The annual St. Louis U. High student art exhibit officially opened yesterday on the second floor art gallery of the Jesuit Wing, allowing students to showcase their art from the school year.

In typical years, the Fine Arts Department features art from every student in an art show, which is open for students and faculty to enjoy as the year winds down. This year, as a consequence of the pandemic, art was hard to keep track of, giving art teacher Sarah Rebholz a smaller amount of art than normal.

“There's likely not a piece from every student in the show this year,” said Rebholz. “What I did try to do though, by default, we had a lot of artwork that was left behind from last year. So I did try to incorporate some of that into the show as well. Pieces that in particular I knew students were really proud of and, you know, things that I just thought would kind of go nicely with the work that we retained from this school year.

Rebholz quickly got to work, sorting through students’ art cubbies and taking note of any art that she thought would be a good fit for the show.  Having a relatively small selection of art that could be featured, Rebholz decided to pull from the art left over from last school year, much of which had yet to be featured in an art show.

With a crowded second semester schedule to deal with, Rebholz had to plan for the show in spare time around the school day, working on layouts in between classes and after school.

“It really began to take up all of the spare time between teaching and other responsibilities,” said Rebholz, “I had a couple late nights in recent weeks, but, you know, once we get to this time of year that’s just what’s going to happen. That’s what needs to happen to get it done.”

One feature of the show that was directly inspired by the pandemic is a display of self portrait contour drawings from the freshman Visual Art classes. Rebholz made the decision to arrange the drawings in the form of a tornado, aimed at representing the mental chaos of the pandemic.

With the challenges brought on by pandemic-era teaching, many art classes focused on creating self-portraits, which in turn means that self-portraits comprise a significant portion of the show.

Due to both time constraints and the difficulty of keeping track of students’ art, not every art student was able to have his art featured. Still, Rebholz is proud of the work that all students have accomplished this year regardless of if their art is being featured or not.

“Yeah, it absolutely makes me proud of what they’ve done and how hard they’ve worked despite all of the challenges of traveling between home and school, or in some cases working strictly from home.”

The student art exhibit will be open for the remainder of the school year, and is open to all students and faculty before, after, and during school.