP Art students are required by College Board to create a portfolio with three sections: quality, breadth, and concentration. For both concentration and breadth the students must submit twelve separate pieces to each. For quality, the student choses five pieces to physically send in to the College Board which can be from concentration, breadth, both, or neither.

Besides spending the year focused on producing twenty-four to twenty-nine pieces for the AP Art portfolio, the students also work on their college portfolios, the Zullo Gallery Show, the AP Art Show, the All-School Art Show, and the Scholastic Art Awards.

Tori Bodozian, a senior, spends “three hours minimum on each concentration piece, and the ones I spent less than three hours on I trashed and am re-doing.” Each student choses a concentration at the beginning of the year, and Bodozian chose hands, wanting to “pick something that I could use myself for a reference. Also, I find hands interesting because a lot of people shy away from them since they are difficult to draw.” She will not be attending art school but plans to continue with art.

Bodozian’s three-hours-per-piece standard is not atypical for an AP Art student. Julia Luft, another senior, works on each concentration piece for “usually two weeks, depending on the medium.” Her “minimum” for a concentration piece is “a few days.”

Luft touches on the difference between AP Studio Art and other AP classes offered at MHS. “It’s not a test of what you’ve learned; it’s based off judges and critiques. For AP tests they have your name, address, social security number, but for AP Art it’s anonymous–we even photoshop out our signatures on the pieces. It’s based on what you can produce.” You “need to really want to take” the class when you enroll, because there is “so much work that goes into it.” Luft’s concentration is portraits, which she chose because “people are more interesting than inanimate objects. Everyone can relate to a person rather than a chair or a river.” Luft will be attending MassArt as a freshman next year.

To see the works of Luft, Bodozian, and eighteen other AP Art students, you can visit the AP Studio Art Portfolio Exhibition in the main lobby of the high school until Friday, April 5th. The main office will provide visitors’ passes any time during the school day.

A new addition this year to the show are QR codes on selected artists’ exhibit panels. QR codes are matrix barcodes that can be scanned into a smart phone for further information on the subject. To participate, download a QR Reader onto your smartphone. With this app, you may scan the codes on many artists’ panels and watch student interviews.

This article was written by Alix Kramer, a Medfield High School student and member of the student newspaper, The Kingsbury Chronicle. The piece is part of Medfield Patch's weekly series, "Warrior Weekly," helping provide information about MHS to the local community.