Learn more about our program at www.allendalecolumbia.org
We at Allendale Columbia School and our Center for Creativity and Entrepreneurship are incredibly proud of these six artists and the work that they continue to produce. Congratulations on your Art Exhibition and your pursuit of art in all facets of your lives.
Amy Oliveri, Director of Creativity and EntrepreneurshipHONORS
Honors is an immersive, symposium-style course that will allow committed students to work in a variety of media at an advanced level. Students cooperate in developing the course, plan a personalized course of study, and propose projects with their peers and teacher. Students conclude the year with a significant portfolio of work, creating a digital or hand-rendered sketchbook of research and an online portfolio as they progress. Through discussions, research, and critiques, each member of the group develops a broad artistic vocabulary and critiquing skills and is exposed to a variety of teaching. The class schedule is divided among studio time, critiques and exchanges, visiting teachers and artists, and work with professionals at galleries, universities, and museums in Rochester. The course concludes with each student hanging an exhibition of the work and writing a thesis statement.
PORTFOLIO
Portfolio provides an environment to continue the introductory level art classes and can also be taken as preparation for the Honors class. Portfolio allows in-depth investigation of ideas and build on the craftsmanship begun during an introductory level class. Assignments to further develop technical skills in a variety of media are interspersed with independent projects. Students play a role in developing the direction of the course and in writing their own assessment criteria.
Through discussions, research, and critiques, each member of the group cultivates an artistic vocabulary and critiquing skills and is exposed to a variety of research and methods for conceptual development. Students maintain a sketchbook as their primary organizational tool for visual evolution. Topics range from community-based and collaborative work to historical, cultural, and contemporary art. The course concludes with a significant independent topic chosen by each student, such as a global art investigation, art used as activism, a personal narrative in art, documentary photography, bookbinding, portrait painting, or a video short. Students conclude the class with a portfolio of work and an artist’s statement.
Many thanks to the people who made this show possible. Thank you to our Head of Upper School, Phil Schwartz and our Head of School Shannon Baudo for their support of the arts. A big shout out to Rory VanGrol owner of Ugly Duck Coffee and Jon Olek owner of Black Cat Baking for your support!
HONORS CAMERON CONHEADY
Cameron is a Senior at Allendale Columbia who plans to attend RIT next year to study Illustration.
Two and a half years ago Cameron began pursuing art as a hobby and it changed his life. The mixture of having a skill that he can pour all of himself into and the self expression that goes with it is now one of the backbones of his life.
Cameron now creates his work mostly digitally, starting with monochromatic sketches and often shading it before using color on a piece. He often revisits similar ideas and tries to recapture the same subject once his skills have significantly improved and he gains a clearer vision of the concept.
His favorite thing about art is the way it can be interwoven into one’s life and make it more dramatic and fantastical. Cameron wants to use his writing and art to change the way people see their lives and to reignite the sublime imagination and possibilities of early life. He will be using his skills to illustrate a series of novels that will hopefully live up to these goals. The works he chose to display here are pieces from this project.
Cameron hopes his work can serve as the tip of an iceberg, inspiring the viewer to imagine the depths of an art piece for themselves and how art may apply to them.
HONORS MARINA ELLMAKER
Marina is a Junior at Allendale Columbia School. She participates in the school yearbook and is on the volleyball team. In her free time, Marina enjoys shopping, playing with her dog, traveling and doing different art projects. Her childhood consisted of doing the usual arts and crafts like drawing with twisty crayons, finger painting and foam stickers. Gradually as she got older Marina became interested in doodling small designs and other simple art projects but her true creativity didn’t come out until she was around eight or nine. Marina was diagnosed with anxiety at a young age and had trouble dealing with it. She tried breathing strategies and counseling which showed her that she can use art to help relieve her anxiety. She started practicing art more regularly and found that it gave her a sense of peace and relief
from the things in the big and changing world. Eventually art became more than something to help with anxiety and Marina truly enjoyed it as a hobby. She has taken the fundamentals of art and created her own pieces of work that she is really proud of. Throughout her years of art she learned and used many different mediums and materials. It has taken her a while to get comfortable with certain mediums and materials but she mainly focused on watercolor, acrylic, colored pencil, and clay. Marina chose these materials because she found the most success when using them and enjoying all the possibilities that can come from using them. She found that acrylic and watercolor have been her greatest strength because overtime, she learned how to
manipulate the paint to create dimensions on the painting that pull everything together. She enjoyed using the beautiful colors of watercolor and acrylic to execute meaningful topics.
