This course prepares students for the newly designed Advanced Placement exam. It emphasizes understanding works in their cultural context and making thematic connections across cultures. The thematic approach to the study of art provides fresh ways of looking at art and often inspires class discussion. When analyzing works of art, students think critically about form, content, context, and function.
Create Beyond Limits
PINGRY ARTS
Unleash your boundless creativity in our innovative and modern arts program, where an abundance of opportunities await, and individualism thrives.
Welcome to the Stage
The Transformative Power of Art
At Pingry, we believe that the best education happens when our imagination is valued and creativity is recognized as a path to open-minded thinking and critical analysis. Our community brings together actors, filmmakers, fine artists, graphic designers, singers, instrumentalists, photographers, journalists, publishers and beyond to form an inspiring, dynamic sense of creativity. This is when deep, thoughtful, artistic learning occurs.
Visual Arts
The visual arts—they affect us personally, socially, and culturally. At Pingry, we seek to help students explore this pervasive media through wide exposure, critical examination, and age-appropriate curricula. Our courses are carefully designed to help students discover their talents and find their voice.
Our facilities are state-of-the art. On the Lower Campus, students work in two renovated studios. At the Basking Ridge campus, they enjoy the resources housed in the beautiful Hostetter Arts Center, completed in 2003. And for Upper School photography students and Middle School studio labs participants, the main campus building is the center of activity.
Visual Arts
Film Production
Filmmaking
Filmmaking has no limitations or box you have to fit into. There are no right or wrong answers, only different ways to tell a story. I can choose the shots, colors, and sounds that I think convey certain emotions, but the real meaning of a film is up to the audience, and I think that’s the best part of filmmaking.”
-Anthony Truncale, 2024 Pingry Filmmaking Award Recipient
Performing Arts
To some, theatre is simply a form of entertainment. But at Pingry, we pride ourselves on using theatre as a way to connect our students to the world around them, helping them to become better people and better citizens. Drama at Pingry encourages genuine personal interactions and truthful moments, allowing actors to open their eyes to the lives of others, to walk in their shoes, and to listen to and respect their voices. As we like to say, the character that a Pingry student portrays onstage ultimately helps to develop their character offstage.
Performing Arts
Past Musical Productions
Pingry students with a desire to perform onstage have several opportunities throughout the year for enriching theatrical experiences. Explore our past productions showcasing our Drama students and their unforgettable performances.
Music
At Pingry, we believe that music is an indispensable part of a well-rounded education. With that in mind, we offer students the opportunity to study vocal and instrumental music as well as music theory, addressing the needs of both experienced and experimental musicians through individualized and group instruction.
We believe that a strong foundation in the classic repertoire not only allows students to experience musical performance with greater understanding, but also encourages them to explore other musical styles and textures. Our performance classes expose students to classical, traditional, world, folk, jazz, musical theater, a cappella, and popular/contemporary repertoire.
Music
Hostetter Arts Center Gallery
Now Showing in the Hostetter Gallery: “Mixed Bag” Pingry Art Faculty Show, 2025
The annual Art Faculty Exhibition is currently on view in the Hostetter Arts Center Gallery through Tuesday, February 4, 2024. The exhibition features work in a variety of media from Pingry studio art teachers including Xiomara Babilonia, Melody Boone, Andrew Sullivan, Russell Christian, Daniel Hertzberg, Seth Goodwin, and Nan Ring.
Upcoming Arts Events
Pingry Artists
Our Pingry alumni are some of the most dedicated and sought-after professionals in art, music, drama and design today. From award-winning ad campaigns and innovative architectural designs, their work can be found in every corner of the globe. Here’s a small sampling of some of their recent accomplishments.
Last spring, Sejal Patel '23 gained acceptance to the New Jersey Music Educators Association (NJMEA) Honor Choir. In fact, she earned the second highest score. It was another achievement in her steadily developing resumé as a skilled choral performer, which also includes being one of just three Pingry freshmen to make the cut for the Balladeers, the School's female a cappella group.
As a sophomore, Brandon Spellman ’19 had trouble locating Pingry’s clayworking studio. By junior year, he was spending most of his flex and conference periods there, soaking in the knowledge of Upper School visual arts teacher Mr. Richard Freiwald. A lover of the visual arts from a young age, Brandon had never been exposed to clay until he arrived at Pingry. Mr. Freiwald’s studio ignited a passion. “Frei’s style is to give you an entire room of materials and, combined with his knowledge, you can make whatever you want, in whatever medium you want—glasswork, metalcasting, throwing on pottery wheels, sculpting, slip casting. My favorite part of class is just getting to try all he has to offer.
Inspired by his father, also a cellist, Caleb began playing in the Lower School band in Grade 3. It was his first experience playing in a group, and he was hooked, he recalls. He went on to perform in the Middle School orchestra, and now, as a rising freshman, looks forward to collaborating with Upper School cellists and playing in the high school orchestra. One of his favorite musical initiatives at Pingry: a few years ago, he teamed up with two friends, both violinists, to create the Ace Trio; they still perform at parties and community service events
When asked about her sources of artistic inspiration and influence, Ariel Li ’21 cites her mother, a dentist, who has always loved to draw in her free time, and her great aunt, a professional artist in China. “Growing up, I saw my great aunt’s paintings around our house. I was just a baby when she came to visit us. She drew my portrait,” she recalls. Today, Ariel occasionally sends her aunt photographs of her own drawings—the protégé nodding to her master
Cal Mahoney’s passion for theater began to shine years ago, when they entered Pingry as a Grade 6 student and joined the ensemble of The Secret Garden. In Grade 7, they continued to assist in the school’s theatrical productions, as a member of the tech crew for Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. When given the opportunity to step into a leading role the following year, as Antonio in The Tempest, there was no turning back. “It was incredible—the lights, the set, the costumes. It really sparked something in me,” they say
In first grade, Josh Thau ’20 was an audience member, watching his fourth-grade sister perform in the Lower School play, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. When he arrived home that afternoon, his message to his parents was clear. “Sign me up—I want to do that!” He would have to wait another year and a half for eligibility, but his Grade 3 debut was a memorable one, he recalls: he played a circus animal in Seussical, Jr
When a visiting artist treated Middle Schoolers to a sculpture workshop, introducing students to materials they hadn’t before worked with, aspiring artist Ajuné Richardson was inspired. Using pulp, wire, and dyes, she invented her own mixed media pizza. She recalls another visiting artist who taught her about larger scale projects—murals. “It’s great to be introduced to the work of other artists and exposed to different types of art,” she says. “I like to sketch with pencil and paper—it’s very simple—so I was pretty single-faceted before. I still love to sketch, but now I have a better appreciation of other approaches.
