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From Canvas to Stage: Recreating the Work of Baroque Masters
After studying Baroque artists such as Caravaggio, Gentileschi and Velázquez, students examined how these painters used strong contrasts of light and shadow, expressive poses, and detailed composition to create powerful scenes. In small groups, students analyzed a chosen artwork, then recreated the painting using costumes, props, and staged lighting. In the studio, students planned each…
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JOSEF ALBERS: LEARNING TO SEE THROUGH COLOR
Grade 4 Elementary School Project, November 2025Color is a tricky companion. It shifts, deceives, glows, and hides, depending on what sits beside it. No one understood this better than Josef Albers, one of the great teachers of the twentieth century. Albers spent decades exploring how colors speak to one another, how one hue can appear…
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From Leaf to Light: The Mosaic Drawing
This project began with a simple act: stepping outside. Students walked through the school grounds as autumn slipped toward winter, searching the ground for fallen leaves. They became observers of seasonal change, noticing how time reshapes the natural world. Some leaves were torn by wind, some freckled by decay, some filled with intricate networks of…
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IB Visual Arts × MAXXI, 1+1: Relational Art
Our IB Visual Arts students spent the day inside the living architecture of MAXXI. From the moment they stepped inside, the space asked them to slow down and look differently. This was not a gallery of still objects. It was a set of encounters waiting to happen. Students gathered in clusters, pointing, comparing, mapping the…
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When Myth Meets Manga
The sixth graders spent the past few weeks travelling between two worlds, the mythic imagination of Ancient Egypt and the expressive intensity of Japanese manga. The project began with a simple thought experiment: what happens when you combine a god who has lived for thousands of years with a drawing style that lives in the…
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Where Does the Art Live?
Grade 9 History of Art | Light, Space, and Perception In this Grade 9 History of Art project, students stepped into the worlds of James Turrell and Olafur Eliasson, artists who shape perception through light, space, and the quiet drama of seeing. Instead of beginning with monumental installations, the class began with something intimate: a…
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Restoring Time: The Good Shepherd Reimagined
In this Grade 7 Visual Arts project, students explored one of the most meaningful images in Early Christian Art: The Good Shepherd from the Catacombs of Priscilla. Beneath the streets of Rome, the original fresco shows a calm and caring figure surrounded by animals, painted on the walls of ancient burial chambers. Over hundreds of…
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Grade 6 Art: Reimagining the Cave Wall
Our sixth graders stepped deep into prehistory, back to the flickering firelight of ancient caves, where the first artists told stories through pigment and motion. Using wrinkled paper as “stone,” they worked with earthy ochres, umbers, and reds to evoke the primal atmosphere of sites like Lascaux and Altamira. But this was not mere imitation,…
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Curating Meaning — Grade 12 IB Visual Arts in the Roman Contemporary Scene
Our Grade 12 IB Visual Arts students stepped out of the studio and into the living anatomy of contemporary art during visits to Galleria Uno Su Nove and Galleria Lorcan O’Neill. These encounters moved beyond passive observation, asking students to deconstruct how exhibitions think, how meaning is not merely displayed but generated through sequencing, adjacency,…
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Ritual of Resourcefulness — The Alchemy of the Everyday
In this Grade 9 History of Art project, students channelled the spirit of James Castle, the self-taught artist from rural Idaho who made wonder from waste. Castle worked with soot, spit, and scraps; our students followed suit, creating artworks entirely from found materials: torn card, toothpaste, Amazon packaging, crushed flowers, lemon peel, coffee, dust, saliva,…
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MMI Art Expanded Classroom 