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Cindy Ingram: Hello and welcome to The Art Class Curator Podcast. I am Cindy Ingram, your host and the founder of Art Class Curator, and The Curated Connections Library. We’re here to talk about teaching art with purpose and inspiration from the daily delights of creativity to the messy mishaps that come with being a teacher. Whether you’re driving home from school or cleaning up your classroom for the 15th time today, take a second, take a deep breath, relax those shoulders, and let’s get started.

Hello, everybody. Welcome to The Art Class Curator Podcast, soon to be the You Need Art Podcast, starting in January. Today’s episode is a part two to my episode last week with Madalyn Gregory. We started to talk about the art of Naudline Pierre who is an artist out of Brooklyn. We had the amazing pleasure of seeing her exhibit at the Dallas Museum of Art. We were both just completely blown away by her, the whole exhibit and all of her paintings, so we ended up talking for an hour and a half about our experience with her art. This is the second half of that conversation. Here is part two of my conversation with Madalyn Gregory about the artwork of Naudline Pierre.

Madalyn Gregory: I’ve just realized something that I realized whenever we were in front of this painting, then I forgot and now, I’ve just seen it again. There are not four angels. There are five. In the blue green, there’s the brown bodied one, the red one, the one that–

Cindy Ingram: Oh, I see it.

Madalyn Gregory: Then the fifth one coming in under her left arm, under the wings of the other ones, then once you see his face, you see which wing is his. It’s funny I’m saying “his” but they really do all give off different levels of masculine and feminine energy to me, and different emotions.

Cindy Ingram: Each one, you only see little snippets of their face but each one has a totally different vibe. Like this one that looks like her that I mentioned has a very sort of calm and loving look to it but then the red one, you don’t even see the face at all but it looks more strong and fierce to me. It must be red.

Madalyn Gregory: Yeah, to me, the blue green almost looks childlike, then the one at the center that we just see the face almost is more like aggression, like good anger. I see the same meditative peaceful thing happening with the one, they have the same haircut. The red one to me, it almost looks like there’s nudity already—you’re not showing this to the kids—but it looks sensual. It looks like desire to me, especially whenever I zoom in on the little sliver of face that we can see. Then the one that’s mostly hidden, there’s an intensity there. It almost reminds me of a reprimanding teacher but a teacher that you’re going to walk away like, “You hurt me but you were good for me. I learned things.”

Cindy Ingram: Yeah, that one looks really much to me like the one that is taking the most responsibility for catching us, person. They’re at the bottom, their wings right under there close to the main figure, then very focused, Like I am going to catch a softball on my way. I’m watching it really carefully. I’m going to keep staring at that ball until I catch it.

Madalyn Gregory: It reminds me now of what you were talking about like you’re wanting to control. That’s what I feel from that one.

Cindy Ingram: Yeah, interesting. 

Madalyn Gregory: I love this painting.

Cindy Ingram: Me too. I love that exhibit. I didn’t want to leave. I wanted all of them in my house because I don’t want to stop looking at them.

Madalyn Gregory: I don’t know if we’re too late or too into it but I do still want to talk about the other one.

Cindy Ingram: I think we can. Before we do that, I Googled this at the very beginning but I knew I wanted to wait till we talked about it first but this title is Lest You Fall. I was like, “That sounds significant,” so I Googled it. It was a Bible quote. Here it is. It’s 1 Corinthians 10:12. It says, “Let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall.”

Madalyn Gregory: That I think speaks to the surrender component but also, that is interesting to me because it sounds like a warning. Like don’t be too prideful to get up on your high horse but then also, I mean to air is to be human. We’re all going to do that, so what do you do with it? I think her surrendering to it. Regardless if she feels numb or not, there’s a community aspect to this. I think leaning into that and both accepting your flaws, and being aware enough of them to work on it, I can see that here.

Cindy Ingram: I don’t like this Bible quote. There’s something triggering it. It’s kind of the antithesis of how I want to live my life. I’m going to take off the “thinketh he standeth” because I can’t handle that anymore.

Madalyn Gregory: Fair enough.

Cindy Ingram: “He who thinks he stands take heed lest he falls.” It’s like, “Oh, don’t get too comfortable being happy because it’s going to be taken from you. I think I lived my whole life like that. You’ll remember this. The joke is probably still made but anytime anybody, one of our friends would be going home, if they didn’t say they’re home, in my head, they got in a car wreck and died. There was always this feeling in my life that something terrible was about to happen. I have been spending the last three years of my life trying to get myself to not do that anymore because it’s not healthy. I don’t think it’s a healthy mindset. That’s what this quote gives me.

Madalyn Gregory: It’s interesting because I can see a way to read that as truly like it means well, be aware, take care of your stuff, and all that. I see that other side too, like what you’re talking about but I almost feel, like you said, the art is almost the antithesis of that. It’s like, “Yeah, I fell but I am going to rise again.” That’s why try and try again is such a powerful thing. I think there is wisdom in realizing that you will fall and being prepared for that but it can be taken too far. It can be an anxious thing. It can be a reason that you aren’t living your life but I think with the right mindset, you can almost take it as an invitation to make that leap anyway.

Cindy Ingram: We’re of course, not reading this quote in context.

Madalyn Gregory: No.

Cindy Ingram: So 1 Corinthians, 1 through 9 and 13 plus, we will surely provide some information but I also think that the quote also reminds me of that feeling of you can’t be too proud of the things that you’ve achieved. We’re taught to downplay our strengths, so it feels icky to me too from that perspective but the painting itself is like, “Yeah, you’re going to fall and you’re going to be okay because you’re taken care of.” I think that’s lovely.

Madalyn Gregory: I think there’s a poetry to it too to the Lest We Fall. Of course, we go into fall. The “we” there  too, I mean it makes it not just about her. It makes it about all of them. 

Cindy Ingram: Her title is Lest You Fall.

Madalyn Gregory: Is it? Okay. That’s interesting because that does frame it to me in that she doesn’t know that they’re there but also now, I’m thinking of Dear Evan Hansen and You Will Be Found. It’s like you will be found. 

Cindy Ingram: Oh, I love that. Let’s look at the next one. It’s called Hold On, Hold Tight and also made in 2019, and surely they are related. In this one, our main character is there again. They are being cradled and held by an angel who is like a dark, black, and navy blue shadow. You see a little bit of their face but not a lot. Their figure almost looks like they’re glowing. They’re like one of those glow worms like my daughter had when she was a baby.

Madalyn Gregory: It’s almost like a coal fire.

Cindy Ingram: There’s rays coming off of their face onto the black angel, then we have six other angels.

Madalyn Gregory: No, seven angels.

Cindy Ingram: Seven angels, then one. There’s eight figures in total. 

Madalyn Gregory: Yes.

Cindy Ingram: I’m looking for hidden ones because last time I was like, “Where are they?” In the same instance of the last one, we had the little stars in the sky, then we had the little flame drawings at the bottom but this time, they’re just drawn with blue or a light blue, then all of the angels, except for two of them, are crowded. They’re all crowded around our main character, then they’re all looking down at her. They all got their arms out. It’s like a group hug, then everybody’s looking at her but then there’s some ones on the side that they’re not necessarily but they all have the kind of concerned/loving looks on their faces. They have a little bit more expression on their faces in this one than they did in the other one. We see what we see more of the faces. They’re the same. They’ve got the big wings, human legs, and human bodies mostly, then some of them have this feather texture on them, then the background is just a purplish darkish gray.

Madalyn Gregory: There’s a feeling of the shadows that can’t fire, light will throw. I feel like she’s like a campfire because just the way that the paint in the shadows feels, it has that feeling to me.

Cindy Ingram: She’s the light source mostly but the only thing that throws me off of that is the purple angel at the top, she’s got a glow behind her.

Madalyn Gregory: Because it’s so tight to her wings, I do feel like that’s part of her glow, the angels glow.

Cindy Ingram: I guess when I look at all of them, most of them, their wings are glowing.

Madalyn Gregory: They have a bright line.

Cindy Ingram: There’s some sort of structure, like a fence or a building. Do you see that? No, that’s a wing. That’s a wing.

Madalyn Gregory: One of the angels largely, it’s like hugging almost, at least a few of them, not everybody though. I think I stood in front of this one the longest.

Cindy Ingram: Our main character is in a fetal position. She looks really comfortable, cozy, warm, supported, and loved.

Madalyn Gregory: Maybe it’s because of the fetal position but I think something about it too, just makes me feel like, I guess it makes sense that this is part two from the other one, but it feels like she has been injured. She’s really been put through the wringer. We’re waiting for that coal fire in her to burn out a little bit and cool down. She looks almost injured to me. There’s comfort there but it’s weird because it’s such warm colors but I almost feel her shivering into the embrace and needing to be.

Cindy Ingram: She does look really comfortable to me but at the same time, she looks like how I would feel if I were to cry for the next eight hours, then cry so much that all my tears were gone, then I was so tired and all I could do was just lay there in bed, curled up, laying there in bed, watching some really comforting TV show or just laying there in that state of relief and catharsis but at the same time, you’re still in a lot of pain but you’re just set after effects. It’s like I don’t necessarily want to be her right now because she clearly has gone through some stuff. It’s so funny how I can feel that from her but it’s like, “What is it that makes me feel that way?”

Madalyn Gregory: Like you said, there’s literally rays of light shining on her face. That feels like it should be powerful or mystical. Because she seems so vulnerable right now, and because of what you talked about, it’s like her inner child or her truest self or something shining through and we aren’t allowed to see it. We can just barely see maybe a little bit of her eyebrow and maybe a little bit of lash but that’s it. This is something private. Not all of them but several of them are gazing upon it. It feels like yes, she is rubbed raw by whatever has happened but also, she is completely and totally loved, and accepted by these people. That’s the dream relationship.

Cindy Ingram: That’s huge. It makes me think about that Marianne Williamson quote. It says, “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?’” Then it goes on, which I’m sure you’ve heard that a million times but I know that similar to what we’ve already talked about, like that feeling of, like I was saying earlier, not allowed to be too proud of your accomplishments or too whatever but it’s like, I know me personally have always been afraid to shine too brightly or stand out too much or in entrepreneur circles, we talked about this fear of success, that there is something that blocks us from really truly stepping into what we’re capable of because of that fear of othering ourselves, I guess maybe. I’m sure that shows another. That’s my field, so that’s what I know about but I can see that maybe her falling was the big risk that she took, then she is scared or exhausted or something from taking too big of a chance. Like it was too much, so now she needs to rest for a while before she goes back out and lets it shine a little more.

Madalyn Gregory: I can totally see that. It’s interesting because the background is black mostly but it’s smoky. It’s not as dark as the flames of the last one. You were talking about the accomplishments and really stepping into our strengths, and all that. I feel that really deeply. I know that struggle but I also feel like so much of who we are and how we present ourselves to the world is wrapped up in these things that are both superficial, and not. Even though I think I tried to hide it or deny it, and I still do, but I was the straight A student in school, like the teacher’s pet. I was that person proudly. To a certain extent, that defined me. I feel like there’s a struggle between wanting to be seen for your accomplishments, for your actions, for who you are in the world, and how you move through the world but also not wanting those things to be all that defines you. There was a long time where all the gifts I got from people were like–

Cindy Ingram: Doctor Who?

Madalyn Gregory: Yeah. It was all Doctor Who stuff. I loved those things. I still have a lot of them but we never fully see each other. It’s not even possible, I don’t think, for us to fully see each other. I think that’s part of what draws me to this artwork is I feel like she is being fully seen.

Cindy Ingram: Yes. It’s very much like she is allowed to be who she is in all of her pain, in all of her everything. She is loved, seen, and understood.

Madalyn Gregory: But even then, was everybody there, see, love, and understand her? The fully black angel that we can’t really see face, I mean it’s cradling her, so it certainly seems to be focused on her, and so are four of the others. But the other two, one at the bottom right corner of the painting that is sitting on the ground and is looking away from her. I can’t tell if I feel like the look on her face is mournful, sad that she had to go through what she went through or if she’s not happy that this moment is happening.

Cindy Ingram: Yeah, I zoomed way in on her just now, so I can really get a sense.

Madalyn Gregory: Part of me almost feels like she feels neglected. Maybe she needs to be the one that is being cared for and is not.

Cindy Ingram: Is that the plight of an angel? It’s like a mother. You’re parenting, you care for everybody else but no one cares for you. That feeling that you have sometimes when you’re handling everything as a mom.

Madalyn Gregory: Yeah.

Cindy Ingram: She does look really sad, melancholy when I zoomed way in. There was sadness I could see.

Madalyn Gregory: I feel like she is separate from the moment that is happening. I feel like that could be a complex mix of yes, of course, she needs to be taken care of but also me.

Cindy Ingram: Also too, though, what if this again is all of the parts of her and all angels are different parts of her? What if that’s the part of her that was getting left behind with this fall, like the parts of you that you move on from and that you don’t recognize anymore as parts of who you are. Like the part of me that used to think everybody died in car wrecks anytime they left my site.

Madalyn Gregory: Maybe it doesn’t look the same on everybody but the part of us that’s petulant or stubborn or just cannot be pleased or doesn’t want to be touched.

Cindy Ingram: Yeah.

Madalyn Gregory: I can see that too.

Cindy Ingram: I don’t think I would want five people hovering around me like that. That sounds horrifying.

Madalyn Gregory: Touch us not.

Cindy Ingram: It’s not. Maybe that’s why I don’t want to be her in this situation, not because he’s been crying, it’s because there’s too many people touching her.

Madalyn Gregory: Then there’s the other one that’s outside of our little circle of love. Her expression is much more unreadable. She’s behind everybody else. It’s like kneeling or sitting on the ground. You don’t really see her body. Just her face and a wing.

Cindy Ingram: She’s the same color as the background too, so she blends in.

Madalyn Gregory: She almost looks like she’s fading away. If she’s a separate angel and not part of her, then that makes me feel like maybe she is no longer needed. Her job there is done but if she is a part of her, I mean I think the same thing can be true because she is equally, like you said, there are parts of yourself that come to a point where they no longer serve you. You can let those go. There’s so many different people over our lives, so many different versions of ourselves.

Cindy Ingram: I just love looking at this so much. The color of her body is giving me so much life. That’s all I can handle is how beautiful it is. The colors are so jarring. They don’t go together.

Madalyn Gregory: They don’t feel like they belong in the same painting.

Cindy Ingram: There’s this green with a red over the top of it and there’s this light purple. These colors clash in such crazy ways but I’m not mad about it at all. It adds to it.

Madalyn Gregory: There’s also these little touches. They’re not in the same shade of blue but over the black angels, there’s this star with extra light, maybe shooting out of it. It almost looks like they’re like the depiction of the North Star, old maps and stuff, then there’s in the bottom left corner, again, kind of like our bird and the other one, there’s a touch of blue but it’s the flame. This time, it’s the outline of a flame. The balance of that is interesting but it clashes with everything. Even the style of it, it almost feels like another place encroaching on this safe space that she’s in. It feels like okay,  we can stay here but only for so long before we’re completely consumed by flame. Like you said, if this is like a rest period for her, if this is a recharging period, there is the siren song to stay in that for too long.

Cindy Ingram: This is not related to what you said but it was related adjacently, but about how the blue didn’t necessarily look like a different thing. When I saw this exhibit, I had a really strong desire to go home and paint because these paintings feel so free. They feel like they break all the rules. I feel like I could go paint anything I wanted. It doesn’t matter if you wouldn’t put that color typically next to that color. It just feels like they were so big, painterly, bright, and bold. That’s the kind of thing I like to paint too, is big, bright, and bold. I was just like, “I need to go home and paint.” I didn’t go home and paint but I should have. Now I want to paint again. Maybe that’s what I’ll do this afternoon. It’s like I’m having that urge again while talking about the way she painted it because it’s just so free and so loose but just enough detail.

Madalyn Gregory: I know next to nothing about painting but it feels like there’s so many styles and so many techniques represented and to put them all together in a way that feels right, even though it breaks so many of the rules, it’s enchanting. 

Cindy Ingram: It hits all the boxes of art that I love, which are bold and colorful, big, characters that I can relate to, that I can find emotion and so emotional. Then I love artwork that looks familiar but it’s like this is new. It’s different. I’ve never seen this before but it still looks familiar. Like the Baroque aspects of it, they actually put it with the medieval paintings because it has such a medieval feel to it. It has that familiarity to it. I love artwork with a really complex story that you can pick apart. Everything I love about art is in this painting.

