Poly’s Winter Arts Festival closed off 2025 by highlighting the diverse talents of the Middle School students, presenting visual arts showcases, as well as vocal and instrumental performances just before the holidays. Several Middle School arts classes, including the Tower Singers, Foundations in Studio Art, and Eighth Grade Ceramics, had their work displayed in the Winter Arts showcase, and art classes had been working on projects and performances for the Winter Arts Festival since the beginning of the school year. The festival was their first opportunity to share their first-semester work with other members of the Poly community.
The Tower Singers, a seventh and eighth grade vocal group, was the only Middle School performance in the showcase that was not a visual art. It comprises 105 students, making it the largest group to perform. Vincent Iannelli, Choral Director and Music Programs Coordinator, said that in order to select concert songs, “we sing a bunch of music [in class] and we try to decide as a group what’s the best thing to do for a concert.” Iannelli also noted that “Tower Singers represents the Middle School because they’re the only Middle School performance,” and that “this year we tried to accentuate that by doing a sing along with the audience.” The audience, including parents, siblings, friends, teachers and more, joined in with the Tower Singer’s medley of Christmas, Hanukkah and winter songs, and even one song in Spanish.
The group made sure to choose a variety of songs because they “wanted to make a warm and welcoming holiday environment by taking the largest group and making the audience feel like it was a part of the music that was going on,” Iannelli explained.
Middle School students who took art classes in the first semester also had their work displayed at the Winter Arts Festival. Ceramics students displayed pottery from two projects: their textured pots and ancient teapots. Visual Arts Faculty Yonghwi Kim explained that the texture pot project was more about “learning the basic characteristics of the materials, learning basic shapes, and learning how to apply the texture on the pots. [The] ancient teapots used more advanced techniques, and of course the artistic designs.” “When I display their work in the case, it looks completely different than when it’s just sitting on the cabinet or shelf.”
The Winter Arts Festival also featured artwork from other Middle School visual art classes, including seventh and eighth grade Foundations in Drawing and Painting, sixth grade Art and Identity, and fifth grade Exploring Materials in Art. For example, the fifth grade displayed two projects called Sound Art and Fragrant Faces, which involved using different senses to create artwork based on what the students observed. For Sound Art, “We listened to a song as a class and created an abstract mixed media painting inspired by the song,” explained Andre Batista, Visual Arts Faculty. In Fragrant Faces, “they smelled essential oils, and whichever was their favorite, they turned into a character,” Batista said.
Batista concluded by saying that, “I think what’s most special about the projects in the art class is that every project is about social and emotional learning.” He also added that “as the parents and myself are looking at the artwork, we’re also looking at the individual and the person who made it.” The Winter Arts Festival provided a wonderful opportunity for parents, faculty and students alike to admire the artwork of other community members and ensured that each person left with appreciation for the student’s talents.
