Students Celebrate Big Art Day

In early March St. Stephen’s students gathered in the Helm Fine Arts Center to celebrate Big Art Day, a statewide event created by the Texas Art Education Association (TAEA) to engage art educators, students and schools in art as a creative force within communities.
 
“This is the third year the St. Stephen’s fine arts department has hosted this event on our campus,” said Elizabeth Zepeda, Upper School art instructor and event organizer, who dubbed the annual event “Big spARTan Day.”
 
“Big spARTan Day celebrates the visual arts and kicks off Youth Art Month in conjunction with TAEA,” she added.
 
For the event, art students and instructors set up a variety of open studio stations in the Helm lobby that students could visit throughout the day. Station activities included the opportunity to create retro Shrinky Dinks backpack charms, wearable art buttons, intuitive scratch art, 3D drawings and free-form paintings. 
 
A number of special creation stations also were hosted by other campus groups. Members of the school’s annual theme committee set up a table filled with glitter stickers and colored pens for making HOPE-themed flags for display in the spring. In addition, Theatre Focus Director Lindsay Brustein and 12th-grade props tech Anna Hicks worked with participants to make props for the spring musical, “Beauty and the Beast.”

While the purpose of Big Art Day is to create art, recently completed student works from fall term were on display in Scanlan Gallery, which is housed just off the Helm lobby.
 
“It was an awesome day making art and celebrating student creativity,” Zepeda concluded.