Madalyn Gregory: I feel like we should go back to the question that the exhibit asked. 

Cindy Ingram: Oh gosh, okay, let me go back to it and we’ll read it. I think that we’ve been talking for over an hour.

Madalyn Gregory: I think we have too. I feel like the reason I want to ask this question is because one thing I usually end up saying in these conversations is like, what is this calling you to do? I feel like this question is another way of asking that question.

Cindy Ingram: Let’s repeat the question again. What is it to be expansive, to be multiple, to be contradictory, to live in the fullness of possibility? Oh, I want to write that on the wall.

Madalyn Gregory: I know right. Put it on there. I feel like I almost forgot all the words that were used and now that I have them again, I’m like, “Yes, this connects so perfectly to everything that we were talking about.” To be expansive, to take up your space, to take up your power, and to be multiple, because we’re not just one version of ourselves. We are many things. They contradict each other. Wasn’t it Walt Whitman who said “I contain multitudes”? To live in the fullness of possibility, I mean that’s leap, that’s faith, that’s trust fall. In the name of the exhibit again, What Could Be Has Not Yet Appeared, that’s so hopeful to me because I remember, whenever we were on the first, well, it wasn’t the first but the first Art Class Curator trip that I went on and we were talking to the ones that were younger than us, and they were getting older and we were like, “No, just wait, what could be has not yet appeared.” You are going to be better. You’re going to be fuller. You’re going to be more yourself. You’re going to have more depth and understanding. I feel called to just like I am in a period of great change in my life. I am so excited about what is coming and what can be. The heartbreak, the love, the journey, and the adventures, I want it all, the fullness of it.

Cindy Ingram: I’ll be your little angel to catch you if you fall.

Madalyn Gregory: Thank You.

Cindy Ingram: You’re welcome. I’m excited to watch this, be a part of it. It’s such a good thing because what really resonates with me from that quote is like, “To be multiple, to be contradictory,” I have always had this sort of black or white thinking like, “This is right. This is wrong.” I’ve been trying to accept that it’s not the way the world is. There are layers. There’s not black or white. There’s not just gray. There’s every color. It’s not just even a spectrum of black to white. It’s up and down, and left and right, and all over. I struggled with things like, “Well, how can I be as much of a lover and supporter of science as I am but also still be spiritual? How can I be this and that, and this and that.” In my head, I’m like, “Well, you can only be one or the other because they’re contradictory. It doesn’t work.” But you can be a contradiction. I think I still am learning that lesson every day, that is okay. This is me. I’m constant like these external forces. We were talking about this in More Wonder, Please. I’m acting like we just talked about this podcast. Go back and listen to that one but I have all these feelings of guilt all the time about expectations that don’t even exist of me. It feels really exciting to fully try to embody this question of what is it to be expansive, to be multiple, to be contradictory, to live in the fullness of possibility. That feels really exciting to me too.

Madalyn Gregory: Oh yeah, just open to whatever life brings. Surrender.

Cindy Ingram: Surrender again. That’s good. Okay, that was a great conversation about Naudline Pierre.

Madalyn Gregory: That was fun.

Cindy Ingram: I enjoyed it. Hopefully, you enjoyed listening to it as well. I hope this encourages you, listening, to go out and look at some art for yourself because you need art. That is the name of this podcast now. Thank you so much for joining me again today, Madalyn. 

Madalyn Gregory: Always.

Cindy Ingram: Thank you all for listening. We will see you again another day. 

Madalyn Gregory: Bye.

Cindy Ingram: Have you learned all the lessons art has to teach you? Of course not. Art always has something more to teach us about ourselves, about the world, about where we’ve been, and where we’re going. Art is more than a creative outlet. It’s a powerful tool that can teach you about yourself and help you recognize your path in life. If you want to learn life lessons through art, I invite you to join our Art Connection Circle. In the Circle, you’ll learn how to find your truest self by looking at art and connecting with a community of passionate, thoughtful individuals. Together, we explore the human condition and find answers to our heart’s deepest questions inside of brushstrokes, captured in photographs and in conversations with one another. Learn more about what the Art Connection Circle has to offer you and how to join at artclasscurator.com/circle.

• More Wonder, Please podcast
• Art Connection Circle

Be a Podcast Guest: Submit a Voice Memo of Your Art Story (Scroll to the bottom of the page to submit your story.)

Cindy Ingram: Hello and welcome to The Art Class Curator Podcast. I am Cindy Ingram, your host and the founder of Art Class Curator, and The Curated Connections Library. We’re here to talk about teaching art with purpose and inspiration from the daily delights of creativity to the messy mishaps that come with being a teacher. Whether you’re driving home from school or cleaning up your classroom for the 15th time today, take a second, take a deep breath, relax those shoulders, and let’s get started.. 

Hello, everybody. It’s Cindy Ingram. Thank you for joining me for The Art Class Curator Podcast. Today on the podcast, I have Madalyn Gregory with me again to talk about another work of art. I love talking about works of art with Madalyn, so we ended up talking for an hour and a half when we recorded this episode, so I decided to break the episode up into two parts. Today, we have part one, then join me next Monday for the second half of our conversation. Another thing that I wanted to bring up, I mentioned on last week’s episode that we are changing the name of the podcast. Right now, it is The Art Class Curator Podcast. Starting in January of 2022, it will be called You Need Art. I’ll explain a little bit more about the reason for the change on the first official episode of You Need Art but until then, just know that when you see it show up in your podcast subscriptions, you’ll see a new name starting in January. Just a warning there, we will be You Need Art. All right, here is my conversation with Madalyn Gregory about the artwork of the artist, Naudline Pierre.

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to The You Need Art Podcast, formerly The Art Class Curator Podcast. My name is Cindy Ingram. Here, I have with me Madalyn Gregory to have another art conversation. Hello, Madalyn.

Madalyn Gregory: Hello. 

Cindy Ingram: Before we start talking about the artwork that we’re going to talk about today, we have some awesome news that we want to share with you. We have been friends for a very long time, probably, how old is your youngest kid, 10? 

Madalyn Gregory: 11.

Cindy Ingram: We’ve been friends for 11 years.

Madalyn Gregory: I was pregnant with my youngest.

Cindy Ingram: Yeah, that’s how I always can easily know. We have really enjoyed working together the last few years and we’ve been enjoying doing these podcasts for you where we talk about art, so we have decided to branch off from this podcast and start our own podcast with just the two of us. We’re calling it More Wonder, Please.

Madalyn Gregory: Yes. I’m so excited because I just love having conversations with you and all the weird tangents that we go down, and connections that we make. It’s always such a delight to do that with art, but to be able to do that and jump off from other places is really exciting too. 

Cindy Ingram: She still will be a regular on this podcast. We talk about not just art over there. We’ve had a few episodes we’ve recorded already and more to come but we have what would we do if we were God for a day and stuff like that. Just random things we were wondering about. We got the name from when I was reading Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert. She was writing about wonder at one point in the book and she said, “More Wonder, Please,” in it. That line really stuck with me. We started to talk about podcast titles and that came up but I think it really does encapsulate everything that we want to achieve in that podcast, which is more wonder. 

Madalyn Gregory: It truly does. It feels very full circle life moment for me too, just because a word that I’ve used for years in my own writing is wanderlust, which is usually wander with an A for loving to travel and experiencing new places but I always used it with the O because I love wondering about things, and being excited and enchanted by the universe.

Cindy Ingram: You can check that out at any podcast player. Just type in More Wonder, Please and you will find us. Today, we are going to do another art conversation with you. We have decided to choose one that we recently saw in person. We were both just totally delighted by this exhibit that we happened upon and want to share with you. The artist is Naudline Pierre. Me and Madalyn go to the art museum almost every other week. Our plan, like last Friday, was to go to the Crow Museum, then Nasher in Dallas. We just happened to park at the Dallas Museum of Art and we just looked on our phones to see what they had. It wasn’t even the plan to go there. We saw this exhibit and decided we needed to go there too, so we did three art museums in one day. This was definitely the highlight for me. Actually, there was a lot of good art that day.

Madalyn Gregory: It really was. 

Cindy Ingram: Oh, really good. Let’s do it. We didn’t even pick one artwork. There was an exhibit room of probably maybe 10 paintings in that room.

Madalyn Gregory: Yeah, I think it was exactly 10.

Cindy Ingram: Then there was one in another area but really incredible. Do you want to just share your experience of walking in and what you noticed?

Madalyn Gregory: Like a lot of exhibits that had the artist’s name and some text about the exhibit outside, which usually I might skim it and if I’m interested, I’ll come back to it because I don’t want to be influenced but I was so enraptured by what she had put, then also, we got a tiny preview of the art before, so I was like, “Yeah, I want to know.” The exhibit was called What Could Be Has Not Yet Appeared, which I could talk about that title for a long time. 

Cindy Ingram: Totally.

Madalyn Gregory: I don’t know if I necessarily want to read it even though it is really good. I took a picture of it.

Cindy Ingram: I think the first line is worth reading, which is, “What is it to be expansive, to be multiple, to be contradictory, to live in the fullness of possibility?” Oh, so good.

Madalyn Gregory: The right words in the right order. So good. Since we’re not talking about a specific artwork, all of the artworks feel, and I believe, were intended to be very narratively connected. There’s familiar faces in several of the paintings but there’s a lot of nudity, I will say that off the bat. But there’s one human figure in particular that appears in many of the paintings that is nude and in different colors. They’re all very bright. Some paintings were very bright, almost neon colors included and others were darker. Some had both.

Cindy Ingram: Dude, you’re doing a fabulous job here.

Madalyn Gregory: There was the human character but then there were also a lot of winged characters presented in these paintings. I guess I would say the closest analog for most of them were angels, though I feel like some of them looked more bird-like or perhaps like guardians. But her use of light is just fantastic. I feel like we’re going to have to at least zero in on the specifics to really talk about them but they all, maybe you can help me with the language here but all of the backgrounds or the settings were nondescript. Some of them were almost alien or otherworldly but it gave me a feeling of a spirit world I’d say.

Cindy Ingram: To me, they seem very much like a new version of a Baroque painting, like Italian Baroque, looking like Caravaggio or Gentileschi. They’re very close. That you don’t have a lot of background. They’re really intimate and cropped. They have really dramatic postures, emotions, and poses. They have a religious bent or a spiritual bent. I get more spiritual from this than God but the Baroque was all about Catholicism, then you also have, like in Baroque, a dramatic lighting, like highlights on some people. Some of the figures almost feel like they’re glowing, which is something that they did in Baroque, then the backgrounds are really dark and plain, which is what they did in Baroque too. I at the time did not see the Baroque thing at all but now that I guess because I have a computer monitor and I have six of the images all together, I’m like, “Oh shoot, these are Baroque but with neon colors and a little bit less detail. 

Madalyn Gregory: There’s some pieces too, whenever you’re talking about Baroque where around the angel figures or even around the human, on one of them, there’s like the golden halo effect happening.

Cindy Ingram: Another thing they did in Baroque, not to give you a full art history lesson here, but one of the reasons why Baroque art is the way it is, is because they had the protestant reformation. The Catholics were trying to pull people back in through the use of the art, so they would put everyday people into their paintings rather than beautiful renaissance people, like you would see before. That’s what I felt when I looked at these paintings. I felt like I was hurt. I felt like the main figure that was in all of them, I saw myself in there. That was one of the goals of Baroque painting too is to put the viewer into the painting and give the viewer these experiences to move them emotionally so that then they would be Catholic but that’s probably not the artist’s goal.

Madalyn Gregory: I think it might be related to not the religious aspect of it but the humanity aspect of it. Seeing everyday people, even I would say maybe marginalized people put in these spiritual settings where they’re being cared for when they’re going through trials and tribulations. That feels very relevant.

Cindy Ingram: They’re so cool. I think we probably should pick one because it’s really hard to talk about them as a whole.

Madalyn Gregory: It is.

Cindy Ingram: Do you have a favorite that you want to talk about?

Madalyn Gregory: That’s really hard because I think I have three, four favorites.

Cindy Ingram: Me too.

Madalyn Gregory: I think maybe the ones with more characters in them are a little more open for interpretation there. I think the one I was most initially drawn to was Closer Still but then I also was really drawn to Hold On, Hold Tight. I’m sorry these pictures are not in the correct order. I’m going to just describe them. The one where the figure is being carried by the completely black angel figure.

Cindy Ingram: That one is Hold On, Hold Tight.

Madalyn Gregory: Then the one where the human figure is falling and all of the creatures, it looks like perhaps a rescue.

Cindy Ingram: I love those two. I think they’re good to talk about. I think they’re the same picture at two different times. Let’s start with the one with our falling. The artwork that we’ve just chosen, then you’ve got to see our process there, it’s called Lest You Fall from 2019. Again, the artist is Naudline Pierre. In this painting, we have a woman who is like a bright orange woman who’s nude upside down but falling. Her head is at the bottom and her feet are in the air. She’s falling and at the bottom, there’s these black flames and also outlines of flames in a pink background, like a neon pink, neon yellow, orange, and green, then there are flying angels around her, what look like angels. They’re people’s bodies but with wings. It looks like they’re catching her. There are four different angels and of different colors, then there’s also a bird who is grabbing her hand as well. From the bird, there’s this little blue.

Madalyn Gregory: Almost like an upside down crown.

Cindy Ingram: It’s like light rays but they’re blue. Did I describe it good enough? Did I miss anything?

Madalyn Gregory: I think you did a grand job. I will say composition wise, I mean the human falling is definitely front and center but the angels are almost coming in as like a curve from the top left corner of the painting, and surrounding down the right side of her body.

Cindy Ingram: It’s like one big swoosh. It’s like she’s falling but you don’t get the feeling that she’s falling quickly. It feels like the state of her fall, it’s like a feather wafting down to the ground. It’s almost like she was falling but then they caught her and now, they’re gently escorting her to the ground. That’s what I feel.

Madalyn Gregory: I was going to ask you what you saw because I feel like if I look at different areas, I feel differently about how fast she’s going because the background colors feel like whenever you put a picture on Instagram—this is weird—but if you put it on the stories, it’ll spread whatever color is at the edge of the story. The angels are glowing off and that’s the background color. Whenever I look at the green into yellow area, it almost feels like the ground to me. Especially because the angel in the top left corner has a shadow beneath them, so it feels like they just caught her in the nick of time to me. But then looking more at the orange and the pink areas, it feels like she still has a long way to go. I do get that slow descent feeling from it.

Cindy Ingram: I can see that. I hadn’t thought of that as the ground but now I can see that.

Madalyn Gregory: It’s very nebulous because it really is just color. There’s no landmarks or anything. The only other thing going on is the flames. They clearly look like flames to me, the black in both the drawings but also, it reminds me of hair tendrils upside down. 

Cindy Ingram: Oh, yeah.

Madalyn Gregory: I am very curious. Is she falling toward danger? What is she falling toward? I want to know what happened.

Cindy Ingram: When I saw this at the museum, I don’t think I saw the flames. This feels like new information, the flames do, and I’m like, “Did I just completely miss that?” Another thing I just noticed too is some of the angels are blending into the background. They’re almost transparent. The leg of one of them, you can see the background behind it, then this other one too, it’s like they’re not there and they’re there at the same time, which is really cool. 

Madalyn Gregory: There’s a quality to it that almost looks unfinished I think too, because the angel that’s doing most of the catching, the whole body and wings are brown but then the face, like you said, is transparent and you see the orange coming through from the background underneath, then the flames that are not black, just look drawn there. I’m just in wonder of it all at the moment but I have a lot of theories about the benevolence or not of the winged creatures and of that bird especially.

Cindy Ingram: My initial feeling when I saw this was this feeling of the invisible support of the universe. It felt very woo to me. I had a coach one time who said, “Everything is fine, everything has always been fine, and everything will be fine.” He would say that and I would always take a lot of comfort from that because yes, bad things happened in the past or whatever but I’m fine. I ended up okay, then I’m going to be fine, but then it’s like–

Madalyn Gregory: It’s also not.

Cindy Ingram: That’s the thing. It’s like, “Yeah, but what if there are things that are not fine?” There are those stories that go untold, like the people who died because the things weren’t fine, what about them? They’re not fine. It won’t always be fine. In my head, when I was looking at this painting, I kept going back and forth, and fighting myself on that. It’s funny, I think that’s probably why I didn’t want to see the flames because I just wanted her to be fine.

