Fine Arts
The arts program is very large at Williams. Visual art, pottery, band, orchestra, chorus, Musical theater, and modern dance are among the opportunities available to students. The Marching Bulldogs perform at all home football games and select away games. An art show is held each spring, featuring student work as well as the work of visiting local artists.
The chorus, under the direction of University of North Carolina at Greensboro graduate Laura Sam since 1984, program puts on a homecoming show starring George Bulldog and a musical in the spring. In recent years auditioned members from the choral groups have also performed internationally in Italy and Austria. Sam was named 2007 choral director of the year by the North Carolina Music Educators Association. Students have been selected to participate in the North Carolina High School Honors Chorus, most recently in 2009. Sam inherited an outstanding program of choral music instruction and performance that was begun at WHS by Eva Wiseman (music supervisor of the then-Burlington City Schools - and founder of the Burlington Boys Choir), and developed by successors Edgar von Lehm, Erving Covert (who began the Homecoming Show tradition), and Thomasene Sparks (who had previously directed choruses at feeder schools, Turrentine Junior High and Sellars-Gunn Junior High).
The band program has received extensive recognition at contests and festivals over the years. The Marching Bulldogs were the official marching band of the 2007 Shrine Bowl. The band is currently under the direction of James Brewer, a 2007 graduate of the Elon University.
Award-winning orchestral groups have traveled to competitions in New York City and Gatlinburg, Tennessee in recent years.
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Famous quotes containing the words fine and/or arts:
“The Good of man is the active exercise of his soul’s faculties in conformity with excellence or virtue.... Moreover this activity must occupy a complete lifetime; for one swallow does not make spring, nor does one fine day; and similarly one day or a brief period of happiness does not make a man supremely blessed and happy.”
—Aristotle (384–322 B.C.)
“These arts open great gates of a future, promising to make the world plastic and to lift human life out of its beggary to a god- like ease and power.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)