She always centered her artwork around bright and colorful themes such as the beach and tropical colors. The theme of bright and colorful work is very meaningful to Marina because she wants to represents her personality in her artwork. She explored many different mediums this year. She started the year off with a charcoal self portrait. Compared to the self portrait and still life created over the summer, she advanced her skills by focusing on values and dimension. While using charcoal, she made a still life of a skull. She applied new information about shading and values in order to create a life like drawing.
Marina has three pieces of artwork in the show. The first is Pity Party , cakes she painted with watercolor and watercolor pencils (which she had never
used before). The cakes have a colorful 50’s theme. She wanted to make people hungry just by looking at it. Her next piece in the show is a collaged and mixed media dress, The Dress . Marina used patterned paper, tissue paper, beads, chains and jewels to convey an elegant yet playful look. She was inspired by the Met Gala which is known for broadcasting celebrities with extravagant outfits. Finally, the third piece is a gigantic disco ball. She used foamcore board, acrylic paint, and glitter to give a disco feel. Marina was inspired by the 70’s theme and music group, ABBA whom she loves.
After creating these artworks she learned that patience is key and that it’s ok if your work takes a long time, it just means you’re improving and adding skills to your work. She wants the viewers to see how much she enjoys making art and hopefully understand who she is as a person.
HONORS CAITLIN SWARTZ
“If you hear a voice within you say, ‘You cannot paint,’ then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.”
-Vincent van Gogh
Caitlin Swartz is a Junior at Allendale Columbia and is a part of the AC yearbook staff. Over the past year, Caitlin has received three art awards, including the Kevin Stein Class of 1982 Art Prize, the Dean’s Award from the School of Art, and the Scholastic Gold Key for drawing and illustration. She loves to paint with acrylic, drawing with pencil and collage using various materials. Aside from creating art, Caitlin enjoys reading and travelling in her spare time.
When creating art, Caitlin prefers to replicate life shown in her painted still life and Fatigue , a pen drawing. Although she doesn’t show most, Caitlin enjoys using her knowledge of photography to take photos of nature in her backyard, specifically during the spring and summer.
Whether she was learning how to make a collage in lower school art or drawing a self-portrait in honors studio art, her passion for creating art has always existed, heightening even more in the past years. Artists such as Claude Monet, Wanda Comrie, Alexandre Cabanel, and Laura Hills have always been an area of inspiration for her, showing that creating extraordinary pieces of art is possible. High school was the first time Caitlin began to understand how to express difficult emotions through art. As someone who struggled with anxiety, depression, and extreme fatigue, she uses art as a way to harness and display what she has experienced in her life to the rest of the world. Aside from exhibiting emotion through her art, she spent countless hours honing her focus on rendering considerable detail in her works. Caitlin usually creates art using acrylics because she’s used it since childhood or charcoal because she challenged herself to use it more in the past two years. When using charcoal, she is able to show immense detail with shadows and the transitions for black and white, which is why she considers it her strongest medium. She always enjoyed using acrylics in art and learned over the years new techniques and styles, further increasing her skills. However,
this year, Caitlin mostly chose to work with less familiar mediums, challenging herself to include a vast amount of detail in each work.
Fatigue , Wine Glasses , and ReplicaoftheFallenAngel each show a different theme that relates to the artist. Fatigue , as the title suggests, focuses on the extreme fatigue that she experiences almost every day. When brainstorming this piece, Caitlin wanted to choose an area of struggle that she had yet to show in previous pieces of art and to use a medium that is unfamiliar to her. She decided to take a self portrait and use primarily pen and ink as the medium, despite being afraid to make a mistake with it. For Wine Glasses , she was tasked with creating a still life using paint as a summer assignment for this class. Caitlin chose to incorporate vibrant colors by using colored lights, and aside from the background, decided to leave colors that were side-by-side unblended so that when the viewer steps back, the piece comes together. This piece shows her interest in conventional art with a traditional composition, and a slight twist. Lastly, for my Replicaof theFallenAngel by Alexandre Cabanel, she planned on painting it for quite some time, and this year she was finally able to do so. Caitlin learned about this painting a few years ago, and ever since, wanted to create my own. She originally planned on using acrylic; however, she chose watercolor instead, in hopes of expanding her skills and knowledge of the medium. Caitlin’s rendition of Cabanel’s work also demonstrates her interest in historical works as a theme and basis of her work.