Madalyn Gregory: I think perspective matters a lot whenever you’re talking about something like that because we have such a limited scope of perception in our lives as humans, which is something we talked about on More Wonder, Please. It does, like on a cosmic level, “Is everything okay?” We get to see such a snapshot if even that. I feel that incongruity with you because it both feels true and feels like an incredibly privileged cop-out.

Cindy Ingram: It’s like, “Where do you draw the line?” I think probably the answer is that I just allow myself to be comforted by the notion that the universe has my back and maybe try not to think about it too hard, then it’s like, “I don’t know. That’s not good either.”

Madalyn Gregory: Goodness knows, complacency can be a dangerous thing. It’s interesting to me that is where you went. Just proving again that art meets you where you are. To me, this very much felt like somebody that her body is relaxed, almost looking. Even though she’s upside down, her legs are flying, and there’s even flames coming off of her foot, there’s a gracefulness to it and almost like an acceptance to her position.

Cindy Ingram: Like a surrender.

Madalyn Gregory: Yeah, like a surrender. We always have this conversation every time we look at art with the person of some sort in it. I’m not entirely convinced it’s a woman. They have I guess the pubic area that you would most closely associate with cis women but then also, the chest is flat and the haircut is short. I think especially whenever you’re playing with themes of the divine, the universe, and guardian angels, if you want to call them that, I feel like I just see the personhood of this person.

Cindy Ingram: Because when I said woman, in my head, I was battling back and forth because I was like, “Well, I don’t know.” But I think what I was responding to, especially as all of her paintings feel like they’re about the same person, it looks like the same person is on all of them. In some of them, her chest isn’t flat but then some of them, it is. Her hair is short in all of them.

Madalyn Gregory: But I think it also gets back to what you were saying about inserting everyday people into celestial settings. I feel like I connect with that person, so it feels more like me. I’m a woman but I feel like if a man was standing in front of this and they were open to it, they could see themselves in that person too.

Cindy Ingram: That gives me a whole other side conversation, which we probably don’t have to have right now, but how women in society are used to putting themselves into the role of the man because for a long time, men were always protagonists in movies, TV shows, and books. We’re used to doing that. I think that’s one of the reasons why movies keep being put out toward men are the main characters because men can’t imagine seeing themselves as a woman but then women are just used to it the other way because we were forced to.

Madalyn Gregory: I think that definitely happens with race too and why the conversations around representation are so important. I think that’s definitely a piece of the art too based on what the exhibit said. It is really interesting just to go into pop culture for a minute. Like whenever the new Star Wars movies came out, that was a big thing on the internet. A lot of fans of The Originals, let’s just say they were men for the most part, were very upset that it was a female-led story that was going to come out. I see that over and over again. The people that want to get upset about that do seem to just have a failure of imagination in putting themselves in the role of what it might be like not to be you.

Cindy Ingram: I feel like that could be a whole other thing. Maybe that’s our part two on More Wonder, Please. We’ll let you know if that happens.

Madalyn Gregory: I want to talk about the bird.

Cindy Ingram: Yeah.

Madalyn Gregory: To me, I don’t know a lot about birds but it looks like a dove.

Cindy Ingram: I don’t either but I agree with you.

Madalyn Gregory: Doves are represented in a lot of art and things. That looks like a dove to me. I could be wrong. They’re usually symbols of peace, purity, and stuff like that. I really don’t know how to read what this bird is doing because it’s not sitting on her hand. It’s floating down with her. The wings are outstretched. To me, I almost wonder if the blue streaks underneath the bird are representing that it’s not flying. It’s coming down. It’s captured as well but the beak is on one of her fingers. There’s like a little spark. It’s lighter than the rest of her skin tone. I just have the picture and I’m having to zoom in quite a lot.

Cindy Ingram: I didn’t notice that.

Madalyn Gregory: But it almost looks like a cross or maybe a cut. The skin tone is different from the rest of the orange, yellow that is happening. Part of me wants to interpret that as almost like a gift or something that the bird is giving to her. Part of me feels like it’s a wound. I keep going back to that scene in Harry Potter & The Chamber Of Secrets where Fawkes, the phoenix flies down, cries on his knees, so he gets healed like, “Is this a healing thing?” I see a lot of duality in the entire artwork really. I feel like maybe that is representing whatever wound put her into free fall and the bird is coming to heal it maybe.

Cindy Ingram: Wow, I did not see that spark thing at all or the little white thing on her finger. That’s really cool. I zoomed way in. As a reminder, we will put the image of this artwork up in the show notes, so you can see it for yourself but don’t look at it while you’re driving, if you’re listening to it while you’re driving. To me, it looks like the bird is grabbing her finger with its beak and helping keep her from falling.

Madalyn Gregory: Oh, I like that too.

Cindy Ingram: I think that the blue under the bird, to me, gives it a holier look. It’s like a divine bird but also I think you’re right. It creates a little bit of an upward momentum. It shows that the bird is trying to pull up rather than go down. I think it’s also just balanced. There’s blue there, then there’s blue on the other side of the painting. There was no blue on the left side of the painting. It looks weird. There’s also a functional thing to it, which I love about art too. It’s just like if that blue wasn’t there,  the whole painting would be thrown off balance. 

Madalyn Gregory: I love that interpretation that the bird is trying to pull her up. I think it’s twofold. It’s because here are these four other winged creatures coming in to grab her and to hold her, then this little bird is not going to make that much of a difference but is still doing what it can. That is incredibly powerful to me because we’re all just one person in this world but also, if that is what the bird is doing, then the bird is cutting her hand. Again, I’m seeing duality because it’s so easy in life when you’re trying to help to end up hurting.

Cindy Ingram: Then what level of hurting is acceptable, you do have to get hurt to save yourself. To be human is to have pain.

Madalyn Gregory: To love is to give someone the ability to hurt you, I mean the other thing too but it is that.

Cindy Ingram: I think it’s a trade-off. The person doesn’t get saved or the person gets a little painful finger, a scar from the situation, then they’ll have a scar on their finger.

Madalyn Gregory: Part of the reason that I think we were drawn to these images on the whole was because that is a universal experience to feel like you are in free fall to be hurt even by someone you love. It’s a beautiful thought that there are these creatures or the universe or God or whoever is out there to help you and to be there for you but at the same time, can she see them? Can she feel them catching her? I think there’s a beauty in that but that is really lonely. If that is all you have, that is not enough. We still need each other. We still need the real world or the physical world I guess.

Cindy Ingram: I think that she doesn’t see them because I’m looking at some of the other ones, which I’ll again put on the show notes on artclasscurator.com. She’s not looking at them. They’re interacting with her and she’s not necessarily interacting with them in most cases I think. 

Madalyn Gregory: She is being held, several of them, but the only ones were at least to me, it looks like the only one that I feel like she’s knowingly holding on, the other person doesn’t have wings.

Cindy Ingram: What I’m doing in my head right now, and I don’t know how to just say this or ask this or anything, but I guess what I’m trying to do is put myself into the position of someone in this situation who is falling. I’m trying to remember times in my life or whatever that I felt this way, like what I imagine that to feel like.

Madalyn Gregory: It’s hard to surrender.

Cindy Ingram: It feels so lonely. This is one of those times where my body can feel it but I can’t explain it. It’s like I’m having a hard time getting these words out because that just happens to me sometimes where it’s just like, “Oh, I can feel this but I can’t put words to it.” But to me, it’s like when you’re in that that state, when things are collapsing and things are really hard, and maybe you’re going through a depression or just something really hard in your life and it feels so isolating but then it’s really hard to me personally to feel like I am being supported. But I see other people. The guy that keeps popping in my head is one of my friends from high school who died of cancer when he was in his late 20s. Before he passed, we were Facebook friends and I would see he posted a lot of religious things. He was really deeply connected to his faith during that time in his life. He always was a religious person but during his cancer, that was such something that kept him going. That’s what I see in this situation is you’re looking for something outside of yourself to hold on to. It’s like a grasping but then she doesn’t look like she’s grasping. I don’t know.

Madalyn Gregory: I think maybe faith has always been a difficult concept for me for a variety of reasons, but looking at it through that lens, I do think that if I had to imagine what faith looked like, what good, deep, true faith feels like, maybe that’s what it feels like. It’s just being able to surrender, being able to trust, and not being attached or not supposing you already know what the outcome is going to be. Maybe you get caught, maybe you smash into the ground but be at peace with that.

Cindy Ingram: I prickled a little bit when you were talking because my anxiety got triggered a little bit because I tend to want to control everything. I want to control all the outcomes. I want to control my part in it. I feel like my part is bigger than it actually is. I feel like I’m responsible for a lot of things that I’m not actually responsible for. The idea of just surrendering and being supported fully, that feels impossible to me to even fathom.

Madalyn Gregory: I 1000% understand everything you just said because even the thought of it was a bit like, “Ahh,” but what I actually thought of whenever I looked at this artwork and especially now looking at it again, I feel is related to that, which is that I’ve been doing a lot of work on—depending on who you are listening, this is either going to sound like the best thing or the worst thing—but I have been doing a lot of work, trying to heal my inner child and get at those core wounds. A lot of the time, whenever you look into stuff like that, people will talk about your shadow self, which I think came from Jung, I don’t remember, but I see a lot of those elements here. I think maybe that’s why I saw so much duality because I think that idea is around us all the time; the good and the bad, the yin and the yang, the light and the dark. Even in science, there’s matter and antimatter. There’s all of these things that happen.

Whenever I looked at her, the far more comfortable idea rather than it being about faith or about religion, it was the idea of surrendering to what you actually need and who you actually are. Now, the black flame tendrils, it does feel like that’s the shadow. That’s what you could fall into. There’s something too about being raised up and the whole idea of a higher being, and these angels and all of that, of recognizing deeper truths about yourself, not even your potential but just the better angels of your nature. I think it’s much easier for me to imagine the creatures and the angels being almost parts of her or parts of her story that she’s finally letting in. That’s what’s going to save her from the shadow.

Cindy Ingram: Oh, Madalyn, that was beautiful. Better angels of ourselves, I think that’s what you said. It was so good. I don’t remember but it was so good. When you look at it through those lenses, then all of a sudden, I was like, “Well, what if this one angel looks like the same hair as her?” But it looks younger, so maybe that’s a younger version of her or them or maybe it’s like an ancestor or it’s like a grandmother or it is all of the parts of her. One of the things I’ve been studying recently with just this new program I’m in is internal family solutions and how within you, you have multiple selves and there’s like one higher self but then I’ve got this perfectionist self that’s in there that I have to talk down sometimes when she gets upset. There’s all the different parts of me. I like seeing that. But then I also, as you were talking, started to think again because we asked this question at the beginning but we haven’t really talked about it, which was where is she falling from, where is she falling to, and what’s the story. I started to think, what if her falling is not a bad thing? What if she is falling into her greatness, into something better, good, and exciting but it’s scary? Like you take a leap and you take a risk, and it’s really scary but then on the other side, really amazing things happen. Maybe that’s happening.

Madalyn Gregory: It’s like a trust fall. You’re trusting yourself. You’re trusting the universe. I think that’s one thing that I strive for in my life is to get to a place and be in a place as often as I can because I don’t think it’s ever possible to do it all the time but where I am truly listening to my body, and to my intuition and trusting that process that’s both scary, and freeing. 

Cindy Ingram: Yeah, 100%. That’s really a main focus of my life too is doing the same thing because I think for many, many years, I let other people’s thoughts, feelings, and opinions be the guiding force, then I always would second guess or overthink any opinion that I had or any goal I had, I would talk myself out of but then every time I’ve fully listened to my intuition and fully trusted what came out of me, those are the times in my life that were the most full, successful, and soul-filling. I’m learning to do that more.

Alright, that is all for today. Like I said in the intro, we are breaking up our conversation into two parts because we ended up talking for a full hour and a half about her artwork. We will resume our conversation next Monday on The Art Class Curator Podcast. Another reminder that the podcast will soon be called You Need Art, starting in January. I’ll see you again next week.

When was the last time you did something only for you, something that put you in touch with your innermost thoughts and feelings, something that filled your bucket and inspired your spirit? Too many of us can’t remember the last time we took the time to do something like that. A lot of people have never done it at all, but that’s exactly what the Art Connection Circle is all about. If you want to seek a deeper connection with yourself and with the human spirit, the Circle is for you. Learn more about what the Art Connection Circle has to offer you and how to join at artclasscurator.com/circle.

• Art Connection Meditation and Guide
• Art Connection Circle

Be a Podcast Guest: Submit a Voice Memo of Your Art Story (Scroll to the bottom of the page to submit your story.)

Cindy Ingram: Hello and welcome to The Art Class Curator Podcast. I am Cindy Ingram, your host and the founder of Art Class Curator, and The Curated Connections Library. We’re here to talk about teaching art with purpose and inspiration from the daily delights of creativity to the messy mishaps that come with being a teacher. Whether you’re driving home from school or cleaning up your classroom for the 15th time today, take a second, take a deep breath, relax those shoulders, and let’s get started.

Hello everybody, it’s Cindy Ingram, and I am happy to welcome you to The Art Class Curator Podcast. I have a great interview for you today. It’s a little on the shorter side because this is actually going to be a two-part episode. We have the first part with Olivia Ollis. She is an art teacher in North Carolina. She has had an experience over the last year where she deepened her connection to works of art and has discovered a lot about herself in the process. She participated in a museum program that helped her through this and I also will be interviewing the museum educator who runs this program as well. That episode is coming as well to talk about it from the side of the person planning the program. But I really love this conversation with Olivia because it really does illustrate the power of art connection, and I know I talk about it all the time that you can learn about yourself through art. You can have deep connections, you can explore the emotions, the thoughts, and the feelings that come in works of art, and it can add value to your life. We want that for our students and that is really what I’ve been focused on in my career up until this point, is helping teachers make these connections so that their students can make these connections as well and that will ripple out into the world. But I have been finding more and more that I crave that deep connection and those deep conversations with people who are changing their lives through their interaction with works of art.

You’re going to see a change in this podcast. We are rebranding in a few weeks. Starting in January, we’re going to have a brand new name. It will be a slightly different focus for the podcast although the same things that I’m passionate about, you will see those come again and again. But these art connection stories, these conversations about art, and what we can learn about ourselves through art are giving me so much life right now after the last couple years of stress, refocus, and a re-understanding of who I am in the world. I think what the pandemic gave us—and I’ve talked about this before on the podcast—is that we had the chance to really survey everything in our life and everything that it got stripped down. Then we are now making these decisions on what we want to add back in. The thing that I want to add back in, the thing that I realized that I have been craving is deeper conversations and deeper connections. That is what I hope to have here on the podcast moving forward. I cannot wait to share that with you in a couple weeks.

We have decided to run the Art Connection Circle, which you heard about in my episode a few weeks back with Lisa Carpenter. We are going to start the new Art Connection Circle the week of January 17th. If that was something that you are really interested in pursuing and checking out, you can head over to artclasscurator.com/circle. The types of insights and inspirations that you will see in this conversation with Olivia today is what the types of conversations and connections that we hope to build together and co-create together in this Art Connection Circle. I hope that you join us. You can head over to artclasscurator.com/circle if you’re interested in checking out the program. We would really love to have you. Without further ado, let’s introduce Olivia Ollis, and hear her incredible story.

I am so excited to welcome Olivia Ollis to the podcast. Welcome, Olivia. 

Olivia Ollis: Thank you. It’s wonderful to be here.

Cindy Ingram: You reached out to me last month in response to an email that I had sent to my email list and shared your story of how you have been using art with your health journey. I thought it was a really powerful email and a really powerful thing to talk about. I’m so excited that you’re here to share with us. Can you just introduce yourself, tell us about your background and experiences before we get started?

Olivia Ollis: I am a K-8 Art teacher. I have taught for over 30 years and I live in a very rural part of Eastern, North Carolina. But I am close to the North Carolina Museum Of Art and I’m close to Wilmington, the Cameron Museum Of Art. I can travel where I need to go. I’m not completely and totally isolated. Sometimes it’s nice. Art has always been an important part of my life but whether through my parents, in their medical journey and now, my most recent medical journey with cancer, art has been very important in healing and coping.

Cindy Ingram: Yes. Before we start to talk about your connection with art and healing, can you tell us a little bit more about your classroom? What kind of projects do you like to do? What does your classroom look like?

