Advanced Studio Art Honors is a full-year course modeled on The VR School’s approved UC record WE2HBX. The record describes an advanced studio course that follows Art Fundamentals, alternates skill-building exercises with content-rich projects, studies art from many cultures, uses a sketchbook throughout, and builds a portfolio in breadth and in a concentration. Our version keeps every project the record names and rebuilds its sources on museum open-access collections and public-domain texts.

Standards. The course is built on the California Arts Standards for Visual Arts (2019). Each anchor standard, Creating (Cr1-Cr3), Presenting (Pr4-Pr6), Responding (Re7-Re9) and Connecting (Cn10-Cn11), is cited at some high-school level across the year, and about seven in eight citations are at the Accomplished (HSII) or Advanced (HSIII) level. Every unit cites at least one Creating and one Responding code. The alignment matrix generated with the course shows every lesson’s codes.

The record’s nine units. The record is organized unusually: its Units 1 and 5 list projects (natural form to abstraction, poetry collage, found-object sculpture, trompe l’oeil, the altered shoe or hat, stepping stones, painting with paper, the school poster); Units 3, 4, 6, 7 and 8 describe the older California strands (aesthetic valuing, artistic perception, connections, creative expression, historical and cultural context); Unit 2 describes studio methods; and Unit 9 describes assessment and exhibition. Each of our units lists the record units it covers, and all nine are covered across the year. Semester A carries the first five projects plus the midyear show.

Honors. The record’s honors distinction is exhibition: all Advanced Art students exhibit at a midyear and a year-end show, with frequent individual and group critique. We add what current honors studio courses and college portfolio reviews expect: a sustained investigation, formulated by the student at midyear and pursued through semester B; written criticism in every unit; and an artist statement. Unit 4 ends with the midyear exhibition and the investigation proposal.

A-G area F. UC expects a visual arts course to develop artistic perception, creative expression, historical and cultural context, aesthetic valuing and connections, with substantial studio time and writing about art. Each unit’s culminating task moves through a plan, a critiqued work in progress, a revised final and a defense, and each includes written or oral criticism.

The five-part unit. Every unit follows the same shape: an artist study, a hands-on studio techniques lab, a critique and discourse lab, a production workshop, and a culminating portfolio task. Students learn the rhythm by Unit 2.