Show Me The Art

Ana

Show Me the Art 

The middle school art show opened yesterday evening in the sixth avenue auditorium. If you haven’t taken the time to visit it yet, I encourage you to do so soon - the table art will down on Friday and the art on the walls will remain for another few weeks. The products of various learned techniques are impressive to see - painstaking and elaborate cutting, bending, kneading, layering and shading. The art is especially striking when assembled - the eye projects all together, or the watercolor triptychs. There’s a power in seeing each child’s work in the context of their peers’ - the full range of interpretations and variations on a single prompt.
 
In making visual art, the process and product are public in a way that they often aren’t in reading, or science. Students’ skills develop in public. Can’t figure out how to make the nose in your self portrait look more realistic? Is there some mysterious error in your two-point perspective drawing? Does your sculpture tip over? Every mess and mistake happens publically. In our art classrooms, the public nature of the process builds resilience, creative problem solving and a non-judgemental community. Art students are used to seeing each other try and fail. They share and copy each others’ techniques. They aren’t territorial over strategies or ashamed of failures.
 
The public nature of art-making is a model for what we aim for in all our classes: a community of learners borrowing from, leaning on, and critiquing each other, refining their understanding all together. Of all the art in the show I like the in-process pieces the best; the ones where not all the stray lines are erased, or not every corner is colored. It reminds me of the effort invested in the piece and of the evolving community of artists in which it was made.  
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