Katerina Deliargyris ’19 came to Pingry in Grade 6 via schools in Germany and, before that, Greece. A few of her new Pingry friends took part in the Middle School musical her first year, but drama wasn’t on her radar. “I thought, ‘Good for them. They’re doing their thing, but it’s not something I want to pursue.’” Then, the following year, she decided to give it a shot, and landed the role of Mrs. Oneeta Sengupta in Haroun and the Sea of Stories.
With the help of a few friends, Jesse McLaughlin '17 transformed the 1971 play, Cowboy Mouth, by Sam Shepard and Patti Smith, into a dance piece, and shared his staging with students and faculty at Rutgers' Mason Gross School of the Arts Theater Department, where he was a conservatory actor. "It was an exhilarating, breakneck process," he said. "But I found myself dissatisfied. My work with this piece was not over."
It is telling that, while at Pingry, TanTan Wang '16 was not only the face of the Buttondowns, but the iconoclast behind its smooth, high-level publicity movies. Head of the Student Tech Committee his senior year, he was also the very first student at Pingry to become an Apple Certified Mac Technician (he was given a small toolset by the Tech Department to celebrate the milestone). And the first student to launch a drone above Pingry's Basking Ridge Campus, capturing spectacular photos for the School's Communications Office. Thanks to interests cultivated at Pingry, technology and the arts have always been inseparable to him. When he got to Yale, he found the perfect, hybrid major: Computing and the Arts.
A mere two years out of Pingry, Chris Varvaro '17 is deftly balancing the demands of college, where he's a Music major at The College of William and Mary with his fast-rising career as a DJ and music producer. It's not the life of a typical college student, but Chris embraces "the hustle," as he calls it. (Worth noting: he's minoring in Entrepreneurship and Innovation at The Mason School of Business.) For a young adult aspiring to write and produce full-time, as well as travel on tour, he's making a pretty good start.
Their equally outgoing personalities veil very different experiences in the dramatic arts at Pingry—whereas Katharine found her home on the stage, as actor, Allie has found hers behind it, as stage manager. Unifying them, however, is their passion for stagecraft, and the impact that the school’s drama program has had on them
Recipient of the 2011 Award for Outstanding Achievement in 3D Media-Sculpture and the 2012 Brendan J. Donahue ’79 Memorial Prize for Pottery, he was pretty sure sculpture was his thing. But then he realized, thanks to another class with Mr. Freiwald, that he really liked making jewelry as well, and the idea of making sculpture on the body. After many long days in Pingry’s studio and numerous conversations with his mentor, he was on a path to becoming a fashion designer.
“Pingry definitely helped me strengthen my ability and curiosity to learn about art,” she says. “I think I was really lucky with the art program. Compared to other schools, Pingry gives you access and exposure to a lot. It really introduced me to the art world.”
Wanting to enrich Pingry’s music experience for fellow students, in her junior year, Emily Kwon founded the school’s first chamber music quartet. It wasn’t as if she needed to pad a lean schedule. A violin player since age five, she was selected to New Jersey’s competitive regional and all-state orchestras as a first violin player for two consecutive years. She was also a member of various New Jersey Youth Symphony ensembles since Grade 3, not to mention a variety of Pingry instrumental ensembles since Grade 6.
During his senior year at Pingry, he was tapped to perform as Keith Urban’s keyboardist during the American Country Music Awards. Just after graduation, he joined guitar virtuoso Steve Vai on an international concert tour that took him to Australia, Indonesia, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, China, Taiwan, and Thailand, all before he turned 19. And, during his sophomore year at USC’s Thornton School of Music, where he has been taught by music masters Patrice Rushen, Smokey Robinson, and John Fogerty, he appeared as a student musician on two episodes of the hit show Glee.
The recipient of Pingry’s top music honor, the Madeline Bristol Wild Music Prize, Camille is now happily immersed in the New Studio on Broadway program at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Still, she returns to campus on occasion to ask Mr. Winston for his feedback on new pieces. “Without him, I wouldn’t have had the courage to break boundaries and immerse myself in the unknown.”
A "graduate" of three Pingry musicals and three plays, he has told many stories to many different audiences. Now, a performer at Franklin & Marshall College, where he is planning to double major in music and physics, he continues to pursue both his artistic and academic passions.
In eighth grade, Adam Present ’17 took an introductory film class with Ms. Sullivan. At the Upper School, he thought he would take photography, but on a whim ended up taking the Upper School film class with Ms. Sullivan as well. He grew to really like it. By his junior year he was taking a portfolio course with another key mentor, Mr. Boyd, and began working on more complex projects with a friend and fellow classmate. When Ms. Sullivan told them about the upcoming Montclair Film Festival, the two filmmakers submitted their latest finished work. Why not?