Olivia Ollis: I have a wonderful classroom. I teach at B. F. Grady Elementary in Albertson, North Carolina in Duplin County. I teach K-8, which is a wide span of ages and I am constantly, with my students saying, “All right. Give me a minute. I don’t mean to talk to you like kindergartners. I just had kindergarteners, wait a minute. I’ll get to fifth grade, be patient with me.” We do all sorts of things but I feel like it’s very important that we integrate the arts into subject matter. One, it helps me because those who are not quite as interested realize, “Oh I heard that before, this is important,” and also the teachers buy in. It also helps strengthen and support the teachers in what they’re doing, it just makes life more interesting. As I tell them, artists pull their ideas from all over the world. We’re going to pull our ideas from all over the school, everything you’re learning. We go on virtual field trips but also we’ve done field trips. I bring artists in to work with the students so they understand that particular process that the artist goes through and it enriches them, also enriches the teachers. I try to have a balanced art appreciation, creating art, making art, looking at art. We have fun and we make a mess but everybody seems to understand that’s okay.

Cindy Ingram: It’s beautiful. What made you want to be an art teacher? How did you get into this field?

Olivia Ollis: I had always enjoyed art. I remember being really little and painting with watercolors on pieces of cardboard, I was always allowed to dabble. I really didn’t know what I wanted to do in college and I took an elementary art course for classroom teachers just trying to figure out what I wanted to do. The art professor said, “You’re teaching the class so you’re going to be an art teacher,” and I just said, “Okay.” I have really enjoyed it. Now, yes, there are ups and downs but I have really enjoyed it. One thing about being an art teacher, at the end of the day, you have been working with shapes and first graders, cutting shapes and free form, and all sorts of things and you can, at the end of the day, sit back and you look at those ridiculous turkeys where they learned to make a cube and then they converted it into a turkey. Some are screaming, yelling, and losing their feathers like some of the children, some are very quiet and contained. It’s just hysterical. I have enjoyed it.

Cindy Ingram: Yeah. There’s never a dull moment. There is always a funny story at the end of every teaching day. That’s such a great joy. Tell us about what’s going on with you now with your cancer and introduce us to that story.

Olivia Ollis: Starting last spring, I began to have some problems, immediately went to the doctor who sent me to another doctor, who sent me to another doctor, and it went into surgery, chemotherapy and radiation. I had a wonderful support team for my resource team at school, family and community. I felt really good about it and this is all going to be fun. I tried being in the classroom but it just did not work. I was too weak. It just did not work out. I felt it was important that the kids see me there and I’m fighting through it and everything. It’s going to be fun, particularly with the pandemic and all that has occurred, but it just wasn’t happening, so I’m home doing lesson plans like trying to keep up with everyone and that’s fun, but I think they all understand that. But I was diagnosed with endometrial cancer, had surgery, then I had three rounds of chemotherapy, five weeks of radiation. Then I’ve had one more round of chemotherapy and I have two more to go. Then I’m expecting all the scans to be clear, have a great new year and gradually get my strength back. I will be back in the classroom on the 1st of January. I’m looking forward to everything getting back on a normal schedule.

But the Cameron Museum of Art in Wilmington and the medical center and the Zimmer Cancer Center which is part of that, had this program called Art Enhances Health. I jumped at it because I kept hanging on to my art, looking at art, connecting with museums and images and everything I was trying to do to reach out, to take care of me because there were things I could not do but there were other things I could focus on. I could find some calm, some peace, some distraction in that. This was a wonderful program, as I say, everyone who is a part of it, who signed up to participate and we’re at the Cameron, we’re all in the same storm, we’re in the same harbor at the Zimmer Cancer Center and we’re all in different boats but that’s the same. But we all have a desire and appreciation to learn more about art and we start in the gallery.

Then we do writing exercises, which is a good way to explore between the gallery and how we’re feeling. I love the fact that the person who is leading the writing said, “Okay, now you can burn these if you want to,” so we can put down whatever we want and then we can destroy it if we want to hang on to it. That has been really good because I’m not a writer—visual person but not a writer, and that’s been good. Then we actually do hands-on art activities. Then we take ideas from what we’ve written, what we’ve seen. We’ve done collage, we’ve done drawing, painting. We’re just having a good time, we’re laughing, and that’s the best distraction, I think, of all, of being able to leave some of the worries and concerns and you’re not feeling well. It seems to be going on forever to find some sense of peace, hope, and happiness.

Cindy Ingram: That is so beautiful. I have not gone through such a situation but I can imagine everything that you would think, the community of people around you that are also going through what you’re going through, the opportunity for self-expression, and a deeper relationship with yourself. Then the distraction, the joy and the fun of it, like all of that wrapped into one package in the creative expression, did I say that one? I think it did, but that’s really wonderful. Do you meet every month?

Olivia Ollis: We meet once a week, on Mondays, and then the museum is closed. We meet for two hours. This way, we aren’t encountering the public. We all wear masks, social distance and everything, but we’re not putting our health further in jeopardy by coming into contact with other germs. It’s wonderful that the museum has extended that, working with the hospital in meeting these guidelines. We meet for two hours. We meet once a week and then we all understand that there was a day I couldn’t be there because of chemotherapy treatment. There are days others can’t for different reasons. I think we can also look and recognize, we’re so glad to see each other and we’re glad to be there. We can recognize who’s not quite feeling quite as well but everybody has something to contribute. It’s a very slow pace. Having been in the classroom, you’re always up against the clock and trying to get things done, this is much more relaxed and it’s for six weeks. I think this is a beginning because we’ve had people also from, I believe it’s public health within the hospital system and they’ve done surveys and things. They have also been there. I think this is a learning experience for all of us but I think it’s extremely valuable. It’ll be interesting to see how it comes out; I know that for me, to continue to have the opportunity to look at art, to share opinions and think about things. Plus, I’m finding that as I look at art or I’m creating art, I’m writing about art, there’s also a part of me that’s reflected.  I’m learning more about me.

Cindy Ingram: Yes. Can you speak a little bit more about that process of learning about yourself through the art or provide an example or just to illustrate what that means for you?

Olivia Ollis: One type of writing was legacy writing and what do I want to leave from this experience, or take from this experience, or what do I want others to notice from this experience is something that people have said that really resonated with me but I was really surprised that I’m so positive. “Oh, really?” I thought. I don’t think of myself that way. I thought of, going back as I’m also an artist, my drawings that I did after my father died, my mother had Parkinson’s and they were very revealing to me of—I realized what was important and what was going on in my life and I don’t know that I would have thought of them as necessarily positive—but my work that I’m doing in class I’m writing, apparently, has more positivity.

One of the things also with affirmative writing, what’s important, what’s positive, what’s your safe place, your happy place and I realized my front porch was my happy place. Being in the middle of nowhere, it’s wide open and swings on one end, it runs the length I can walk to the other end. Of course, now all my plants are dying because I have not been able to take care of the thing but that’s okay. But my collage was very bright, cheerful, happy, and warm. It’s really interesting how you find those things or things that I really hadn’t thought about come up in the writing and I realized, “Oh, I’m stronger than I thought I was.” It’s been very revealing. One particular piece at the museum in the collection that we saw, I needed to have prints, and I believe it’s the building gallery. I think it’s the—and you’ll have to help me here, I can’t remember—it’s Sonia Delaunay, her bright, colorful prints, and I really needed to see those bright moving colors that day. Then another day, there’s a Rauschenberg and it’s all different grays. But there’s this broom and it’s sweeping. I thought I need to sweep things out of my life. I need to make room so I have more space for me. I’m accustomed to being overwhelmed with K-8, family, dogs, and all that. I can’t quite separate that from, “This is my time alone but that’s okay,” but I can clear things out. That was something that until after looking at it, thinking about it, we discussed it and writing about it, I didn’t realize, “Oh, that’s what I need to do.”

Cindy Ingram: Yeah. Oh, you just gave me chills head to toe. I love that. I just wanted to highlight just a couple of things. You discovered about yourself that you probably assumed—never deliberately thought of your safe space but then you also did so in a community and people reflecting their views of you back to you. You’re seeing yourself through a new lens and I was surprised to hear that you didn’t see yourself as positive because I’ve only spent, I don’t know, 20 minutes with you now then an hour last week or two weeks ago, and I was like, you just radiate this positivity, this love energy. I love that you got to see yourself through other people’s eyes too. That’s beautiful. Then you also got to feel all the range of human emotions in connection with the art, that safe space of a work of art and how it can be there for you wherever you’re at that day. I think that is really powerful. In this program, is this your first time to ever really spend time looking at art in this way for yourself?

Olive Ollis: I’ve done that some. At one point in time at a different phase in life, I love to go to the North Carolina Museum of Art like New Year’s eve and spend time and go back. I said, I would go back and visit old friends. I’ve always enjoyed looking but it’s on a much deeper level. I don’t know if that’s because I try, always when I’m in the classroom, working with the kids, we start with a work of art, visual thinking strategies, look through and thinking through. It’s not whether you like it or not, you got to tell me why and what the evidence is there, helping them look and then produce art. Whether I was already accustomed to that, but here it’s for me, and that’s been extremely important. Art is all. Looking at art has always been important but this is a little different meaning, and a lot of times, I can find peace there where I guess I wasn’t looking for before but now I can find it there.

Cindy Ingram: Yeah. Oh, that’s beautiful I think I’ve noticed that teachers—and I’m guilty of this too, for a while I would go to art museums and I would spend all my time looking at the art through the eyes of how would I teach this, how would I show this to my students, is this a good example of this particular topic, or what activity I can do with it, or I would be thinking about the website, I’m like, “Oh, I could do an email about this.” Then suddenly one day I was like, “I need to just put my phone down, turn my brain off, and just experience the art for itself.” That’s when the true magic happened when I allowed myself to let it be for me and for no one else.

Olive Ollis: One thing I found with the kids is if I put myself aside and listen to what they’re saying, a lot of times, they come up with things that I hadn’t seen before that is amazing. But it is hard to put that teacher hat over to one side and to really listen to what they’ve seen, what they found.

Cindy Ingram: Yeah. I love that you get to do this in this program with other people and you get to be the student. You don’t have to worry about facilitating that conversation that you get to fully engage.

Olive Ollis: I enjoyed not being the art teacher.

Cindy Ingram: Yes. You don’t have to clean up and you don’t have to plan it. You don’t have to cut the paper in advance. You just get to enjoy it. How do you think this will change your relationship to art moving forward?

Olive Ollis: Good question. I think one thing for me as an artist will be that my work is going to change. Where my drawings have been, they’re what I call fragmentations. They’re bits and pieces of drawings that go together to make whole drawings that also separate and make images but they’re controlled, simply because I have the time, I can get one little teeny tiny drawing done and I’ve accomplished something. Where now, that’s not as important as loosening up the whole image, the energy, or warmth, or whatever strength that I have found it contains. My personal work will change, but hopefully, I am going to help the students find more meaning as we look at works of art and they look at their own art because that’s so powerful to me. I feel particularly with the stresses of today, and many being we are in a rural area and there are many influences and problems that we have that you don’t have in a big urban area, the same thing is reversed, to hopefully help them learn to find a way to help deal with things by looking at art. If they get that chance to travel to go to that museum as their life expands, they have more opportunities, they have that confidence to go on and do that. Hopefully, I can give them that.

Cindy Ingram: I love that. I think you might have already answered this but maybe if there’s anything else you can think of, how has art, this experience with this program and just art in general, helps you through your healing process?

Olive Ollis: I’m not as focused on me. It would be very easy to be overwhelmed, between overwhelmed with the bills, between overwhelmed with trying to sit with the dictionary, to find the words, learn all the medical jargon and the knowledge to not look too far forward. No teachers were planning for the year or the two years or whatever we’re planning ahead. I don’t need to plan too far ahead right now. I have to get through this treatment, then this treatment, I have to give my body a chance to rest and recover. It helps me see a new perspective, not get dragged down and bogged down in depressive thought or dark thoughts or worrying about the fact that the money that I can’t control, the health insurance and all that goes along with it. I’m very fortunate, my daughter took a leave of absence from grad school to take care of me because I’m in a rural area, I have to drive everywhere. She’s driving me and she has gotten me to the museum because she understands this is my mental health day. This is extremely important to me. It’s been a very valuable experience to help me stay focused on what is important and not get overwhelmed and bogged down particularly, when you’re not feeling well. It’s really easy to get overwhelmed. Plus, as I said, I can see others who are also going through the same thing, and it is wonderful works of art where I can lose myself.

Cindy Ingram: I love that. That’s beautiful. Thank you so much for sharing that. I’m going to ask you the last question which I ask every guest that I interview on my podcast and that is which artwork changed your life?

Olive Ollis: I would have said someone else, but now I think the Rauschenberg prints with the broom sweeping, meaning I have to make room for me. I think that has, perhaps, been the most powerful right now. There have been others throughout different periods of time but right now, I would say that particular print, with that broom—and I am not a housekeeper—but in that motion of sweeping, I need to move and clear things out.

Cindy Ingram: Can you describe your initial reaction to the artwork? Did you initially feel that tug to the artwork or did you arrive at it after a little bit of time?

Olive Ollis: The art in me had to go all the way around the gallery and look at all the different prints. I immediately liked that one because I like the motion, but I had to go and look at everything first. I actually went to the Sonia Delaunay because I really, on that particular day, needed those bright dancing colors, but I went back to the gallery, looked and I realized after the writing, “This is what I need to do.” I don’t know what Rauschenberg’s thought was but that’s okay. He had his own agenda, but mine, I need to get moving, sweep the stuff out, and clear more space for me.

Cindy Ingram: I love that because a lot of times, people are expecting to have an initial jolt of like, “Oh, this is the artwork.This is the connection,” but sometimes it’s a really slow burn. Sometimes you’ll see the artwork four times before suddenly something about it hits your life with just the right artwork at the right time and the right process. You were giving yourself and the artwork space to create that meaning together, and I love that. It’s a good lesson.

Thank you so very, very much for joining me today on the podcast. I hope that museum educators around the country are going to be inspired by this program and start ones of their own. Then I hope that you also give some hope and ideas to people going through what you’re going through to connect with art in new ways. Thank you.

Olive Ollis: Thank you, and it’s been a pleasure talking with you. If you ever get to North Carolina, you should visit the North Carolina Museum of Art, and Wilmington, the Cameron Museum of Art.

Cindy Ingram: I definitely will.

Olive Ollis: Besides the long rural spaces that are quiet.

Cindy Ingram: Okay, everybody. That is it for today’s episode of the Art Class Curator Podcast. Like I said in my intro, we will be hearing from the Cameron Museum of Art who put on this program that Olivia discussed. We will have an interview with them in a coming episode. I’m so inspired by this conversation with her and I hope that you are too. If you do have an art story of what art means to you, what an insight that you learned about through art, a powerful moment that you’ve had in connection with works of art, I would love to talk to you about your story either as an interview, or you can send me a voicemail about your experience and I can add it into an episode. You can leave us a voicemail at 202-996-7972. You also can send me an email to cindy@artclasscurator.com. If you’re interested in being interviewed about your art connection experience, this is something I am so passionate about and I can’t wait to have these conversations with you moving forward as we rebrand the podcast in the next coming weeks. Once 2022 hits, you will start to see the new unveiling of our podcast. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you have a wonderful holiday season and I hope that you take some time for yourself—if you have a break in the next coming weeks—to visit an art museum and check out some art. Okay. Have a good one. Bye.

Do you remember when you last took time just for you? Not for your students, not for work, not for your family or friends, just you? Connecting with your deepest thoughts, emotions, and desires. It seems like there will always be a hundred things on the to-do list, and bone-deep exhaustion that makes it feel like doing anything but scrolling in your phone is impossible. You’re here listening to this podcast because you know the power of art. But trust me when I say art has so much more to give you if you’ll let it. I’m talking about making space for you—your insights, your memories, your delight—all by using art as a catalyst for a deeper connection to yourself and your life. You can get a guide on how to nurture your life and your spirit through art connection including a guided art meditation all for free at artclasscurator.com/meditation. Take the time to connect with your deepest self and find your path forward through art. You deserve it. Get your free meditation and guide at artclasscurator.com/meditation.

Thank you so much for listening to The Art Class Curator Podcast. If you like what you hear, please subscribe and give us an honest rating on iTunes to help other teachers find us, and hear these amazing art conversations and art teacher insights. Be sure to tune in next week for more art inspiration and curated conversations.

