On May 2 at 6:00 p.m. the MUSE festival, or Fine Arts Festival, took place and was led by the art teachers at North who collaborated together. The evening was dedicated to everything relating to fine arts, which consists of theatre, music, choir, and visual arts. The festival welcomed all students, parents, faculty, and the Grayslake community as a whole.

MUSE is the fine arts program at Grayslake North, and the festival takes place around most of the school like in the cafeteria, hallways, and the Black Box Theatre. MUSE involved much preparation and excitement from the students. Some examples of events during the festival included a concert of different bands, a choir showcase, face painting, pottery, and visual arts activities with clay, drawing, and digital photography.

The first MUSE festival took place 11 years ago in 2013, when Grayslake North took inspiration from a different school’s fine arts festival.

“We had seen another school do a full fine arts festival, and we thought we needed to try to get the community into the building and seize and celebrate student art,” said art teacher Randy Sweitzer.

While talking about the events being held, a student by the name of Elijah Bond talked about having a caricature booth, mentioning how they did caricatures last year, and said they might do caricatures again next year. The students who participated look forward to hearing the feedback on their caricatures. During the festival, people could have a caricature drawn of them if they went to the booth that was set up.

“I will probably do caricatures again,” Bond said.

Some students are new to MUSE and will be attending and even participating for the first time.

For sophomore Stone Adkisson, it was the interest in seeing the artwork of other students that sold them as well as talking about how they think future MUSE festivals will go when they plan on attending in the future. They also mentioned that they would even have some art going on display. In fact, a big aspect of why students decided to attend in the first place was because of the art work that was displayed during the festival, along with having their own pieces of art being shown to others.