The New Normal: Back to work in the TASIS Art studios

Since TASIS opened at the beginning of September, 2020, for the new school year, students returned to the art studios of the Şahenk Art Center after an absence of 6 months. The situation is a bit changed in our world and at school, but the teachers and students are happy to be back together to learn and make art.

In order to satisfy regulations for safe distancing and health, plexiglas panels have been added to the Architecture studio, the Photo Lab, and the Middle School Art Room. The Middle School Art Room and the Photo Lab have been the most notably altered as desks and tables have been separated to accommodate mandatory distancing of students. Students and teachers regularly disinfect all the working surfaces, including computer keyboards, mouse, desks, and shared tools.

This means that Studio photography is more difficult and students now must use portable equipment to set up where they can. All the art and design studios must work with more limited work space for art making. The days of students spreading out in the process of creating new work has been suspended until such time that we can work together without masks and disinfectant. Students in Mr. Dukes’ High School Art room have been given their art supplies which they must store in individual plastic boxes with their sketchbooks in order to impede sharing or touching by others. Sketchbooks that leave the classroom can’t come back. This is the level of caution we have to take to try to limit the spread of the COVID-19 virus.

Despite the relative inconvenience and the challenge these precautions present for classes where students are making things and experimenting with techniques and materials, everyone in the TASIS Visual Arts department would like to ensure that we can continue to meet in person, in the art rooms, where students and teachers and work together.

¡Hasta la vista, baby!

Print Exhibition featuring student artworks from TASIS Visual Arts Academic Travel Granada Print Workshop, 2015 - 2020

 Now on view in the Ferit Şahenk Art Center's Horst Dürrschmitt Gallery is an exhibition of student prints from Solar Plate etchings and gravures made in the print studio of master printer Maureen Booth in Pinos Genil, Spain, near the city of Granada. The show celebrates the diversity of student work and the wonderful opportunity that a week-long, immersive art-making workshop provided to TASIS students in the Advanced, AP, and IB Visual Arts courses.

 In addition to individual student prints, the exhibition features three collaborative Artists' books made in February, 2020 and short videos on the gallery screen that show the printmaking process in the studio.

 Students from 2015, 2016, 2017, 2020, and 2021 are represented in the exhibition which features a wide variety of subjects and styles, all encapsulated in the Solar Plate technique. Intaglio etchings in various colors of ink and featuring Chiné-colle applique are seen alongside photogravure and design gravure examples. 

The exhibition will remain on view until January, 2021.

Remembering our annual Venice rendezvous - pondering the future of Academic Travel

Art students of all stripes are hard at work in the studios of the Şahenk Center as the Fall semester winds down. Usually, this would mean that some students were completing artworks begun during the trip to Venice, Italy for our October Academic Travel encounter with the Serenissima. Instead, this year, the week-long travel was canceled for the reason that travel to most of our usual destinations is not allowed or would require self-quarantine on arrival and on return to campus due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

As an alternative, Ms. Natalie Philpot and the Academic Travel team collaborated with the Visual Arts department to offer modified weekend journeys to cities in Switzerland where travel is permitted and where there are world-class museums to visit, as well as modern architecture and European culture to soak up. One group was able to travel to Basel in October, but proposed trips to Bern and Lausanne were also canceled due to concerns over health and safety as numbers of cases rose across Switzerland and Europe.

Students and faculty alike lament the interruption to the historic and annual sojourns to Venice. The same can be said for many of the traditional trips to destinations like Rome, Florence, and the Alps. 2020 will go down in TASIS history as the first year for many decades where students did not have the opportunity in the Fall semester to take their education out of the classroom and into the streets and villages to discover the history, science, the natural world, and art from their studies.

The Venice Art and Photography trips were developed by the long-time Art department chair and founder of TASIS Photography, Horst Dürrschimdt, and refined over time by art and photography groups. In recent years the IB Visual Arts classes have benefitted from visiting the Venice Biennale of Art and taking in the many and varied ideas in contemporary artworks and curation.

Through the summer and autumn of 2020 students and teachers have seen images and video clips of an empty Venice, void of the throngs of tourists that flock to the city, arriving in the large cruise ships that usually dock in the lagoon. The lack of tourist presence has been disastrous for the local economy, but the water of the canals has cleared and the tourists have been replaced by birds and other wildlife.

There is no guarantee that art students will have the luxury of a week-long visit to Venice in 2021, even if travel restrictions are lifted and the danger to health from the pandemic is abated. TASIS Headmaster Christopher Nikoloff has announced that Academic Travel as traditionally offered at the school is suspended and that organized student travel will happen on weekends and long weekends throughout the year.

For now, students in the classes of 2021 and 2022 are the last from TASIS to have had a week in Venice concentrated on sketching, painting, and photography. As the autumn turns to winter, one must hope that the future will find new students from TASIS roaming the walk streets and riding the Vaporetto in the discovery of Venice, Italy.

Academic Travel Photography Contest

During the Spring Academic Travel trips students and faculty were encouraged to shoot photographs and then enter up to three images in a photo competition. ​Over 70 entries were submitted for the Spring contest.

The judges for the contest are TASIS photography instructors Kim Nelson and Frank Long. One grand prize is given and the winner for the Spring contest is senior Lara Hekimolgu for her image taken on the Art History Istanbul trip. The grand prize winner has a choice for their prize - a one-year subscription to David duChemin's online Photography magazine or a batch of Mrs. Nelson's freshly-made chocolate chip cookies.

A similar contest took place for the Fall Academic travel. Below is a gallery of selected images from the Spring contest. More images can be viewed here: Academic Photography Contests 2012-2013​