“Stretch the range of your tool.”
NMSA Visual Arts Chair Cristina González, teaching a visual arts course filled with students from all NMSA’s arts disciplines
Arts Exchange Day, held all day today at New Mexico School for the Arts, featured four separate arts blocks wherein NMSA students — each of whom practices one of the four NMSA arts disciplines as their major (dance, music, theater, visual arts) — got a chance to learn and play in an art form different from their own. Every student attended classes focusing on all the art curriculum taught by NMSA arts faculty — a way of “getting a new perspective and doing something you don’t do every day,” according to Visual Arts freshman Emma Goodman. NMSA staff and faculty participated in the four arts blocks as well.
Vocal student Erin Hanna, a sophomore, appreciated being able to break out of the circle of her own department and delve into different modes of creating. “People can stop comparing departments,” she says. “You learn how hard every department works!”
Visual Arts Instructor Sarah Spengler and Special Education Instructor Lorraine Edge Castillo oversaw a digital media class, where students from every discipline were encouraged to create a self portrait using Adobe Photoshop. Ms. Castillo remarked that many students have expressed interest in exploring all the different departments at NMSA, and Arts Exchange Day is a powerful way for students to experience new art forms simultaneously, everyone navigating unfamiliar terrain together. “They learn they might have a talent for something they didn’t know before,” she says.
Student advisory board member Julia Baca (a senior instrumental student) emphasized the many benefits students receive from orienting themselves to a variety of new art forms over the course of the day. Not only do students familiarize themselves with their friends’ and classmates’ disciplines and gain a new appreciation for the rigor of each art form, a main theme of the day was to bring the school together. The morning began with opening exercises aimed at getting students to meet with and talk to other students they’d never gotten to know, and the day proceeded similarly, with students mingling with both different art forms and different classmates.
“It keeps the NMSA community going,” says Julia.