Essentially GFS: Night Classes For All

In this four-week class, students will create hand-built sculptural forms for outdoor spaces. We will sketch ideas and create templates for our different projects. Students will learn a variety of hand-building techniques as they create functional ceramic pieces for the garden—think bird-feedling pockets, herb strippers, and bird feeding stations. These pieces will be glazed and fired so that they can be placed outdoors. Explore and grow your process in the new ceramic studio in the All School Commons. 

Instructor: Heather Chu Marvill teaches in the Middle and Upper School at Germantown Friends. She has taught art for over 25 years. Her work has spanned preschool through adult-level classes, and she particularly enjoys opportunities to work with students new to the art of ceramics. Heather has been the recipient of the Maguire Fund, the Class of '52 grant—which enabled her to travel to Oaxaca, Mexico—and the Faculty Leadership Award. 

Who was this boy, Hamnet? Details are scarce, but in this course, we will explore Maggie O’Farrell’s novel Hamnet as a fearless argument for the necessity of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and a pathway to the playwright’s family story. We’ll explore the novel and the historical record, but we’ll also peek at the film which stands as its own piece of art. Finally, we’ll weave in selections from the play Hamlet in order to understand it in a new way, with the echoes of these more fully realized personas informing our reading. In the course, we can weave in our own deepest experiences and in doing so, feel a kinship with the characters and one another, a sense of shared humanity. 

Instructor: Julie Marren, head of the GFS Classics Department, is an avid reader with an M.A. in English who has taught Latin, Ancient Greek, and English in her 23 years at GFS. Julie fondly remembers first reading Hamlet in her senior year of high school and going to a local production of the play in her hometown of Chicago. Her one publication, From Bean Chaointe to Fear Lέinn: 'The Lament for Art O'Leary',  appears in The Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium, 1993. But her proudest moment was when she was giving a talk at a conference, when Seamus Heaney came up to her. To the small assembled group, he said, "She's quite a show woman!" and then turned to Julie and said, "You'll make a fine teacher." 

What does it mean to be a successful artist? Is success measured by recognition, financial stability, influence, longevity, or something harder to name? And who gets to decide? This Essentially GFS course invites participants into a thoughtful, discussion-based exploration of success through the lives of Black artists whose careers complicate easy answers. Using figures such as Zora Neale Hurston, Marian Anderson, Augusta Savage, Freeman Vines, Thaddeus Mosley, and others, each session will begin with a short contextual reflection on the Artist Journey. We look at their moments of acclaim and obscurity, struggle and resilience. We then open to a broader conversation.

Together, we will consider how race, history, institutions, and timing shape artistic opportunity, and how these stories might help us rethink success not only for artists, but for ourselves. Designed as a shared inquiry rather than a lecture course, this class welcomes alumni, families, students, faculty, and community members who are curious, reflective, and eager to engage in meaningful dialogue. Essentially GFS asks big questions in community. This course offers space to sit with one of the biggest questions: “How do we define a life’s work and what it means to thrive?”

Instructor: André Robert Lee '89, in addition to being an alum and beloved GFS film teacher, is a filmmaker, educator, and cultural strategist.  He is the founder of Many Things Productions and the director of award-winning documentaries that sit at the intersection of storytelling, social impact, and community engagement. His recent work includes the feature documentary This Too Is Healthcare: Bridging the Gaps and the Oscar-qualified and NAACP Image Awards-nominated short Freeman Vines, acquired by Switchboard Magazine. André has directed and produced for CNN’s This Is Life with Lisa Ling, co-directed the Sundance-premiering Meet Me Where I Am, and served as Executive Producer of NPR’s Notes From America with Kai Wright.  Earlier in his film career, André wrote, directed, and produced the autobiographical documentary, The Prep School Negro, which aired nationally on PBS and led to an international workshop tour.

Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike
They’ve all come to look for AmericaSimon and Garfunkel, America (1968)

In this course, we will explore how “America” has been imagined simultaneously as an inspired plan or sublime ideal and as a hard-knock concrete historical reality. In this class, America is also a Promised Land of freedom gently waiting to be triumphantly grasped, as well as an elusive dream glimmering in a violent, nightmarish funhouse hall of mirrors. How do we move between and reconcile these dramatically conflicting visions?  Where can we look for America when it appears to be always running in two different directions at once?

In the American Studies tradition, this discussion-based seminar will explore the symbolic and physical American landscape in search of the texts, artifacts, voices, and places where we can see, feel, and hear what Whitman called the “varied carols” of the nation. Our survey will include iconic tourist sites, tall tales and fables, urban legends and Hollywood movies, WPA photographs and Pop Art paintings, immigrant narratives and national monuments, rock ‘n’ roll and rhythm and blues songs, Looney Tunes cartoons, and both early American literary classics and twentieth-century Modernist fiction. In the words of Tracey Chapman, “Maybe together we can get somewhere…”

Instructors: Rob Goldberg and Adam Hotek often collaborate as GFS colleagues. Head of the History Department at GFS, Rob studies American culture with a special interest in race, gender, and childhood. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times and the American Journal of Play. His book, Radical Play: Revolutionizing Children’s Toys in 1960s America, was published in 2023 by Duke University Press. Rob has two children at GFS. 

Adam is a longtime teacher in the English department at GFS and is also a part of the Friends Free Library team. Adam specializes in the study of literature and philosophy and particularly enjoys interdisciplinary work. Adam is the faculty advisor to Graffiti, GFS’ Middle School poetry magazine. Originally, Adam is from California, where he lived on a commune.