By Alex Bosworth
News Writer
Photos by Brittany Coates

The Dark Horse Art Gallery celebrated its grand opening last Friday and offers art students the unique opportunity to have their work showcased for their peers and the community.

The gallery is located in the art hallway in A133, which was previously used for meetings, but has since been re-purposed to allow students to showcase the artistic abilities they’ve learned in their art classes. The space was obtained from a grant written by art teacher Karen Popovich, with the intent of giving students real world art experiences within our school.

“Part of our curricular focus is the development of an artistic voice through artistic intent,” art teacher and gallery sponsor Kathryn Parenti said. “And the ability to show the result of that artistic voice here in a gallery in that distinguished presentation allows our students to fulfill that whole process of coming up with the idea of creating and presenting it to the world.”

One of the unique things about the gallery is that it operates in a way that is very similar to a professional art gallery. The art teachers plan to change the art showcased in the gallery throughout the year, just like exhibits in a real museum rotate. Students in all art classes have the opportunity to submit and potentially to be chosen to have their work shown in the gallery. After being chosen, students are honored at the opening of each exhibit, to highlight the artistic work that got them to be showcased in the gallery.

“It’s really exciting to have your art displayed in the gallery. Usually it just goes in the front lobby, and people just pass by it, but this is an actual closed off gallery, which makes it a little more special,” junior and featured artist Randall Kraujalis said. “It’s cool for us to have a new way to display our art.”

The art teachers sponsoring the gallery hope that this new display will help students find and gain confidence in their artistic ability, as well as improve their technical skills.

“Each of us brought forth pieces that we felt were significant, either in subject matter, technique, or theme, and felt that the pieces needed to be brought forth and honored as being exceptional,” Parenti said, regarding the process of choosing the art for the current exhibit.