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Cindy Ingram: Hello and welcome to The Art Class Curator Podcast. I am Cindy Ingram, your host and the founder of Art Class Curator, and The Curated Connections Library. We’re here to talk about teaching art with purpose and inspiration from the daily delights of creativity to the messy mishaps that come with being a teacher. Whether you’re driving home from school or cleaning up your classroom for the 15th time today, take a second, take a deep breath, relax those shoulders, and let’s get started. 

Hello everybody. Welcome back to The Art Class Curator Podcast. This is Cindy Ingram. Today, I’ve got Madalyn Gregory again with me in the Zoom studio. Hi, Madalyn. 

Madalyn Gregory: Hello. 

Cindy Ingram: I want to say in the studio, like it was fancy but we were not in a studio. We were in our offices. You’re in your closet. 

Madalyn Gregory: I am in my closet. I live on a very loud street. 

Cindy Ingram: What we’re going to talk about with you today is The Art Class Curator Summer Workshop. This is probably my favorite thing that we do every year. It is the thing that fills my soul the most. It’s the thing I enjoy the most. It gives me the most energy and excitement for the work that I do. We’ve done it four times. This year was the year I think we finally were like, “Yes, this is how the workshop should be. This is perfect.” It can never be perfect but I’ll tell you how we’re going to make it different next year too. We’re going to tell you about it, tell you how you can join us next summer, and just talk about our experience with the workshop. Are you ready? 

Madalyn Gregory: I am so excited. 

Cindy Ingram: What we do every year is if some of you know, I used to work in museum education and one of my roles as a museum educator was to do teacher programs. We would do teacher workshops, we would do teacher happy hours, we would write lessons for teachers, all sorts of things, but there’s nothing that can replace actually being in a real art museum with other people, talking about the art. It’s just magic to me is what it is. I feel like in my job at Art Class Curator, I’ve created my own little museum. I get to explore works of art. I get to talk about art for my job. I get to share it with the world. I get to share it with students and teachers but there is something different and something special about actually being in the same space with the artwork. That’s what we do for this workshop. We actually do visit art museums and spend time in them together. The best part of it to me is to just be in the space.

We started offering this workshop about five years ago. The first one, we did in Dallas. I did it at a co-working space conference room. We spent most of the day in the conference room, then the afternoon, we headed over to the Dallas Museum of Art where we wrapped up a lot of the work that we did. Then two years after that, we did the Meadows Museum, which is on the SMU campus in Dallas. We were actually in a classroom at the Meadows. I love their education team. They’re great collaborators. It was really lovely. But all three of those workshops that we did, the biggest feedback that we got on our surveys at the end, everybody was like, “It was so great.” Otherwise, the heat, people were like, “It’s hot outside. You made us go outside and it’s hot.” But the biggest thing that we saw was people wanted more time. That one day was not enough time to really dive into the content, like we wanted. In the past years, we did a lot of how to discuss art with kids or with your students, how to lead engaging activities with works of art, and we packed all of that into that six to eight hour time frame.

This year, we decided it would be wise to try to add a second day so that we could slow down. Also, if you’ve been following us for a long time, you’ve noticed that our focus has really shifted to a more of a personal connection with works of art. We really wanted that to be a strong component in the workshop as well, that not only how are you going to bring the art to your students but how are you personally going to connect with the works of art too. That will fuel your students’ art connections if you were personally connected to art. We added the second day to really allow ourselves the time to develop those art connections. That second day made all the difference in the world. 

Madalyn Gregory: It was magical. I’m so excited to get into it. It’s funny too because it was the same time of year but this year with the extra day, everybody was getting to know each other better, they actually walked and wanted to go outside, walk to the museums because we were just down the street from them. It was fantastic. I’m so excited to do it again. 

Cindy Ingram: You’ve never seen three more excited people. Me, Madalyn, and Jen were at the workshop. At five o’clock, it was over and no one wanted to leave. Everybody just felt connected to each other. We were all having a hard time walking away. We were so excited and so thrilled by the workshop, and the connections that we made, that we did not stop talking from 5:00 PM until 1:00 AM. We were staying in an Airbnb. We ordered Uber Eats food and we just talked, and talked and talked, and talked and talked until we couldn’t talk anymore because we just had such a wonderful experience. I can’t wait to tell you all about that.

This year, we did it in Fort Worth, Texas. We moved across the Metroplex. It was perfect. This summer in 2022—2022, can you believe that?—we’re going to do it in the same place. The workshop is at the Fort Worth Community Arts Center. What’s beautiful about that is that Fort Worth, if you’ve never been, has really amazing art museums. There are three main art museums. They’re all across the street from each other in the Cultural Arts District. The Fort Worth Community Arts Center is right across the street as well. All three museums that we visited and the space for the workshop were all within walking distance, really close to each other. 

Madalyn Gregory: The Community Arts Center had art of its own. It was really like its own little mini museum too. It was great. 

Cindy Ingram: The workshop is in the galleries. We’re not just in a conference room. We were like in the room with the art too. The art was so cool at the space. Oh, so good. Another thing that made it so special this year is we’ve been living through this pandemic and most of us had the opportunity to spend time with our colleagues for so long, so it felt so good to be in the room with people again after such a long, long hiatus of that.

The other thing that we wanted to add to the workshop by adding the second day was to add more art making. In the galleries and past workshops, we would do drawing activities and things like that but we never really did any real art making. That was another goal of ours for this year was to add that component in because we’re art teachers, we want to have the chance to make it too. Making art, inspired by art in the galleries surrounded by art with other people who love art just gives me chills thinking about it. It’s so good. I was going to go through the outline of what we did in the workshop to tell you guys about it and part of me feels like I’m spoiling it if you were to come again but also I don’t think so because it’s a fluid thing because the art is always changing and the ideas are always changing, that hearing about it is not the same as living through it. 

Madalyn Gregory: The people are always changing. We have one person who is a member of The Curated Connections Library that signed up every single time and actually missed one due to life but he has come every single time that he could, and continues to enjoy it and see what changes. Even though some of the stuff we talk about might be the same, it’s going to be a unique experience every time. 

Cindy Ingram: You change too. With the connection being so strong, with the personal connection to a work of art, what happened to you in the last year is relevant to your experience. Depending on where you are in your life, every time you come, you’re going to have new layers of experience based on that as well. Our first day at the workshop was the same format as our past workshops where we did a lot of talk about art discussion, how to lead art discussions. I led sample art discussions, then we also talked about strategies for that, then one of the things that we did differently this year was that we had the participants make their own sketchbooks when they came in on the first day and we taught that process, how to stitch them, hand stitch them, we painted covers for them. You learned about how to fold the paper, how to stitch, how to tape it all together. That was so fun. I love my sketchbook. I value it. I’m never going to throw it away. I think it’s so cool.

I think it was such a cool thing because then all the participants of the workshop had a place to keep all their notes and now they have this memento or document of their memories from the workshop that we made art in there, we did all the activities in there. We had the sketchbook that we used that’s a memento for the teachers but I love the idea of the kids making these in the class, the beginning of the school year too, because then all of your art connection, things that you do, all of your warm-ups, and things can happen in those sketchbooks. I think the student is less likely to want to throw it away at the end of the year if it’s a book that they’ve made and they’ve invested so much into it rather than just some cheap spiral notebook that they just throw away at the end of the year. 

Madalyn Gregory: It was a process. It definitely took a little more time than we thought it was going to but it was so much fun. They’re so personalizable. Because we just had a bunch of different paints and stuff out there, everybody came out looking so different. You could add as many or as few pages as you wanted to. All of the worksheets and stuff that we used, everybody just glued in, so it was just this one thing that we could take around. You didn’t have to worry about it. I love the scrapbook nature of that because it becomes the memory of the event in a way that it wouldn’t if you just had a folder that you threw in the back of your car at the end of the day. 

Cindy Ingram: I loved that time too because it was right at the beginning, we had already done introductions and stuff but it was a time that we got to chat with everybody there. We got to get to know people. The elementary teachers were talking to the high school teachers about like, “Well, how do we take this and drop this down to an elementary level to make the sketchbook easier for the little kids to make?” There’s a lot of talk about modifications. I think because we had that low-key time at the beginning, everyone had that chance to build some connections and foundations at the beginning that served us the rest of the workshop too. 

Madalyn Gregory: It was a great opportunity too to talk about just the art making process because no one had made them before. You didn’t really know how it was going to end up looking, even as you made your cover. There were several of the teachers who were like, “Oh, that didn’t come out how I wanted it to,” or whatever but then by the time it was all bound and all the pages were in it, everybody loved it because it’s that process of imperfection that you get to do with your students too, which was so fun to see and play out. I think you can forget that sometimes whenever you’re in front of the classroom all the time. 

Cindy Ingram: Speaking from my personal experience, I get really nervous making art with other art teachers because they’re so good and you’re just like, “Oh, I’m not going to be as good as that.” I get all of my crap about my own talents, so I always get a little bit apprehensive, and I did with this too because I wanted my stitches to be just so perfectly straight. I gave up midway through. I was like, “There’s no way of getting it.” But then actually now, I really love how imperfect they are. It was really fun. We all talked about our own creative processes and shared those. Other people had those same insecurities and we were just laughing about them. It was really fun. It was a really fun time. We did that in the Fort Worth Community Art Center. In the galleries around the art in our room was like, I forgot the name of the artist, I have to pull it up on my phone but I wanted to say it was a Mexican artist but he was very surrealist, very Frida Kahlo-like. 

Madalyn Gregory: Armando Sebastian

Cindy Ingram: Armando Sebastian, yes. But the art in the galleries was so cool, weird, and amazing. Every time you look around at anybody, you’re just also getting this awesome art behind us. We had such a kick out of the art that was in the room. Then we learned about art discussion, practice art discussion, then the first museum that we went to after lunch was at the Amon Carter Museum, which is across the street from the Fort Worth Community Arts Center. The focus of the Amon Carter Museum has been American art since about the 1840s and they also have a large photography collection as well. I used to work with Amon Carter as a gallery teacher back right before I was in grad school, so a lot of the art from the Amon Carter has ended up in The Curated Connections Library because I have such a strong connection to that art. I spent so much time with it, teaching back in 2004 I think is when I worked there. What we did in the Amon Carter is we went and we practiced a lot of the gallery activities that we teach at Art Class Curator, writing poems, drawing activities, all sorts of different activities that we did with works of art. It was a whirlwind. It was fast. We did a lot in a very short time but it was really fun. Is there any activity that really stood out to you? 

Madalyn Gregory: Oh, goodness. There was one where we were looking at the mobile. 

Cindy Ingram: Oh, yes. That one was so good. 

Madalyn Gregory: We had them do a kinesthetic activity. Was it a dance? 

Cindy Ingram: It was an interpretative dance.

Madalyn Gregory: Yeah, an interpretative dance of this mobile. One group just really went for it. It was so great. They got a standing ovation. It was amazing. 

Cindy Ingram: Yeah, one girl is wearing this really long skirt, it was a Calder mobile and she pulled out her skirt to make this really cool triangle shape, then she slowly spinned. We told them it had to be a group. It can’t be that they are all just moving separately. They had to be responding to each other. I’m doing all these movements like you can see me but they’re doing these movements, then that would trigger other movements. It was so good. I forgot about that one. 

Madalyn Gregory: I love that. I also loved the poetry activities that we did. We were in one of the smaller spaces and just had everybody pick an artwork they were drawn to, then they could do one of the poetry templates that we have. I remember two people chose the same artwork. To see their different interpretations and to really dive into how they saw it and everybody was giving their own little of what they saw on art, it was great. I loved that. 

Cindy Ingram: That one artwork that they both chose, it was so funny. Wasn’t it cork in just a pattern? 

Madalyn Gregory: I think it was pieces of wood, wasn’t it? 

Cindy Ingram: Yeah, it’s like wood or cork or it was just basically a wood texture that was pieced together. One person was really about more of the materials. Another person was more about the feelings of it. There were totally different interpretations coming out of this really simple artwork. They didn’t have a lot to it but really deep interpretations but totally different. I love that about art that two people can look at the same thing and have completely different experiences. It’s so fun.

These activities would change every time we do this because we picked the activities based on what art was there. Whatever art is there, we’re going to pick the best activity for that artwork. We don’t just have an activity, then pick an artwork. We let the artwork tell us what it wants. We did one where it was like this futuristic scene. It was like this giant painting. It was a stairwell. It was this giant futuristic thing, then they had to draw themselves as if that was their neighborhood or did they draw themselves or their home? No, I don’t remember. 

Madalyn Gregory: I’m looking at the artwork. They had to draw themselves as if they were a part of the painting. 

Cindy Ingram: It’s like in this futuristic robotic type of style, then they had to add themselves into it. A little drawing activity. We did lots of little things like that. We did elements and principles. I call it the elements and principles shuffle, which I’ve never actually put on the website but I’ve done it in workshops where you look at a painting, then you assign each person an element and/or a principle. Half of the people get an element. Half of the people get a principle. They look at the painting, they write their thoughts about it, then they have to pair up, so then an element person goes with the principle person. If the element person is a shape and the principle person is as a rhythm, they then have to discuss how the shape creates the rhythm or how the shape or the line creates the movement or whatever. Then they pair in different ways, then have little mini conversations, then we talk as a big group about it. It’s just one way to really analyze elements and principles, and how they work together. We did that there too. There were a lot of activities that we did in that two-hour span at the museum but it was awesome. I love it. 

Madalyn Gregory: I loved it because by the end of that day, people had already found your person. We had them mixing and matching in different groups, so everybody got to know everybody but by the end of that day, it was like, “Okay, I found somebody that I could hang with, my little teacher friend.” It was just so fun to see everybody come together around art. That’s what art teachers do. They’re so often the only one in school. 

Cindy Ingram: Oh yeah, getting to be with people who actually do the same job that you do, it’s not as common for art teachers as it is for other subject areas. The first day was super full. It was really inspiring and engaging. We had a lot of new ideas and energy around the artwork. We wanted the second day to really be focused on the personal connections with the works of art and really wanted to see what it was like to dedicate a whole day to really fostering that connection. We met again at the Fort Worth Community Art Center on the morning of day two and we did some warm-up activities in the galleries there. That was super fun. We did the memorization activity where you have the participants look at the painting for three to five minutes, then they have to turn their back, then recreate it and draw it, or I’ve also had students write about it or explain it and I draw it. There’s a lot of different ways to do it but we had the teachers drawing it. Do you know the name of the artist of that gallery?

Madalyn Gregory: With the birds? 

Cindy Ingram: With the birds. 

Madalyn Gregory: Gale Gibbs. 

Cindy Ingram: This is not really related to the workshop but we were in this gallery with this work by Gale Gibbs and they’re very narrative art but also very symbolic. There were all sorts of symbols in it, then we noticed as we were exploring the gallery after the activity that there were these birds in lots of the artworks, then they were magic birds. 

Madalyn Gregory: Yes. That was even the title of one of the paintings. It was like painting in collage. It was like mixed media. 

Cindy Ingram: But there was text on there. She writes stories onto the paintings too. Apparently, these magic birds would come and do something in this village. Then we started to realize that these magic birds were in all of the paintings, then we got so excited.

Madalyn Gregory: You’re in a room with a bunch of strangers and everybody’s getting to know each other, everybody after the first day but then we are big nerds. We love art. It’s the same thing that happens in the classroom whenever you’re having an art discussion. 

Cindy Ingram: Yes, absolutely. 

Madalyn Gregory: That was what happened. We finally started to see the connecting thread. Me, you, and Jen were just going around the room like, “Oh, look at this, over here, the bird is doing this,” and trying to piece together what the story was. I think by the end of it, we looked up and everybody else had already finished but it was amusing to watch them watch us too because they were like, “Oh, okay, we can get into this. This is not a really stuffy event. Let’s all just be really excited about art together.” 

Cindy Ingram: Yes, I love it because we were overly excited, almost embarrassingly excited about just how delightful it was. We were just so utterly delighted by these magic birds. That moment when you look up and everybody’s done, and we’re the only ones left, we’re like, “Oh, we’re leaving this thing.” I guess we should keep teaching this thing but it was fun. It’s something I’ve thought about before recently is that when I was younger, I would get excited about things that other people didn’t think were as cool. I would get overly excited by something ridiculous. I still do that, like the way a tree is growing or something totally random, I get overly excited about it and people roll their eyes at me. They’re like, “Why are you so excited about this?” I feel like people stuff that out. I love how excited we got about those. 

Madalyn Gregory: We were completely unironically enthusiastic. 

