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Art Around Campus
Highlighting the artwork around campus expands educational opportunities for students and enhances the cultural environment of our community. Learn more about our campus through its works of art!
How long have you been taking visual arts courses? All four years of upper school
What inspired you to create this work? I was curious about how to portray a sunset without paints or pencils, and I experimented with tissue paper to create the illusion of less solid clouds.
About the Artist: "As a new art teacher at ESD it is so gratifying to see the abundance of talent we have in our school. That is why it is imperative that we showcase the accomplishments of these students. This month I want to highlight and recognize Sumner Wooldridge. Since the beginning of the school year, she has demonstrated an exceptional attitude and appreciation towards the art class and her own practice. Sumner works with confidence in her abilities and at the same time, she demonstrates herself open to suggestions and improvement. She is respectful of her peers' works and classroom dynamics. Having students like her makes our profession completely worth it." - Mr. Juan Negroni, Upper School Studio Arts Teacher
Fun Fact: Sumner often creates comics for the Eagle Edition student newspaper.
Mixed Media: image transfer, painting, drawing, printmaking, written prayers.
Displayed over the fireplace in the Study Commons.
In 2013, Middle and Upper School students worked together to create a mixed media piece to hang in the Study Commons to celebrate faith, hope, and love. The piece is composed of prayers from students, faculty, and staff members of the ESD community. After working together to format the imagery with the submitted text, students transfer-printed images of All Saints Chapel and an eagle onto the canvas.
ESD art instructor Ms. Kathleen Raymond, who worked at ESD from 1985 - 1997 and from 2008 - 2014, facilitated the creation of this large-scale artwork. The imagery came from freshmen and senior art students, then everyone in the ESD community was invited to add a prayer.
“Ms. Blaine asked us to create something that embodies the entire school… something that everyone could connect with,” Kathleen Raymond, one of ESD’s Fine Arts teachers, and facilitator of the project said. “Our process was ‘artwork by committee.’ The imagery came from the freshmen and senior art students, and then everyone from the community was invited to add a prayer.”
Middle and Upper School students met over the course of several weeks to decide what kind of artwork would adorn the Study Commons, and choose which images would be used to capture the essence of the School. The group, led by Jenkins Bender '14 and freshman Grant Hemingway '17, settled on a mixed media piece that would involve using metal spoons and solvent to transfer-print images of All Saints Chapel and an eagle onto a custom canvas. Students collected handwritten prayers from their peers and teachers to transfer onto the canvas. Requests of different faiths and languages flooded in, as students worked together to arrange the phrases and uplifting words around the campus imagery. “It was really important to us that the entire ESD community be invited to participate in the making of the print,” Bender said.
When the images were pressed and dried, and the prayers meticulously placed to frame All Saints Chapel and the eagle, the words “faith,” “hope,” and “love” were printed larger and bolder than anything else. The size of each component directly represents the hearth and warmth of the school.
“It really did take a village to get this project completed,” Raymond said. “Everyone was able to add their own special touch to the artwork.”
Next time you walk around the Study Commons, take a closer look as you pass by the fireplace and see if you can read some of the prayers.
Guay’s series on ‘Transfer’ includes works that are photography and oil paint on aluminum. They have a dazzling surface and are nostalgia-inducing representations of journey and relocation. Guay has moved some thirty times in the past fifty years, however, she has maintained a studio in Dallas which she describes as her creative home.
As soon as we are able, Andrea Guay will come into ESD and talk with our students about her work process and life as an artist, which began with a BA in architecture and graduate studies at Columbia University. If we remain virtual, we will organize an online artist talk, so stay tuned for that.
Transfer: How Did I Get Here
“The art in my series, “Transfer: a Search for Personal Place,” explores ideas of migration, exploration, and relocation; the pieces are born of my transient lifestyle. Embedded in this work is the paramount symbol of economic development, the train, a vehicle that enables the transfer of ideas, cultures, products, and people from one place to another. Collectively, my works define place as a living environment that evolves as people, ideas, and things are accumulated, experienced, and passed along.”
“Each final artwork, a balance of the abstract, the representational, and sometimes the figurative, blurs the distinction between painting, graphic art, and digital modeling. My path to get “here” has been many things: purposeful and unexpected; carefully designed and blurred in my memory; designed and accidental. It's been a journey!”
‘Bald Eagle,’ by Thomas Maddrey, 2007. 13.5 x 22.75" Digital Photography. Displayed in the Foyer of the Swann Wellness Center.
After college, ESD alum Thomas Maddrey '00 became a nature and wildlife photographer for almost a decade, selling the incredible images he took to publications and stock photo platforms, as well as out of his gallery in Deep Ellum. For eight years Tom also ran photography trips to Alaska, taking 6-12 people at a time into the wilderness of places like Kenai Fjords National Park. On one of these trips, Tom shot the image of the ‘Bald Eagle,’ that you can view on your left as you step into the foyer of the Swann Wellness Center.
Tom remembers an ESD much different from the one we know now with our beautiful John and Jennifer Eagle Gallery in the Susan M. Frank building. Tom was here when the art department was within the main schoolhouse building and he remembers a tiny darkroom and a fun and memorable photography teacher, Ms. Janis Hefley. Their art classes were small and Tom speaks fondly of glass artist Carlyn Ray '00 being in the same graduating class. One of Ray's glass sculptures is hanging near Tom's photograph, situated above you as you walk into the foyer of the Swann Wellness Center.
Tom is now an attorney and the founder of Maddrey PLLC, an art law firm based in Dallas.
A special thanks to ESD’s Art Cataloger Janis Hefley for her continued work in obtaining and correlating information about our artworks.
This piece was gifted to Father Swann by Thomas Maddrey in 2015.
The Gill Library features works from local artist Djay Chung.
Djay is an abstract artist who focuses on exploring our world culture through the trials of individuals deemed abandoned by society. He researches situations directly by visiting the subjects of his inspiration for weeks or months at a time, to properly place himself within the atmosphere and to grasp the tone and emotion of the local perspective. His paintings often feature rich colors, dynamic layering, and raw energy. The four artworks on display in the Gill Library are part of a series that he created after returning from Bangladesh and working with Rohingya refugees.
Djay works out of his studio in Trinity Groves, Dallas. He has a degree in architectural engineering from his home country of South Korea and holds a B.F.A from The School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University in Boston. After moving to the United States and feeling confronted by a dramatic diversity of races, cultures, and creeds, Djay became interested in psychology and exposing himself to the trials and hardships of many, through volunteer work. Seeing the opportunity artwork has to transcend the barriers of language and culture, Jay seeks to illustrate emotion and the ‘real stories,’ as he travels the globe to live with those on the margins of our societal awareness.
“As an abstract painter, I’m most driven to explore the contemporary state of our world, and the diversity of culture, through the trials of those who society and culture reject," Djay said. "This juxtaposition highlights our deep-rooted desire to survive, which is exhibited in the willpower of the individuals I spend time with around the world; people forgotten by nations but who refuse to succumb to the harshness of extreme living environments.”
These inspiring artworks will be on display until the end of April, and an artist talk date will be posted soon!
