Artists Offer Students a Brush With Creativity

The nation’s largest privately funded effort to involve artists in public schools has kicked into high gear in San Diego. More than 80 county artists have been hired to stimulate children in the city district’s 110 elementary schools.

Through the $3.75-million largess of philanthropist Muriel Gluck, artists already are teaching at schools from Torrey Pines to Paradise Hills, using a variety of creative approaches for children--designing murals, making masks, sketching from observation and experience--all while showing how art relates to mathematics, problem solving, history and other disciplines.

And even as individual schools and faculties eagerly await their own artists-in-residence, administrators are already thinking about how to sustain the renewed interest in fine arts beyond the multi-year Gluck grant. Teachers are being encouraged both to participate with students in the resident artists’ projects and to consider how they can continue an enhanced curriculum once the artists are gone.

In addition, the schools program could heighten the visibility of many of the hundreds of San Diego County artists who design and draw in relative obscurity while supporting themselves through other full-time work. With almost $1 million in salaries being dispensed to artists--an average of $16,800 annually for 20 hours of weekly work--the grant provides some with their first steady payments in their profession.

Director Envisions a ‘Paris of the West’

“I want to keep all these artistic people in San Diego,” vows Kay Wagner, fine-arts education director for the San Diego Unified School District and who oversees the Gluck Young At Art program. “I’d like to see San Diego become the ‘Paris of the West,’ and we can help through making these artists better known in the community. . . . Art has the potential to change the world.”

Already, several artists have garnered attention both for the school and community where they have worked with major murals and sculptures intended to boost neighborhood and student self-esteem as well as improve the aesthetics of the physical plant, which at most schools are admittedly undistinguished.

“What amazes me is how well things have worked so far without my having set down a lot of rules,” Wagner said. “I’ve tried to have as few rules from the top as possible, to instead let the schools and the artists decide together how they want to proceed.” Wagner’s only stipulation is that she wants the artists not to function merely as teachers but to serve as role models and build upon the existing arts curriculum, however sparse in most schools.

“And I’ve been pleased at the willingness of schools to allow artists to come in and share on that basis, because I guess I had the stereotype of schools as not being flexible.”

Wagner strongly backs the “studio” approach to arts instruction, which argues that students learn best about art and its concepts by producing it. In contrast, other educators, in particular the Getty Center for Education of the Arts in Los Angeles, prefer the so-called discipline-based method of instruction, which emphasizes art history, art criticism and the study of great paintings.

While Wagner says there is room for both approaches, she and her artists believe that students, particularly at the elementary level, need hands-on experiences. Gluck reserved $1 million under her grant for the San Diego Museum of Art, which includes museum visits and a special traveling art trailer that tend more toward the discipline-based approach.

For the resident artists, each school is proving a different environment, but the teachers at all sites have certain wish lists they hope the artists can fulfill.

Artist Cindy Zimmerman said, “The schools want us to help improve skills of (regular) teachers, give them logistical help in showing how to set up supplies and deal with the mess of materials, and to show how art can build student self-esteem, serve as a tool for social change, help with the human spirit, all of that.”

Along with colleague Darcy Alexander, Zimmerman visits all the schools to explain the program and find out what teachers would like an artist to emphasize.

“Of course, you can’t expect artists to solve all the problems of the world,” Zimmerman said with a laugh.

Deborah Felix has already shared her talent at four city schools, all of which she said presented different challenges. Students at Vista Grande Elementary, where many of the students have had some exposure to art through their parents, worked with Felix on making large-scale quilts. At Jackson and Encanto elementaries, both of which are heavily non-white, Felix carried out a variety of projects in different areas of art.

“Of course, everywhere I try to show how art is part of my life and how it can really be integrated into other things,” Felix said. “We talk about what the world would be like without art, how art can serve as a social message through posters, how art is decorative at times, and functional at times. . . . I bring in paintings, baskets, African art, things that the kids can touch since so many have never touched any kind of art.”

At Sherman Elementary near downtown, Pamela Kozminska is part of a contingent working with students on ceramic tile designs that will then be molded into chairs and benches for the campus. The students draw word pictures, designs and games after envisioning how they would look as part of street furniture to sit on or lean against.

“At first, we asked students if they would like to draw or write pictures to go on the (ceramic) wall,” Kozminska said. “The natural drawers volunteered right away, and with others we had to ask them several times, or encourage them to go beyond simple geometric shapes to something more personal, and some got real personal.”

Like many of her colleagues, Kozminska wants the concept of art considered in the broadest strokes possible.

“I stress the holistic aspect to art, that pattern is math, that jokes and puns and writing can be part of word games or a picture image, that art connects with environmental issues like clean water, which they are going to deal with as adults.”

For the most part, the artists have found teachers more than willing to partake of their lessons as well.

David Beck Brown, a sculptor who specializes in public art, said most artists stress the need for teachers to participate with their students. Felix compiled all of her lesson plans from Encanto into a booklet for the teachers to use.

“The artist-in-residence is here not only to give art experience to the student but the teacher as well,” said Carson Elementary Principal John Sullivan, who hopes for a “dynamite art show” for parents and students in November as a result of student projects with the school’s artist.

“We’re going to videotape all the lessons,” Sullivan said. “Our teachers get some art training in their teacher preparation, but they have nine other subjects a day to teach. And let’s face it, art has been put on the back burner for a long time.”

Teachers at Zamorano Elementary, the 4-year-old arts magnet school in South Bay Terrace, say resident artists can be helpful even to those like themselves who have some specialized art training.

“They share with us a lot and they are not set apart,” Tony Dowling said. “In most ways, they become part of the faculty, . . . and no matter your expertise, the resident artists take some of the pressure off. And no matter how much background you have in art, you still can learn new things.”

Added Dowling’s colleague, Pamela Stahlak: “Even someone with no experience and great fear of teaching art” can pick up basic skills from watching a half-dozen demonstrations by an artist.

“As teachers, we’re all in this business to learn as well as provide for our students,” she said.

Assistant schools Supt. Catherine Hopper, aware that the Gluck donation will not last forever, wants schools to begin thinking now of ways to continue a strengthened program long after the resident artists leave. The district’s restructuring reforms, which allow individual schools to create their own curriculums and methodologies--within limits--provide that opportunity, Hopper said.

“An individual school can set up its own priorities if it believes art is important,” Hopper said. “They can teach classes in different sizes and clusters.”

Already, one or two teachers at certain schools have agreed to become art specialists, taking students from two or more classes several times a week for art instruction.

“All the answers aren’t going to be addressed with more and more money,” Hopper said. “The positive feedback so far from the resident-artists program has to be channeled or otherwise things will eventually die.”