Cindy Ingram: Totally charmed and totally devoted. 

Madalyn Gregory: Those are the moments that we want to have and that we want to inspire. I think that’s a big reason why over the years, it has shifted away from appreciation and into connection. It was so special on the second day especially to see that happen for the teachers because we hear stories all the time from people who have just found us or people that are members of the library that are having these moments with their students. But to have it as just an individual and as an adult among other adults, that was a very special experience too that I think is just way too rare. 

Cindy Ingram: It reminds me there have been times when I’ve been teaching a work of art with a group of kids where somebody makes some observation that is so brilliant, so delightful, and so interesting that everybody is just so excited about that idea. You feel like you’re a part of a community, you feel you’ve got this shared experience together, this shared connection. You feel disconnected in a way that people don’t feel connected that often.

Madalyn Gregory: It reminds me of The Gottman Institute. They talk about relationships more romantically but I think it works with really any group of people. The magic connection that really happens in relationships is whenever people are together looking at a third thing. I think that’s even one of their things, the third thing. It’s you and another person. You’re looking at the third thing. Can you both look at it together and have this moment around it? That’s what we were doing but it wasn’t the third thing, it was however many people were there. That magic of people looking at something together, art is the perfect thing for that. It opens up a relationship in a way that nothing else can.

Cindy Ingram: That was so fun. The rest of the day we spent really dialing into the personal connection element. After that, we headed over to our second art museum which was the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. If you have never been to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, you are missing out. They have an amazing building, an amazing collection. It was a perfect place for this activity because the art is mostly modern and contemporary. I think the earliest stuff they have is like a Picasso. The earliest stuff they have is probably from the 1930s and 1940s. But most of it, they have a lot of abstract expressionism. Then they have a lot of contemporary art as well. They have Kehinde Wiley. They have all sorts of a wide variety of modern and contemporary art.

I was really worried about doing this. This is always something I’ve wanted to try but I was a little nervous about it. I even paired it down a little bit with those nerves. What I wanted to do is first, we gave everyone an opportunity to just explore the museum on their own so that they got to see everything. We spent, I think an hour maybe. Everybody explored the museum. Then their task was to pick one artwork, spend 20 minutes with it and only that artwork. I wanted to do 30 but I was like, “Oh they might revolt at me with 30. That feels too long,” so we did 20. As the assignment was, you pick an artwork, you sit in front of it. Then we had the gallery stools, they didn’t have to stand. You’re not allowed to Google it. You’re not allowed to get on your phone at all. You can take notes. You can sketch. You can read the label but you can’t leave your artwork that you chose.

I chose a Rothko because I wanted to choose something challenging for myself. I knew a lot of people had really strong emotional connections to Rothko and I’ve never really had that so I was like, “Let’s see what happens.” Everybody goes to their artwork. I was planning on going and  taking pictures of people, but instead, I just hung out with my artwork, set a timer for 20 minutes. We all came back and 20 minutes was not enough time. Instead of them revolting, everybody was like, “We need more time.”

Madalyn Gregory: It was so great because I had the same anxiety. I was like, “No, it’s going to be great,” but whenever it actually came time, because we gave everybody time to look and pick, I picked mine out and I went back up there. I remember sitting down being like, “It’s going to be really hard to not look at my phone,” or do whatever, but I got settled. The only reason I knew that 20 minutes had passed—because I wasn’t smart, I didn’t set a timer—was that I saw one of the other workshop participants walking back downstairs. I was like, “Wait, what?” and I looked at my phone and it had been 20 minutes. It was so great.

Cindy Ingram: Yeah. I try to but I don’t deliberately spend quiet uninterrupted time, not on a device, not watching a show, not even reading a book. I was very quiet, settled on moving time, undistracted time. It was really lovely to be in that space. Then it was really lovely for me too, as the leader of this event too, I was feeling these energetic tugs in all the areas of the museum. I felt connected to everybody in the museum that was with me but they weren’t with me, looking at the same artwork. I was alone for 20 minutes over this artwork but I didn’t feel alone, I felt I was with you all still. It was a really weird feeling but it felt really good.

Madalyn Gregory: It was very meditative. It just made me want to go and do that every single day. It was hard to even fully articulate, but whenever we did come back together as a group, everybody said the same thing. They were worried. They thought they were going to get bored but our brains are story making machines so even if you’re looking at something very abstract, which a few people had chosen, you don’t stop coming up with new ideas and new insights. We’re connection making machines in a way. It was great.

Cindy Ingram: We all did that then we joined back together in a gallery. We didn’t walk around to everybody’s artwork because there was a big museum, everybody was tired at that point, but we all shared which artwork we sat in front of and what our insights were. It was so wonderful to hear all the different connections people made. There were a couple people who made really strong connections to their own art-making practice. They picked something that is something that they maybe would be drawn to like in their own practice. They learned some drawing tips by looking at it. They learned ways of composing. There was someone who recently had a death in the family and they had an intense connection with the artwork because of that. Didn’t you choose like more like a feminist type of one? Did you do the one upstairs with the text?

Madalyn Gregory: It didn’t have text. I do this weird thing whenever I really have a strong connection with art where I don’t take pictures. I don’t know why but I don’t remember. I don’t remember the artist or the name. It might still be there but it was black and white. It was from the neck up, a portrait of what looked like a black woman but then there was also a theater scene in the back. It was all smooshed. It looked like someone had taken the wet paint, flattened out the top of it and so it was almost ruined but not. 

Cindy Ingram: It was Lorna Simpson.

Madalyn Gregory: Yes, yes. There was an iceberg feeling.

Cindy Ingram: It was just so powerful to just sit in a room and hear everyone’s personal connections to the art that they saw. It made me want to do more activities like that and more groups like that. Coming up in the next couple months, I’ve got a new program coming up that’s not related to this. If you’re just really inspired by this particular part, we’ve got more for you coming up too in addition to this workshop. We did that then we had lunch. We were at the Modern. We ate lunch at the Modern because it has a delicious cafe. They have that food that was really good. We had lunch and then we met back again at the Fort Worth Community Art Center after lunch. This is spoiling it a little but hopefully, it’ll be fine.

Madalyn Gregory: You’ll forget.

Cindy Ingram: You’ll forget, yeah. Don’t think too hard about this or remember it too hard. We got back and we talked a little bit about how we like to pair art making with the art connection experiences. We don’t want to do copy versions. We want to be inspired by it but we don’t want it just to be like, “Here’s an iceberg, let’s paint icebergs.” We want you to find a personal connection. What we did with the art making in the afternoon is we said, “Okay, so you spent this time with the artwork, now make an artwork that is inspired by your experience with the artwork at the Modern.” We had an hour, maybe two, or an hour and a half, I don’t remember, it was plenty of time, everybody had time to finish, and we had collage materials out. We had paint. We had markers and colored pencils. We had the leftovers from people’s covers for the sketchbooks. We just let it be open. I like more structure so I was worried about this. I was like, “Oh, what if this just flops?” Oh, it didn’t flop at all. It was so good. The art that those teachers made so deeply personal and related to their own personal journey, related to the art but not copies of it, you could see their personality in the artwork, it was just pure magic.

Madalyn Gregory: I am getting teary thinking about it. I want to find the right words because, like I said, everybody was starting to connect more and more and find their people even within the group. We almost forgot to look at the art together because—we haven’t talked about it yet—but we did another thing after they made the art but before we all looked at it together and they’re like, “But oh no, we’ve got to show each other the art.” It ended up being the absolute best part because art making is always deeply personal no matter what it is about. But to have just sat in front of art and had this intense experience, to immediately go back and be inspired by it, and make something from it, everybody had something different but every piece revealed something about themselves. There’s always going to be a couple that aren’t as talkative. Even those people, it came alive. I felt like I really got to see every individual person and it just overwhelmed me. Several people were teary because it was so good.

Cindy Ingram: That day, it’s a highlight of all of my teaching life. I feel it was a highlight and I’ve taught a lot of groups of people over the course of my career. That was one of the best days, absolutely one of the best days. Because it came together, we saw all the things we’ve been talking about with art connection, all the things that are meaningful to us that we spend so much time thinking about, talking about at Art Class Curator, just to see it happen in real time right in front of us, it was so good .

We did another activity too that day. I honestly can’t even remember all the days. We’re recording this in October. You’re going to listen to this in November. The workshop was in July so I don’t remember all the art, I do have videos of it all. I just remember the one where she took elements of everybody’s book covers and collaged them together into a landscape with a boat.

Madalyn Gregory: Yeah. She made leaves out of the different parts of everybody’s notebooks but it was like a river or lake scene. It was like a pop out because she likes to kayak. There’s the kayak going into the notebook. That was incredible. 

Cindy Ingram: So much good. The last thing we did on that day was—I like to do a culminating activity—we went to our third museum, which was the Kimbell Art Museum which is another really beautiful space. They have a very wide collection of art. It’s perfect for this activity. They have art from all over the world. They have art up until basically when the Modern started their art in the 1940’s, Kimbell goes up until that date but they have Egypt. They have pre-columbian art. Then they have one or two of each type. They don’t have 10 examples of ancient Egypt art. They have one really good example of ancient Egypt art. It’s a really cool museum. What we did was they got into groups then they planned an art activity. They looked at the artwork together. They thought about how they would teach it with their kids. They planned the discussion, planned an engaging activity, and planned a project. Everybody went and did that, then everybody presented their activities to the group. That’s always really fun because you get to just take everything that you learn from the whole two days and apply it all together, and actually practice what you’ve been learning.

Madalyn Gregory: I feel like the way we talk about art education is so different than what I feel like anybody else is doing. It’s amazing to see the teachers who, whether they have followed us since the beginning or just recently found us, wanted to do a workshop to see the absolute magic of doing it this way, of not just being a 100% art making and project focused but to really dig deep and get to the emotions and the stories, not just behind the artwork but behind the individuals, behind your students, and behind yourself, to see that culminate in lessons and questions that they wanted to ask their students. They wanted to show them artwork that was going to mean something to them. They did have fantastic project ideas at the end of it. Every artwork was so different and every lesson was, even though they all followed the same format, they were as individual as the teachers themselves.

Cindy Ingram: It was so fun. The one that stands out to me the most was I’m not participating in the activity, I was just walking around watching people taking pictures and dropping in on groups. I was watching this one group with this painting. It’s Frederic Leighton’s Portrait of May Sartoris. I was watching them pick this painting and I was like, “Oh, that is not the one I would have picked. That one seems weird. I can’t wait to see what they did.” But they were into it. I was watching them and they were talking and talking and talking and then they went over to a table and they’re working and working. They were just so engaged in this activity. Then the activity that they chose, that they did was so good. It was about fashion and the kids planned their own. I don’t know what the project was but it was some fashion related project. I was just amazed at where they went with it because it was just not one that I would have chosen, that I would have naturally been drawn too, but they were so into it.

What I loved was the way we talked about art connection, it’s not about art history, it’s not about, “Okay, let’s learn about Frederic Leighton and let’s learn about how he painted and let’s learn about May Sartoris, whoever this is in this painting. Then we’re going to learn all about them and I’m going to tell you all about that, then you’re going to write that down, then you’re going to do a portrait.” It’s something different, something bigger, or something more connected that yes, the student doesn’t then know all about Frederic Leighton or May Sartoris but they have looked at this painting and they found their way into it. They found themselves in it. I think that to me is more important than any fact I could tell them or anything. I think you don’t really truly understand it until you’ve been in the room and experienced that magic for yourself. Once I realized it existed, I became addicted to it. I dedicated my whole life like, “I gotta keep doing this because this feels so magical, important and meaningful to me that I just want everyone to have that same experience, the same magic.” 

Madalyn Gregory: It’s the teaching high and the light bulb moments all rolled up into one. The last couple years, everybody has been abuzz about social emotional learning and teaching the whole child. This is that. If you look back at your own school experience, do you remember every fact that you wrote down? Do you remember the perfect timeline of what you learned in history? Or if you did have art history in college? There might be moments or little details that you remember but we remember how people made us feel and the connections that we make in learning far more than we remember dates and figures or how to draw a line or any of that. This way of connecting with art, connecting with students, and connecting with each other really is the whole package. If you can do this consistently and have this in your classroom, like you said, you made your own little museum and that’s what the classroom can be. That’s what you can be for all of your students if you just let it happen.

Cindy Ingram: That was good. That’s all that needs to be said about that workshop. That was really so powerful, so good and that’s what this can be in your classroom, like what Madalyn was saying. It really can be that way. I had a lot of these types of moments in my classroom where you just saw those light bulbs, you saw those connections. You knew your students better and they knew themselves better. It’s just truly beautiful. If you want to come to this workshop, we have it scheduled.

Madalyn Gregory: And you should.

Cindy Ingram: And you should. Absolutely, you should because it is so so good. The workshop will be June 22nd, 23rd, and 24th, 2022. You notice I added in a third day. Like I said the first workshops we did, people wanted more. That happened this time too, they wanted more. We’re not adding a full third day, we’re adding in a reception or a social hour, social time on the 22nd in the late afternoon or early evening. The bulk of the workshop will be the 23rd and the 24th, which is a Thursday and Friday. It will again be at the Fort Worth Community Arts Center. Then on the 22nd, we will have a special get together and that way we can get to know each other before we dive into the art connection and learning, we can have a little meet and greet. The hours of that will be sent to you once you register. But if you do register, you can plan on something at four o’clock or after on the 22nd in the afternoon.

If you would like to register, you can go to artclasscurator.com/experience. We have early bird pricing right now until the end of 2021, so until January 1st, you can register for $389 and that’s what we charged last year and so we’re adding more to it. If you’d register for our workshop before the end of 2021, you can get a bonus of getting all of the recordings for Call to Art 1 and  Call to Art 2, which are the conferences that we did in 2020. It has over 50 hours of professional development sessions. I think the number of presenters is 75 plus presenters. Tons of amazing sessions to hold you over until the summer. You can get that if you register before the end of the year as well. You can register at artclasscurator.com/experience and we will accept a P.O if your school wants to pay for it. I promise you this is going to be another really magical, I keep saying magical but it just really was, a really wonderful, wonderful session that we hope to meet you at. Any final words from you, Madalyn, about this amazing workshop?

Madalyn Gregory: Just come, be unironically enthusiastic about art with us, and you’re going to connect with art and connect with other art teachers. Just enjoy yourself and it’s going to be a vacation and professional development all rolled up into one. You’re going to love it, so come.

Cindy Ingram: All right. Thank you again, Madalyn, for joining me to talk about this workshop today. 

Madalyn Gregory: Always a pleasure. 

Cindy Ingram: I hope to see you all listening at our summer workshop in June of 2022. It’s artclasscurator.com/experience. I will see you again next week on the Art Class Curator Podcast. Bye.

When you’re a teacher, one thing is certain, the lesson planning never ends. The Curated Connections Library is here to help with hundreds of art connection lessons and activities. Our signature SPARK Works lessons include everything you need to teach an artwork every single week. Each lesson features one diverse and captivating work of art and is complete with discussion questions, engaging activities to create deeper art connections, and related art project ideas. With unique worksheets and PowerPoint presentations, every lesson is classroom-ready. Get your free SPARK Works lesson and take a break from lesson planning by going to artclasscurator.com/freelesson.

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• Connecting With Works of Art Meditation

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Cindy Ingram: Hello and welcome to The Art Class Curator Podcast. I am Cindy Ingram, your host and the founder of Art Class Curator, and The Curated Connections Library. We’re here to talk about teaching art with purpose and inspiration from the daily delights of creativity to the messy mishaps that come with being a teacher. Whether you’re driving home from school or cleaning up your classroom for the 15th time today, take a second, take a deep breath, relax those shoulders, and let’s get started.

Hello and welcome back to The Art Class Curator Podcast. I am so excited to be with you today to talk about one of the most meaningful things to me with works of art. That is, of course, the emotional, personal connection to works of art. I recently emailed my email list, you might have gotten it, about this new program that I am currently in the middle of called the Art Connection Circle. The email talked about connection to art and whatnot, and had you all reply to the email if you were interested in learning more and I got such amazing beautiful responses to that email. I can’t even tell you, I was just filled with joy reading all of your emails. I did my very best to respond to each one personally. But one of them really stuck with me and I thought for sure this is a great podcast topic. I can’t find the exact email. I tried to search for it with some terms that I remember us using but I can’t get the exact quote. But basically, what the email said was that this person found themselves, when they went to art museums connecting with art, they found themselves really engaging with the art based on what they knew but not what they were actually seeing there live in the museum.

