The art program, run by art teacher Ms. Cha Asokan, starts with Art Foundations, where students learn about the basics of art and get to utilize many different mediums, such as drawing, painting, and photography as well as sculpting and ceramics. 

After Art Foundations, students can go into Advanced Art 2D, focusing on drawing, painting, mixed media, photography, graphic design, and digital art. Alternatively, they can take Advanced Art 3D, working to compose mixed media, sculptures, ceramics, and jewelry, utilizing materials including but not limited to paper, metal, wood, and glass. 

While both classes focus on different types of art, students have freedom in choosing what medium they want to work on compared to Art Foundations, allowing people to do one type of art all year or try out different styles. 

After students finish Advanced Art 2D or Advanced Art 3D, they have the option to move up to AP Studio Art, which gives the opportunity for students taking the class to specialize in the kind of art they want to focus on. 

In each course, students work on building a portfolio which allows them to look back on the past art they have done. 

However, AP Studio Art takes a much more serious approach to student portfolios, as they are normally presented to the College Board for scholarships and they look good on both college and job applications.

This class is an option for students that are serious about art and aiming to earn internships and jobs through their portfolios, which are made up of a 20 slide presentation and constructed in two different parts. 

The first part is fifteen slides exploring a specific idea — one concept that provides the basis for future artwork. Next are the process shots, which show the effort and planning behind the art and finish with a photo of the finalized piece. The remaining five slides consist of specific works chosen by the students that they want to highlight. 

This portfolio not only helps students get into studio-art-related fields, but many others, like fashion design, graphic design, architecture, illustration, animation, and types of engineering.

Aiming to take art all four years at La Salle, junior Danica Glazier decided to take AP Studio Art because of her long-standing interest in it. 

This piece, which is currently finished and displayed in the art hallway, is a continuation of a project she worked on last year based off of the prompt of social justice. Inspired, Glazier chose to create her interpretation of generational trauma because she feels that she has an understanding of the issue and it can be “relatable for a lot of people,” she said. 

Texture is a big thing Glazier wanted to incorporate into this painting because she wanted to show how generational trauma can be messy and deeply rooted in a family.

She achieved this by melting down encaustic wax and using it as a base layer on her canvas. She then started adding things into the wax like broken glass and keys to convey how family history can be chaotic. On top of all that, she did an oil painting with the figures.

In Glazier’s painting, she depicted the figures through the action of people choking each other, which was drawn from the phrase “hurt people hurt people.” She also draws a person cradling a baby, symbolizing how the circle can be broken through love.

Senior Maya Crimin decided to take AP Studio Art because of a persisting love for art, but she was also inspired by both of her grandmothers who were artists themselves. 

The art piece Crimin was working on earlier this year is a pen and ink drawing illustrating her grandmother’s cabin outside of Pendleton, where her family meets every year for a reunion that has been happening even before she was born. 

In this piece, Crimin wanted to capture a through-the-years feel, showing how her family is evolving and changing as the years pass. To do this, she illustrated the place where her family all comes together for a weekend, showing how no matter who comes and goes, she will always have the memories from this fun family event. 

A favorite part of this piece for Crimin was all the details she was able to put into it through the use of pens and being able to look back at it and find something small that she added. She thinks it is important to “look at the little things and not only the big picture” Crimin said. 

While this work is personal to her experiences, she adds that a possible, more broad interpretation of it could be on how important memories are and that people should cherish them.

Senior Lee Papajack has been taking art class at La Salle for two years, but she has been doing it as a hobby since fifth grade. She chose to take AP Studio Art  for the challenge it provided and because of her desire to minor in art in college. 

A piece she recently finished is a drawing of a skull with hands grabbing it. Papajack used pen and ink in this piece, adding color through Copic markers and Posca pens.  

She chose to draw with these materials for the vibrant color of the Posca and the Copic. She used pen and ink because it feels more set in stone, and if a mistake is made, she has to stick with it. The permanence of it adds more meaning to the medium for her. 

Papajack got the inspiration for this piece from her love for anatomy, which she has been fascinated by since she was young. This interest in anatomy was influenced by the challenge presented by the difficulty and importance of anatomy in art.  

In this piece, Papajack wanted to emphasize how similar we all are. “We are all the same internally.” she said. “Inside, we all have the same muscles, the same bones. We are all just people.”

She used this piece to convey that despite how separated we can be from each other, underneath all of that, we are made up of the same things.

Having been interested in art for as long as he can remember, senior Manu Tanzambi began creating art to pass time, describing how he used to make stick figures back in Africa before he moved to the United States in 2011. 

Tanzambi decided to take AP Studio Art to challenge himself artistically and to use the skills to hopefully take a faster approach towards a future career in engineering or architecture. While the portfolios they create throughout this class are generally for college, Tanzambi added that they also show the progression of the students’ work.

In his art class, students were assigned to make their own illustration of a banana, getting to choose what medium they wanted to create it with. Tanzambi chose to depict his banana using moldable metal, foam, and paints.  

“I wanted to make my banana piece more interactive,” he said. The materials that make up Tanzambi’s sculpture allow it the ability to bend. 

A few setbacks he had when working on this piece with colors and a worry that the acrylic paint they used would cause the piece to harden and take away the moldable ability that he wanted the piece to have. 

The inside of the banana is painted to look like a galaxy to represent knowledge, and the banana as a whole represents the fruits of good and evil from the Bible. Tanzambi combined these two ideas to illustrate space and the unknown knowledge we have about it. 

Despite the difficulty of AP Studio Art, many of the students that take the class find it very helpful, with many graduating students using the knowledge from this class in their work and college.

Ms. Cha has students who have taken her AP Studio Art class that are now making designs for companies like Diesel. She also has other students who use their art in less art-focused jobs such as a student who is pursuing environmental studies as well as visual art, making their own dyes out of natural products.

The things learned from AP Studio Art funnel into many different types of careers and college paths, not just art. Besides academics, the intellectual and creative pursuit that can be taken from the class filters into students’ lives and helps form how they think. 

Through the class, the students develop techniques and also group their critical thinking, AP Studio Art creates a “community that forms and everyone helps each other,” Ms. Cha said.