The Fear Factor : An Artist Finds That Her Teaching Techniques Help Students Overcome Prejudice, Anxiety and Self-Doubt

I teach art at many colleges in the Los Angeles area. Artists have a tendency to sit in their boxes with their subconscious, but I find that teaching keeps me going. I get to meet, interact with and influence a couple hundred students each year. Teaching people from different parts of town, ethnic backgrounds and economic levels puts me in a premier position to make people aware of what being an artist is really like.

Artists are neither stars nor necessarily crazy and suffering. I hope the model of the suffering artist is beginning to fade. Artists can man their own ships and run their own businesses. The last thing my students would say about me is that I’m victimized.

Being an artist is like doing any other job, except that artists don’t really have a choice about what to become. Most people don’t really believe that artists can’t choose, but something in my body and psyche told me at age 10 that I would be an artist.

I hope that I am inspirational to students who come from underprivileged backgrounds; that I make it clear that they can do something meaningful just as well as someone who came from privilege. Growing up poor instills anxieties and self-doubts in people. If someone doesn’t have a base of income, it is a tough haul upward as an artist, but it can be done.

I spent the first five years of my life in the back of a Ford. My father was job hunting, so we moved around the country a lot. He was a tool and die maker who worked himself from the abject poverty of growing up as an orphan in ghettos to being a lower-level executive in the aircraft industry. His transition was important, psychologically, for me.

My father died when I was 19, but as a child I spent a lot of quality time with him, sometimes in airports and machine shops. He had a hard-work ethic and was really into education. Every week he took me to the library for 10 new books, and I can’t emphasize enough the impact that activity had on me.

I was raised in different parts of this country and my family had very little. Having meager means shapes how people think about the world and how they think about themselves, even after they are able to rise above it, if they do.

I don’t think many people who come from privilege share with poor people the same compassion for a difficult life--they don’t come into the world with the same set of experiences. I grew up in black neighborhoods and Hispanic neighborhoods and find it easy to move in and out of different ethnic areas and neighborhoods in Los Angeles.

The beauty of living in a super-multiethnic area like Los Angeles is that you don’t have to go to Korea to experience real Korean food or shopping. You can shop in Little Tokyo and Chinatown. I have been to Asia and things are very authentic here.

But most people in this city can’t flow in and out of different places with much ease; they are not willing to make movement a part of their daily routine. Instead, they maintain ignorance and build myths about people whom they do not really know.

That kind of segregation is part of what brought on the riots. Many people are afraid to go places--they are afraid to come Downtown. They are afraid of what they don’t know. Fear is one of the biggest stymies in this city. I had an upbringing that keeps me from being frightened of places today. If I felt fear in the neighborhoods where I grew up, or when I was living in New York or Europe, I would have attracted bad situations. There is a slice of life available to me now because I don’t fear places.

With my students, I try to promote the values of going to different areas of town; of seeing new things. Some of my students have never even been Downtown, so I invite them to my studio.

Everyone has something to teach, and should teach. Los Angeles is an intense place. But because L.A. is such a large multiethnic community, it is important to make life work here. If we don’t, it will be a disaster.

Teaching is an important way of interacting with people that is not combative and should not be characterized by defensiveness. Cookie baking or painting, everyone has something to teach and there are schools and night classes where everyone can participate. Those people who plan to stay here might as well take on the responsibility of really making this a good place to live.