I found that to be so poignant because I’ve seen that to be true of myself in the past too, especially when I was younger, but also while walking through a museum and observing everybody that’s there, you’ll see people walking around with a friend or someone and they’re just sharing information that they know about the artwork or the artist. It’s like, “Here’s van Gogh. This is about his life. These are the colors he liked to use. These are the types of brushstrokes that he liked to use. This is the story I know about the artwork,” that kind of stuff, and we as art teachers know a lot about works of art. We’ve taken art history classes, we’ve engaged with the works in many sorts of ways and so we know a lot about them. When we go to an art museum, we could fall into this pattern of knowing and engaging with the artwork through that lens.

I don’t necessarily think that’s all bad, but I do think that maybe there’s another way and that’s what I want to talk about today. I’ve told this story recently. If you listened to my interview with Lisa Carpenter a few weeks ago, I told her the story of when I decided to study art education instead of art history. I’ll tell you that again just in case you didn’t hear that story originally that is very relevant to this particular topic. When I was younger, this was in 2004, I was in the middle of applying to graduate programs in art history. I was applying to PhD programs, I’ve taken my GRE and I was writing all the essays. I had my list of places I was applying to and some of them had already been sent off. On New Year’s day of 2004, I visited Houston. At the time, the MoMA in New York City was being remodeled and they sent a lot of the art down to Texas. That was so very exciting for me as a young early 20s person who could not afford to travel to New York City to be able to see these artworks that I knew and loved and that I’d studied and everything.

We drove down to Houston from the Dallas area and in the morning, we went to the museum and came back after we saw the exhibit because we couldn’t even afford a hotel room. We were pretty broke back then. When I got to that exhibit, I immediately made—this is not a part of the story that I told Lisa said the other day—but what the first observation that I made upon entering, the very first room, I believe, had The Starry Night in it, had some van Gogh, had The Starry Night, and probably other artwork from that era. I don’t remember what else was in the room. But the thing I noticed was that there was an audio guide and there were just tons of people because it was a holiday, a lot of people took the day off, this was a time where people are going to the museum. All of the audio guide tour stops had just droves of people standing in front of them with the machine to their ear. Now they do it on cell phones but back then, they had this little handheld thing that you held up to your ear and you typed in the number and it told you about the art. I noticed that no one was looking at the other artworks, it was only the ones that had audio guide stops. I was like, “Wow, that is really interesting.”

I didn’t have an audio guide. I usually don’t get them, mainly because I want to experience it for myself. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. They have gotten really good though. I’ve noticed that they’ll play music and they’re pretty cool, but I like to be with myself and the art without a third party interjecting into my ear. Anyway, that was the first observation I noticed and it made me start to wonder, “Is that helping or hindering people’s enjoyment of the art?” I think it’s probably both depending on the person. That was my first observation. Then what happened next was there was this long room that you walked into and then you turned a corner to get to the next room, and when I walked into that room I saw Picasso’s Girl Before A Mirror and it knocked me over. I had been aware of the painting before. I had always been a fan of Picasso. He was one of my favorite artists. I just really always resonated with his art. I was just completely blown away. I cried. I couldn’t leave it. I stayed in front of that painting for so very long.

I ended up writing a whole four-page essay in the car on the way home—no, it wasn’t even in the car, I don’t remember because I didn’t have a computer, how did I write it? Anyway, I still have it so I might read you a bit of it in just a minute. But I was not only mesmerized by my connection to it, I felt a deep connection to the subject matter, the girl looking into the mirror and not seeing herself reflected back but seeing this distorted purpley thing. At the time in my life, I had felt a lot of social anxiety and had been newly diagnosed with social anxiety and I really resonated with that message and painting. But the other thing that I really started to think about was how powerful this connection is to art, how I can look at a painting and I can feel so deeply. It was almost scary how powerful that feeling was. It just overtook me. It came really the first time that I recognized my deep capacity for art connection and it made me recognize that one of the first times in my life where I have recognized that more information is not necessarily the right path. I’ve always been a learner. I want to know everything. I want to understand the world. I have a constant curious thirst for knowledge and information. That was one of the first times that I realized that to exist in the question, to exist in the moment, was magical. I wasn’t going there to learn about the art, I was going there to experience the art, to be with it, and to learn about myself through my engaging with the art. That was a really important distinction that I don’t know that I had ever really fully realized up until that point.

Before I move on to keep talking, I want to share with you a little bit of what I wrote that day. It turns out it wasn’t four pages but six pages. I went and looked for my little essay that I wrote. I wrote a whole bunch about other stuff too. I wrote a bunch about my social anxiety and things but let me talk to you about what I had realized about the painting after I saw it. Here is a little bit of an excerpt from my essay that I wrote in 2004 after looking at this artwork.

As I stared into this dark contrast of the blue and orange mirror frame, my mind started to wonder. I realized that what I was looking at, according to my own eyes and heart, was pure unadulterated perfection. This painting, with paint so rich and so deep, is perfect. I became scared of it, which is the main focus of why I’m writing about it today, but mesmerized at the same time. Scared of this feeling that it created in me and scared that this feeling, if I continue to study art history, will never come back. I’m afraid if I stare at it long enough, it will lose this perfection. Additionally, I worry that if I take my eyes off of it for just a second, it won’t be the same when I look again. I begin to realize that I don’t want to deconstruct modern art and take away its essential meaning and value. I want to leave the mystery in the paintings themselves. I want to see the artworks for what they are and not for the analysis and art historian who could be me someday pinned on it. Had I been more familiar with this particular painting, would I have reacted in such a way? If I knew more about the particulars of the subject matter or that particular time frame in Picasso’s life or what he was thinking about the day that he placed those aqua stripes on the woman’s stomach, would it have still knocked me off my feet as it did yesterday afternoon?

I fear becoming too close to modern art that it loses its excitement. Did staring at and deconstructing the Man with a Pipe ruined the rest of Picasso’s similar cubist works for me? I’m sure it did because at the MFAH, I walked right past two works identical in palette and style to Man with a Pipe because it seemed to be old news. I know I will not have this reaction again to Girl Before A Mirror if I am to someday make it to New York City because it cannot be duplicated or fabricated again and again. I’m not naive enough to believe that each time I see a work of art, I will have the same reaction.

I go on and on in this essay. I started to talk about artworks that were once exciting to me and that now are not because of my education and stuff. To continue on with Girl Before A Mirror just to illustrate the truth of this—I never have done any research on that painting but I have seen it three times now in person and each time, I had a completely different experience with it. It is really beautiful to me how I can go back again and again to a work of art that I connected to and I can experience them in new ways. Sometimes they do lose their magic. Sometimes, the next time, I don’t have as much of a connection to it but that connection changes and then the memory of the past connections join in. The second time I saw Girl Before A Mirror was another pivotal point in my life; it was in 2014. Oh, it’s exactly 10 years later. That is great. I had listened to a podcast about someone traveling around the world, and I realized I deeply wanted her life. I was like, “I want to do that.” Then what I realized at that moment was I haven’t been following my magic and I haven’t been living my life to the fullest and that I was feeling stuck. That’s the year that I made some really big decisions in my life. I started my business, did some personal work. One of the first things I did was I booked a trip. I hadn’t traveled in many years. We just didn’t have the money to travel for so long. But I listened to that. I was just like, “I’m going somewhere.”

I’ve always wanted to go to New York City. It’s just this place hanging over my head like, “I have to go there,” and I just couldn’t make it there. Anyway, on a whim, I went there. It was really a life-changing year but what happened when I looked at Girl Before A Mirror this time was I had reconnected with the magic that it had had 10 years before and it also reconnected me with my love of art. I had been working in education, I had been working with art but I had lost touch with that emotional connection and I had lost touch with myself. I feel like I lost myself for a period of time. I had gained a bunch of weight. One of the reasons I didn’t travel was that I couldn’t fit in an airplane seat and in 2014 was when I realized I could get two airplane seats and so that was pretty exciting. At that time, when I looked at the painting the second time, I realized again this was me looking into the mirror and not resonating with what I see. Both times, there was this feeling of a disconnect with me that I needed to work on connecting with myself even more. That painting is always a reminder of who I am and who I want to be and how to get there. It’s been guiding me all along these years. I can still talk about it with such joy because it has helped me through my life again and again; this painting has.

Had I known who that was and what was going on in Picasso’s life when he did that, and if I’d come into the museum that day ready to spout art historical facts about Picasso, I would have closed myself off to that connection. This story is here to encourage you, when you’re engaging with works of art, to turn off that part of your brain that wants to explain, that wants to say, “Oh, this reminds me of this other artist,” or “Oh, this was his blue period,” or this was his whatever or this related to that. All of that stuff can increase your connection to the artwork. It can provide really cool interesting stories and value to the artwork. But if you’re not careful, that can take away the joy, the spirit, the life, and the magic from that art connection.

I was talking recently with one of my coaches. We were talking about this idea of knowing too much. I told her the story of the Girl Before A Mirror. I had also told her this story of what I did one time, this four hours of silence exercise. I highly recommend you try it out, it was brilliant, so I was going to do four hours of silence and what it teaches you is really what your mind is up to and how your thoughts are just constantly moving. It really allows you to be present with yourself and your thoughts. I had already done it once before but the second time I did it, I was at a lake house. We did like a family vacation to a lake house. This was last year when my girls were doing remote learning. They did their school work in the morning and my husband was working. Everybody was working, so I just sat by this window at this lake house and stared out the window. I was like, “No one’s allowed to talk to me for four hours. I’m just going to close myself in this room. I’m going to sit here on this chair with this blanket. I’m just going to stare at this window.”

What I realized in that moment is I spent a good hour analyzing a squirrel. I watched every movement of that squirrel. I watched it. He just never left the area. It was just climbing up the tree and eating some nuts. The squirrel was just hanging out. In my four hours of silence, I wasn’t allowed to get out my phone, I wasn’t allowed to Google things about squirrels,and so I just allowed myself to exist in my curiosity about that squirrel and exist in my wonder of who he or she is and how they are and how they came to be and what their purpose is on this planet. It was so fun.

The more I know about the world, the more I realize there still is to know, especially with science, I love studying space and I’m obsessed with watching space shows and things like that, and it just blows my mind that the more we know about space, the universe, and everything beyond, the more we don’t know. For someone who’s always been a black and white thinker, there’s a right and a wrong, and there’s a correct answer and an incorrect answer, these interactions with art and these interactions with information, curiosity, space, and psychology, it helps me realize that there is no true one answer and that we can look for those answers within us. The answers are within us. That’s something I talk about with teaching all the time, that a lot of teachers will resort to telling about the artwork in their classes, they’ll give information, they’ll tell a story, they’ll read a book about the artist to the class but they don’t stop to show the artwork and talk about it. We’re skipping the part that has the most area for growth. The most area for excitement and energy is that space spent not knowing, that space spent in wonder, that space spent in curiosity, that space spent in conversation, that space spent in just being present with the artwork.

I started to talk about this conversation I was having with my coach and I just went off on some other random tangent. What she had talked to me about was that she had a father figure in her life that had told her that when you’re—and I’m probably going to butcher this because she was telling me his quote and then she couldn’t remember exactly what he had said and now I’m rephrasing what she had said about him, so this is like a telephone situation—but that when you’re engaging with an object, there are two ways you can do it; externally and internally. But I don’t even know if externally versus internally is the right thing. You can come at it from this place of, okay, what I know about it, what it reminds me of, that art historical information or we’re just saying objects so what information you know about it, its function and whatnot, or you can just be present with it and let it communicate with you what it is there to communicate with you about.

When you’re engaging with a work of art at an art museum, clear your mind of what you know about the artist, clear your mind of what you know about the technique, and just allow the artwork to seep into your being. Be with it. Be present with it. Be mindful of it. Notice it. Then you’re going to make those connections and you can bring in what you know and that can add some rich textures to it. But start with just engaging with the artwork with it and take the pressure off. This is a shorter episode but it’s really important to me and I think it’s important to teach our students to really be present and mindful. I have only just very recently realized that what I’m doing when I’m looking at art is meditation, because I’m a very black and white thinker and I’m a very right or wrong person, things are right, things are wrong. To me, meditation is this way, you sit and you clear your mind and you do a body scan or you do a meditation recording. That is how you meditate. Any other ways you’re being mindful, any ways I’m being mindful in my life or in front of a work of art, or listening to a piece of music, that’s not meditation because I’m not sitting a certain way and doing it this right way. Just allowing myself to view that space as meditation, that space in front of the artwork as meditation, has allowed me to give myself some grace and allowed myself to really sink into that presence with the works of art. It’s just a subtle mindset shift as well.

That was a little bit of a side note but I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. If you have anything pop up, please feel free to email me at cindy@artclasscurator.com. If you’re interested in having these conversations about art that are about the deep inner work that can come with works of art, I would love for you to join my email list. We have a new freebie which is a meditation about connecting with works of art. If you’re interested in checking that out, you can go to artclasscurator.com/meditation. It is not just for teachers, it is for anyone who is interested in exploring art in this way. Go to artclasscurator.com/meditation. Thank you so much for joining me today at The Art Class Curator Podcast. I look forward to seeing you again next week. Bye.

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Cindy Ingram: Hello and welcome to The Art Class Curator Podcast. I am Cindy Ingram, your host and the founder of Art Class Curator, and The Curated Connections Library. We’re here to talk about teaching art with purpose and inspiration from the daily delights of creativity to the messy mishaps that come with being a teacher. Whether you’re driving home from school or cleaning up your classroom for the 15th time today, take a second, take a deep breath, relax those shoulders, and let’s get started. 

Hello everybody. Welcome back to The Art Class Curator Podcast. This is Cindy Ingram. Today, I’ve got Madalyn Gregory again with me in the Zoom studio. Hi, Madalyn. 

Madalyn Gregory: Hello. 

Cindy Ingram: I want to say in the studio, like it was fancy but we were not in a studio. We were in our offices. You’re in your closet. 

Madalyn Gregory: I am in my closet. I live on a very loud street. 

Cindy Ingram: What we’re going to talk about with you today is The Art Class Curator Summer Workshop. This is probably my favorite thing that we do every year. It is the thing that fills my soul the most. It’s the thing I enjoy the most. It gives me the most energy and excitement for the work that I do. We’ve done it four times. This year was the year I think we finally were like, “Yes, this is how the workshop should be. This is perfect.” It can never be perfect but I’ll tell you how we’re going to make it different next year too. We’re going to tell you about it, tell you how you can join us next summer, and just talk about our experience with the workshop. Are you ready? 

Madalyn Gregory: I am so excited. 

Cindy Ingram: What we do every year is if some of you know, I used to work in museum education and one of my roles as a museum educator was to do teacher programs. We would do teacher workshops, we would do teacher happy hours, we would write lessons for teachers, all sorts of things, but there’s nothing that can replace actually being in a real art museum with other people, talking about the art. It’s just magic to me is what it is. I feel like in my job at Art Class Curator, I’ve created my own little museum. I get to explore works of art. I get to talk about art for my job. I get to share it with the world. I get to share it with students and teachers but there is something different and something special about actually being in the same space with the artwork. That’s what we do for this workshop. We actually do visit art museums and spend time in them together. The best part of it to me is to just be in the space.

We started offering this workshop about five years ago. The first one, we did in Dallas. I did it at a co-working space conference room. We spent most of the day in the conference room, then the afternoon, we headed over to the Dallas Museum of Art where we wrapped up a lot of the work that we did. Then two years after that, we did the Meadows Museum, which is on the SMU campus in Dallas. We were actually in a classroom at the Meadows. I love their education team. They’re great collaborators. It was really lovely. But all three of those workshops that we did, the biggest feedback that we got on our surveys at the end, everybody was like, “It was so great.” Otherwise, the heat, people were like, “It’s hot outside. You made us go outside and it’s hot.” But the biggest thing that we saw was people wanted more time. That one day was not enough time to really dive into the content, like we wanted. In the past years, we did a lot of how to discuss art with kids or with your students, how to lead engaging activities with works of art, and we packed all of that into that six to eight hour time frame.

This year, we decided it would be wise to try to add a second day so that we could slow down. Also, if you’ve been following us for a long time, you’ve noticed that our focus has really shifted to a more of a personal connection with works of art. We really wanted that to be a strong component in the workshop as well, that not only how are you going to bring the art to your students but how are you personally going to connect with the works of art too. That will fuel your students’ art connections if you were personally connected to art. We added the second day to really allow ourselves the time to develop those art connections. That second day made all the difference in the world. 

