FAHS Hosts Annual Art Event for 2019

On 23 February 2019, Fleetwood Area High School held its annual Art Event.

“The Art Event was designed as a fundraiser for Artifact, our school’s fine art literary magazine, but became so much more. After 15 years, we now have our first students bringing their children as participants. My favorite part is seeing the whole community come out and watching my awesome students do their thing,” Fleetwood Area High School Art Teacher Mrs. Diane Chisdak stated.

The idea of the art event is to entertain people and inspire them with new ways to create art.

Ever since the beginning, though, it has taken time, hard work, and preparation. Mrs. Chisdak begins to prepare for the event right after Christmas break.

To spread the word, students start to advertise around the school.

“First, we start by hanging flyers around the entire school, and then, a week before the event, we will decorate the chalkboard right outside of Chisdak’s room,” Fleetwood Area High School Senior Chloe Allison stated.

The Senior Art Quote this year was “Art is the stored honey of the human soul” by Theodore Dreiser.

The Art Event decoration was based off this quote and so were the colors of the t-shirts.

The Art Event always had many different activities for the participants. This year, the new creation stations included: the honey scrub station, rock painting, make your own bookmarks, cupcake decorating, honey-flower pots, fabric bracelets and string art.

“My favorite creation station this year had to be tie-die because my socks came out pretty cool,” Fleetwood Area High School Senior Hannah Kutz stated.

“I loved how the students this year embraced the honey theme; they took traditional creation station ideas and gave them the honey twist,” Chisdak said.

The idea of Artifact is to create and follow your own path, so the students tried to incorporate that into the art event.

“Even though this has been my largest number of student participants, I am most impressed with how they coordinated and inspired each other. The theme was both positive and light-hearted, yet meaningful, which made me extra proud this year with the Art Event and how it reached out and thrived,” Chisdak said.

Overall, the Art Event is a place where people can interact and be inspired by the students and their ideas.

“I will look forward to the Art Event every year, and I hope next year I can come back and be proud of what the future students do. Thinking about what I wanted to do after high school, Chisdak really expanded my horizons and made me realize I want to do art for the rest of my life,” Allison said.