Eight Madison Country Day School seniors spent more than a year planning and creating original artwork to turn the school’s hallways into a gallery for several weeks this spring.
The annual Senior Art Exhibition ran from April 6 through May 1, with pieces displayed throughout the school. Students at the Standard Level (SL) presented at least four pieces across at least two types of media, while students at the Higher Level (HL) presented at least eight pieces across three types of media.
The process of planning the exhibition starts in a student’s junior year, with curated prompts guided by Visual Arts Department Chair Julia Taylor. Senior year is the time for the independent projects, where the real magic begins.
Politics and social justice are often themes that seniors explore in their art projects, Taylor said.
Aliyah ’26 chose the title “Normalized Violence” for her show. Her exhibition consisted of five full pieces, exploring the realities of crime, everyday aggressions and the impact that Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids have had on American citizens today.
“I like the idea of art as a social message,” Aliyah said. “If I have an opportunity to voice my opinions in the form of art, I’m going to take it up.”
“People will lie to you and tell you that IB Art is super easy or they’ll tell you that you should only take IB Art if you’re going into art professionally,” Aliyah said. “Both of those are wrong.”
“I am going into engineering,” Aliyah said. “I had the choice of taking Physics and Chemistry or deciding to do Physics and Art, but that’s a valuable part of engineering, which is to show the creative part of you.”
Aliyah said that IB Art is a challenging, time-consuming class. “I do more writing in Art class than I do in English class,” she said.
Aliyah said one of her favorite pieces was her piece titled “Hunting Season.” In it, she said she explored how socially normalized hunting is despite the negatives of the classic wilderness sport.
“The hunting piece has a love from me because I got to use oil pastels in it,” she said. “This has always been a favorite medium of mine and I really got to work with color and color theory.” At the end, she used an overlay of acrylic paint to scar the piece. “That’s the whole point of it, you’re ruining nature with this culture of violence.”
Phoebe ’26 focused on the theme “Internationalism.” She said her art explored the personal and societal aspects of internationalism, inspired by her interest in politics.
“With everything that’s going on in the world now, it’s very important to, at least to me, explore kind of what America means to other people,” Phoebe said, “or what it did mean, or what it means now.”
Phoebe said she enjoyed working with three-dimensional materials like papier-mache. “The most challenging thing was just not having enough time,” she said. “I think everybody felt that we could make artworks forever and that there are so many different things to explore.”
In her piece titled “Chicago,” Phoebe said she experimented with the use of color. “I really wanted to focus on a big city,” she said, “to show the vibrancy and the diversity and the excitement, the potential of how energetic the city is, how it creates opportunities for so many people even though it’s not perfect.”
