In the Works for Catlin Gabel: A New Arts Center
By Nadine Fiedler
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| The Arts Center as seen from Warren Middle School looking south |
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| A bird's eye view of the Arts Center |
Imagine this: a bunch of 6th graders, on their way to the new Middle School arts studio building, stop to watch Upper Schoolers pull raku pots out of their firing cans in the courtyard. “Can I touch it?” a girl asks, drawn by the subtle green and brown shadings on the rough surface of a vase, thinking about the colors in the drawing she’s about to make.
Or this: out in the hallway, an Upper School music teacher hears a Middle School music teacher playing a CD of Aaron Copland’s “Simple Gifts” for his 7th graders. He hasn’t heard it in a long time, and it unexpectedly moves him. Later that week he starts planning to incorporate American folk music into his next choir concert.
Or envision this: dressed for rehearsal in their flowy costumes, a group of juniors sits in the lobby and talk about Shakespeare’s The Tempest, parts of which they’ll present in the Black Box theater in a few days. Some 8th graders, who are reading that play, wander over. “What’s that Prospero guy about, anyway? I don’t get him,” a boy asks.
All these types of fertile interactions —and many more—will be possible when Catlin Gabel builds its new Arts Center. Planned for the hill behind and between the Upper School’s Dant House and the Warren Middle School, this building will finally unite visual and performing arts for students from 6th to 12th grade.
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| View of the studios and "art boulevard" |
Creativity and the arts have long been trademarks of a Catlin Gabel education, and our students and alumni have excelled in incorporating art into their lives, whether as a vocation or a way to make their lives more meaningful. As arts teachers Robert Medley and Laurie Carlyon- Ward discussed in the previous article, the original thinking and risk-taking engendered by a great education in the arts comes to inform and inspire everything a person does.
Our excellence in teaching children the visual and performing arts has been noted in every accreditation report the school has received from the Pacific Northwest Association of Independent Schools for many years. But what has also been noted—and fingered for improvement—is the inadequate state of the school’s facilities for the arts. In fact, the square footage the school has devoted to the arts has actually shrunk over the years. Many classes are now taught in spaces that are too small, poorly ventilated, or downright inappropriate for the task of teaching children one of the most valuable skills they can learn—the building of a creative mind.
The new Arts Center has been designed to address these shortcomings and bring our arts facilities in line with the caliber of the education we offer.
“A strong arts program is a cornerstone of the Catlin Gabel education, and providing students and faculty with dedicated spaces to express themselves is critical to the long-term health of the school. This new space will welcome the entire community to view and participate in the creative energy of Catlin Gabel’s students.” —Jim Spencer, Arts Center design team member, trustee, parent, member of finance and endowment committees
Plans call for a two-story building just west of the Dant House. Its many features include several gallery spaces for showing both student art and that of visiting artists; a Black Box for small theater productions and community gathering space; music teaching and practice spaces; a media arts room; and a two-dimensional arts space with areas to create and store larger works of art.
Separated from the bigger building are two smaller studio buildings for Middle School art and Upper School three-dimensional art (sculpture, ceramics, metal, glass). Open to each other by garage-style doors, and linked by courtyards, the studios will allow students and teachers to see and learn from all the work in progress and on display.
The Arts Center will be built sustainably, and it incorporates technology that will keep this building vital for at least the next 20 years. For now, the timeline is contingent upon fundraising, and groundbreaking will begin when the costs have been raised by donations.
“I could not be more thrilled with Catlin Gabel’s commitment to building a new arts facility. In his book “Out of Our Minds,” educational theorist Sir Ken Robinson makes a compelling case that a flourishing art curriculum that gets equal attention to core disciplines is absolutely essential to producing creative thinkers who will be competitive in a changing world. A new state-of-the-art facility is an acknowledgment of the importance of cultivating multiple types of intelligence. That is what Catlin Gabel is about.” —Thomas Shipley ’87, Arts Center design team member and trustee
This is the building that we owe to Catlin Gabel’s students. As head of school Lark Palma said in the spring 2005 Caller, “Our dynamic and ever-changing arts program deserves finer facilities than what we have now. We can and will increase our support for these vital pursuits that help make our children more thoughtful, interesting, and well rounded--and create a life of more profundity and beauty for all of us.”
