Mill Bay, Mesopotamia and What’s Next

Brentwood is truly unlike any other school I have attended. It would be my guess that you would be hard pressed to find another group of twelve teenagers so eager to undertake the scintillating, yet challenging adventure that is AP Art History. From ancient paleolithic rock drawings, to modern photography, this course uses art as a lens to understand people - or perhaps vice versa - but either way, the year leaves one with a thorough understanding of human history, and all its beautiful, and perhaps not so beautiful moments. Currently, ancient Egypt is our focus, after having made our way through the works of prehistory and ancient Mesopotamia. Coincidentally, the Royal BC Museum currently has a world-class Ancient Egypt exhibit on display. So, almost as naturally as the ancient pyramids were built, our class collectively found time in our Brentwood schedules to visit the exhibit. Before this class, I honestly thought I was the only one who got so genuinely excited about museums, but now I am happy to be corrected. We gabbed eagerly as we drove over the Malahat, with my friend Quin turning to me at one point and saying, “Amelia, I am actually so excited for the museum, you don’t understand.” Upon arrival we all wandered around the exhibit for just over an hour, goggling at the beautiful clay pots and granite statues. It’s one thing to learn about art from a projector screen in a classroom, but an entirely different thing to see the pristine curves in the rock, or see the sparkle of the ritually used precious stones in person. To have our teacher, artist and intellect, Mr Luna, teach from the works themselves, only a few metres away, is truly an enriching experience. After a delicious dinner in downtown Victoria, we headed back our strange campus where the Art History nerds are worried about missing a rugby game. Amelia H, Allard ‘20