By working with new mediums or honing her skills in one medium that she is passionate about, she is better able to communicate the messages in her art. Adding a substantial amount of detail to her work allows people to focus on the artwork and understand the message behind it. However, including such detail requires Caitlin to spend time outside of class working on her art, helping her grow as an individual and understanding that to produce something magnificent takes time.
PORTFOLIO ELLA HERBERGER
Ella is a Junior at Allendale Columbia School and an artist who approaches their art with adventure and curiosity. They enjoy experimenting with new materials to express their creativity. For Ella, art is not about the final product but about the joy and excitement of the creative process itself. Their work challenges traditional notions of art, inviting viewers to join them on a playful journey of exploration and discovery.
When Ella is not creating, they can often be found reading both fantasy and historical documents. These personal interests deeply influence their work, adding layers of meaning and depth to each piece. Through their art, Ella seeks to share their enjoyment of creating with others, encouraging everyone to find joy and creativity in everyday life.
When Ella is not reading, they can be found swimming, teaching swim lessons, and lifeguarding. They have been swimming on the HAC swim team since 7th grade and on the Varsity team since 9th grade. Ella plays the oboe in our Advance Ensemble, they have been playing since 4th grade.
This year, Ella starred in the Upper School musical, Big Fish. For the last two year’s they have danced and sung in a show choir which is a part of 5 Points Performance Company. Ella hopes to major in history in college and pursue a career in Global Diplomacy.
PORTFOLIO MAKAYLA PUTNEY
Makayla Putney is a Sophomore at Allendale Columbia School. She was born in North Carolina and moved to Rochester, NY as a young child. She loves traveling to visit her siblings. She also enjoys gymnastics and is on America’s top 100 scores for her 9.9 on bars this year.
Makayla loves art because she has the freedom to express herself through many different media. Her favorite project this year was the collage that she is currently working on. It is a piece that depicts her most recent visit with her siblings on a trip to Maine.
Outside of school, Makayla is on a gymnastics team at Victor’s Gymnastics. She has been doing gymnastics for 5 years. Her favorite event is bars and last month she went to States for an allaround competition.
Makayla is also an animal lover who owns two cats and two dogs. She enjoys spending time with her younger cousins and volunteering as an assistant coach.
PORTFOLIO SARAH ZURRELL
Sarah Zurell is a Junior in the portfolio class at Allendale Columbia. She recently discovered a passion for the guitar about two months ago, and once she discovers a passion, she tends to explore it thoroughly. When she started making this piece, she was spending about an hour or two every day learning how to play. When she wasn’t actively behind the guitar, she was thinking about it. Naturally, when she was told to start a new piece for class, she decided-- surprise!-- she wanted to make something about a guitar. She said she felt like the pieces of her life were coming together: music and art, the two things she enjoys the most, could fit together in a perfect way. That’s when inspiration struck-- why not make the guitar out of literal pieces?
To start the piece, she had her friend take a picture of her holding a guitar very dramatically, sketched the picture onto nice paper, tore up many magazines into tiny pieces, and started gluing them, piece by piece, onto the sketch. It took many frustrating hours of the little pieces blowing away or getting torn up or being the wrong shade of beige, but she finally made a piece of art that she is really proud of. One of the best parts is that a secret third passion was coming into play here, her (mild) obsession with Taylor Swift’s music. She used sheet music from the songs White Horse and Dear John to finish her project. She collaged the music into a dock (she had not actually been sitting on a dock on the lake in the photo, she was originally on a regular table in the art room). The final piece exemplified the creative passions she enjoys most in one piece. Sarah presents to you, Sarah’s Version .
