Museum Launches Summer Academy for High School Students
Photo: Brice Batchelor-Hall
This summer the Museum partnered with Sharyse Porter, director of the health and wellness nonprofit Dawn of Hope, and Danielle Miller-Winrow, headmaster of Sprout U School of the Arts in Trenton, to pilot an intensive two-week academy for high school students from Trenton and Ewing, New Jersey. The program’s goal is to introduce students to careers in museums, the visual arts, and the humanities while they explore a curriculum designed to encourage creativity and collaboration.
The thirteen students who participated were selected from a competitive pool of applicants. They worked with mentors and artists from Trenton and Ewing as well as Museum staff to explore themes such as identity, power, and social justice through encounters with original works of art in the exhibitions Traces on the Landscape and Victor Ekpuk: Language and Lineage and in the campus collections. Students participated in inquiry-based discussions and presented their observations about the artwork to their peers; they then worked in small groups to create mini exhibitions centered on one of these themes.
The students also met with artists and arts professionals to learn about careers in the visual arts, including jobs in design, marketing, education, curation, conservation, and exhibition installation. The program culminated in a capstone project in which students applied the knowledge and skills gained to create a work of artistic expression. The students shared their creations—which included artworks, songs, and poems—during a closing celebration at Art on Hulfish, the Art Museum’s gallery in downtown Princeton.
Photo: Kristina Giasi
Photo: Brice Batchelor-Hall
Princeton University Art Museum Summer Academy is made possible in part by the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, a partner agency of the National Endowment for the Arts.