Madalyn Gregory: It was magical. I’m so excited to get into it. It’s funny too because it was the same time of year but this year with the extra day, everybody was getting to know each other better, they actually walked and wanted to go outside, walk to the museums because we were just down the street from them. It was fantastic. I’m so excited to do it again. 

Cindy Ingram: You’ve never seen three more excited people. Me, Madalyn, and Jen were at the workshop. At five o’clock, it was over and no one wanted to leave. Everybody just felt connected to each other. We were all having a hard time walking away. We were so excited and so thrilled by the workshop, and the connections that we made, that we did not stop talking from 5:00 PM until 1:00 AM. We were staying in an Airbnb. We ordered Uber Eats food and we just talked, and talked and talked, and talked and talked until we couldn’t talk anymore because we just had such a wonderful experience. I can’t wait to tell you all about that.

This year, we did it in Fort Worth, Texas. We moved across the Metroplex. It was perfect. This summer in 2022—2022, can you believe that?—we’re going to do it in the same place. The workshop is at the Fort Worth Community Arts Center. What’s beautiful about that is that Fort Worth, if you’ve never been, has really amazing art museums. There are three main art museums. They’re all across the street from each other in the Cultural Arts District. The Fort Worth Community Arts Center is right across the street as well. All three museums that we visited and the space for the workshop were all within walking distance, really close to each other. 

Madalyn Gregory: The Community Arts Center had art of its own. It was really like its own little mini museum too. It was great. 

Cindy Ingram: The workshop is in the galleries. We’re not just in a conference room. We were like in the room with the art too. The art was so cool at the space. Oh, so good. Another thing that made it so special this year is we’ve been living through this pandemic and most of us had the opportunity to spend time with our colleagues for so long, so it felt so good to be in the room with people again after such a long, long hiatus of that.

The other thing that we wanted to add to the workshop by adding the second day was to add more art making. In the galleries and past workshops, we would do drawing activities and things like that but we never really did any real art making. That was another goal of ours for this year was to add that component in because we’re art teachers, we want to have the chance to make it too. Making art, inspired by art in the galleries surrounded by art with other people who love art just gives me chills thinking about it. It’s so good. I was going to go through the outline of what we did in the workshop to tell you guys about it and part of me feels like I’m spoiling it if you were to come again but also I don’t think so because it’s a fluid thing because the art is always changing and the ideas are always changing, that hearing about it is not the same as living through it. 

Madalyn Gregory: The people are always changing. We have one person who is a member of The Curated Connections Library that signed up every single time and actually missed one due to life but he has come every single time that he could, and continues to enjoy it and see what changes. Even though some of the stuff we talk about might be the same, it’s going to be a unique experience every time. 

Cindy Ingram: You change too. With the connection being so strong, with the personal connection to a work of art, what happened to you in the last year is relevant to your experience. Depending on where you are in your life, every time you come, you’re going to have new layers of experience based on that as well. Our first day at the workshop was the same format as our past workshops where we did a lot of talk about art discussion, how to lead art discussions. I led sample art discussions, then we also talked about strategies for that, then one of the things that we did differently this year was that we had the participants make their own sketchbooks when they came in on the first day and we taught that process, how to stitch them, hand stitch them, we painted covers for them. You learned about how to fold the paper, how to stitch, how to tape it all together. That was so fun. I love my sketchbook. I value it. I’m never going to throw it away. I think it’s so cool.

I think it was such a cool thing because then all the participants of the workshop had a place to keep all their notes and now they have this memento or document of their memories from the workshop that we made art in there, we did all the activities in there. We had the sketchbook that we used that’s a memento for the teachers but I love the idea of the kids making these in the class, the beginning of the school year too, because then all of your art connection, things that you do, all of your warm-ups, and things can happen in those sketchbooks. I think the student is less likely to want to throw it away at the end of the year if it’s a book that they’ve made and they’ve invested so much into it rather than just some cheap spiral notebook that they just throw away at the end of the year. 

Madalyn Gregory: It was a process. It definitely took a little more time than we thought it was going to but it was so much fun. They’re so personalizable. Because we just had a bunch of different paints and stuff out there, everybody came out looking so different. You could add as many or as few pages as you wanted to. All of the worksheets and stuff that we used, everybody just glued in, so it was just this one thing that we could take around. You didn’t have to worry about it. I love the scrapbook nature of that because it becomes the memory of the event in a way that it wouldn’t if you just had a folder that you threw in the back of your car at the end of the day. 

Cindy Ingram: I loved that time too because it was right at the beginning, we had already done introductions and stuff but it was a time that we got to chat with everybody there. We got to get to know people. The elementary teachers were talking to the high school teachers about like, “Well, how do we take this and drop this down to an elementary level to make the sketchbook easier for the little kids to make?” There’s a lot of talk about modifications. I think because we had that low-key time at the beginning, everyone had that chance to build some connections and foundations at the beginning that served us the rest of the workshop too. 

Madalyn Gregory: It was a great opportunity too to talk about just the art making process because no one had made them before. You didn’t really know how it was going to end up looking, even as you made your cover. There were several of the teachers who were like, “Oh, that didn’t come out how I wanted it to,” or whatever but then by the time it was all bound and all the pages were in it, everybody loved it because it’s that process of imperfection that you get to do with your students too, which was so fun to see and play out. I think you can forget that sometimes whenever you’re in front of the classroom all the time. 

Cindy Ingram: Speaking from my personal experience, I get really nervous making art with other art teachers because they’re so good and you’re just like, “Oh, I’m not going to be as good as that.” I get all of my crap about my own talents, so I always get a little bit apprehensive, and I did with this too because I wanted my stitches to be just so perfectly straight. I gave up midway through. I was like, “There’s no way of getting it.” But then actually now, I really love how imperfect they are. It was really fun. We all talked about our own creative processes and shared those. Other people had those same insecurities and we were just laughing about them. It was really fun. It was a really fun time. We did that in the Fort Worth Community Art Center. In the galleries around the art in our room was like, I forgot the name of the artist, I have to pull it up on my phone but I wanted to say it was a Mexican artist but he was very surrealist, very Frida Kahlo-like. 

Madalyn Gregory: Armando Sebastian

Cindy Ingram: Armando Sebastian, yes. But the art in the galleries was so cool, weird, and amazing. Every time you look around at anybody, you’re just also getting this awesome art behind us. We had such a kick out of the art that was in the room. Then we learned about art discussion, practice art discussion, then the first museum that we went to after lunch was at the Amon Carter Museum, which is across the street from the Fort Worth Community Arts Center. The focus of the Amon Carter Museum has been American art since about the 1840s and they also have a large photography collection as well. I used to work with Amon Carter as a gallery teacher back right before I was in grad school, so a lot of the art from the Amon Carter has ended up in The Curated Connections Library because I have such a strong connection to that art. I spent so much time with it, teaching back in 2004 I think is when I worked there. What we did in the Amon Carter is we went and we practiced a lot of the gallery activities that we teach at Art Class Curator, writing poems, drawing activities, all sorts of different activities that we did with works of art. It was a whirlwind. It was fast. We did a lot in a very short time but it was really fun. Is there any activity that really stood out to you? 

Madalyn Gregory: Oh, goodness. There was one where we were looking at the mobile. 

Cindy Ingram: Oh, yes. That one was so good. 

Madalyn Gregory: We had them do a kinesthetic activity. Was it a dance? 

Cindy Ingram: It was an interpretative dance.

Madalyn Gregory: Yeah, an interpretative dance of this mobile. One group just really went for it. It was so great. They got a standing ovation. It was amazing. 

Cindy Ingram: Yeah, one girl is wearing this really long skirt, it was a Calder mobile and she pulled out her skirt to make this really cool triangle shape, then she slowly spinned. We told them it had to be a group. It can’t be that they are all just moving separately. They had to be responding to each other. I’m doing all these movements like you can see me but they’re doing these movements, then that would trigger other movements. It was so good. I forgot about that one. 

Madalyn Gregory: I love that. I also loved the poetry activities that we did. We were in one of the smaller spaces and just had everybody pick an artwork they were drawn to, then they could do one of the poetry templates that we have. I remember two people chose the same artwork. To see their different interpretations and to really dive into how they saw it and everybody was giving their own little of what they saw on art, it was great. I loved that. 

Cindy Ingram: That one artwork that they both chose, it was so funny. Wasn’t it cork in just a pattern? 

Madalyn Gregory: I think it was pieces of wood, wasn’t it? 

Cindy Ingram: Yeah, it’s like wood or cork or it was just basically a wood texture that was pieced together. One person was really about more of the materials. Another person was more about the feelings of it. There were totally different interpretations coming out of this really simple artwork. They didn’t have a lot to it but really deep interpretations but totally different. I love that about art that two people can look at the same thing and have completely different experiences. It’s so fun.

These activities would change every time we do this because we picked the activities based on what art was there. Whatever art is there, we’re going to pick the best activity for that artwork. We don’t just have an activity, then pick an artwork. We let the artwork tell us what it wants. We did one where it was like this futuristic scene. It was like this giant painting. It was a stairwell. It was this giant futuristic thing, then they had to draw themselves as if that was their neighborhood or did they draw themselves or their home? No, I don’t remember. 

Madalyn Gregory: I’m looking at the artwork. They had to draw themselves as if they were a part of the painting. 

Cindy Ingram: It’s like in this futuristic robotic type of style, then they had to add themselves into it. A little drawing activity. We did lots of little things like that. We did elements and principles. I call it the elements and principles shuffle, which I’ve never actually put on the website but I’ve done it in workshops where you look at a painting, then you assign each person an element and/or a principle. Half of the people get an element. Half of the people get a principle. They look at the painting, they write their thoughts about it, then they have to pair up, so then an element person goes with the principle person. If the element person is a shape and the principle person is as a rhythm, they then have to discuss how the shape creates the rhythm or how the shape or the line creates the movement or whatever. Then they pair in different ways, then have little mini conversations, then we talk as a big group about it. It’s just one way to really analyze elements and principles, and how they work together. We did that there too. There were a lot of activities that we did in that two-hour span at the museum but it was awesome. I love it. 

Madalyn Gregory: I loved it because by the end of that day, people had already found your person. We had them mixing and matching in different groups, so everybody got to know everybody but by the end of that day, it was like, “Okay, I found somebody that I could hang with, my little teacher friend.” It was just so fun to see everybody come together around art. That’s what art teachers do. They’re so often the only one in school. 

Cindy Ingram: Oh yeah, getting to be with people who actually do the same job that you do, it’s not as common for art teachers as it is for other subject areas. The first day was super full. It was really inspiring and engaging. We had a lot of new ideas and energy around the artwork. We wanted the second day to really be focused on the personal connections with the works of art and really wanted to see what it was like to dedicate a whole day to really fostering that connection. We met again at the Fort Worth Community Art Center on the morning of day two and we did some warm-up activities in the galleries there. That was super fun. We did the memorization activity where you have the participants look at the painting for three to five minutes, then they have to turn their back, then recreate it and draw it, or I’ve also had students write about it or explain it and I draw it. There’s a lot of different ways to do it but we had the teachers drawing it. Do you know the name of the artist of that gallery?

Madalyn Gregory: With the birds? 

Cindy Ingram: With the birds. 

Madalyn Gregory: Gale Gibbs. 

Cindy Ingram: This is not really related to the workshop but we were in this gallery with this work by Gale Gibbs and they’re very narrative art but also very symbolic. There were all sorts of symbols in it, then we noticed as we were exploring the gallery after the activity that there were these birds in lots of the artworks, then they were magic birds. 

Madalyn Gregory: Yes. That was even the title of one of the paintings. It was like painting in collage. It was like mixed media. 

Cindy Ingram: But there was text on there. She writes stories onto the paintings too. Apparently, these magic birds would come and do something in this village. Then we started to realize that these magic birds were in all of the paintings, then we got so excited.

Madalyn Gregory: You’re in a room with a bunch of strangers and everybody’s getting to know each other, everybody after the first day but then we are big nerds. We love art. It’s the same thing that happens in the classroom whenever you’re having an art discussion. 

Cindy Ingram: Yes, absolutely. 

Madalyn Gregory: That was what happened. We finally started to see the connecting thread. Me, you, and Jen were just going around the room like, “Oh, look at this, over here, the bird is doing this,” and trying to piece together what the story was. I think by the end of it, we looked up and everybody else had already finished but it was amusing to watch them watch us too because they were like, “Oh, okay, we can get into this. This is not a really stuffy event. Let’s all just be really excited about art together.” 

Cindy Ingram: Yes, I love it because we were overly excited, almost embarrassingly excited about just how delightful it was. We were just so utterly delighted by these magic birds. That moment when you look up and everybody’s done, and we’re the only ones left, we’re like, “Oh, we’re leaving this thing.” I guess we should keep teaching this thing but it was fun. It’s something I’ve thought about before recently is that when I was younger, I would get excited about things that other people didn’t think were as cool. I would get overly excited by something ridiculous. I still do that, like the way a tree is growing or something totally random, I get overly excited about it and people roll their eyes at me. They’re like, “Why are you so excited about this?” I feel like people stuff that out. I love how excited we got about those. 

Madalyn Gregory: We were completely unironically enthusiastic. 

Cindy Ingram: Totally charmed and totally devoted. 

Madalyn Gregory: Those are the moments that we want to have and that we want to inspire. I think that’s a big reason why over the years, it has shifted away from appreciation and into connection. It was so special on the second day especially to see that happen for the teachers because we hear stories all the time from people who have just found us or people that are members of the library that are having these moments with their students. But to have it as just an individual and as an adult among other adults, that was a very special experience too that I think is just way too rare. 

Cindy Ingram: It reminds me there have been times when I’ve been teaching a work of art with a group of kids where somebody makes some observation that is so brilliant, so delightful, and so interesting that everybody is just so excited about that idea. You feel like you’re a part of a community, you feel you’ve got this shared experience together, this shared connection. You feel disconnected in a way that people don’t feel connected that often.

Madalyn Gregory: It reminds me of The Gottman Institute. They talk about relationships more romantically but I think it works with really any group of people. The magic connection that really happens in relationships is whenever people are together looking at a third thing. I think that’s even one of their things, the third thing. It’s you and another person. You’re looking at the third thing. Can you both look at it together and have this moment around it? That’s what we were doing but it wasn’t the third thing, it was however many people were there. That magic of people looking at something together, art is the perfect thing for that. It opens up a relationship in a way that nothing else can.

Cindy Ingram: That was so fun. The rest of the day we spent really dialing into the personal connection element. After that, we headed over to our second art museum which was the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. If you have never been to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, you are missing out. They have an amazing building, an amazing collection. It was a perfect place for this activity because the art is mostly modern and contemporary. I think the earliest stuff they have is like a Picasso. The earliest stuff they have is probably from the 1930s and 1940s. But most of it, they have a lot of abstract expressionism. Then they have a lot of contemporary art as well. They have Kehinde Wiley. They have all sorts of a wide variety of modern and contemporary art.

I was really worried about doing this. This is always something I’ve wanted to try but I was a little nervous about it. I even paired it down a little bit with those nerves. What I wanted to do is first, we gave everyone an opportunity to just explore the museum on their own so that they got to see everything. We spent, I think an hour maybe. Everybody explored the museum. Then their task was to pick one artwork, spend 20 minutes with it and only that artwork. I wanted to do 30 but I was like, “Oh they might revolt at me with 30. That feels too long,” so we did 20. As the assignment was, you pick an artwork, you sit in front of it. Then we had the gallery stools, they didn’t have to stand. You’re not allowed to Google it. You’re not allowed to get on your phone at all. You can take notes. You can sketch. You can read the label but you can’t leave your artwork that you chose.

I chose a Rothko because I wanted to choose something challenging for myself. I knew a lot of people had really strong emotional connections to Rothko and I’ve never really had that so I was like, “Let’s see what happens.” Everybody goes to their artwork. I was planning on going and  taking pictures of people, but instead, I just hung out with my artwork, set a timer for 20 minutes. We all came back and 20 minutes was not enough time. Instead of them revolting, everybody was like, “We need more time.”

Madalyn Gregory: It was so great because I had the same anxiety. I was like, “No, it’s going to be great,” but whenever it actually came time, because we gave everybody time to look and pick, I picked mine out and I went back up there. I remember sitting down being like, “It’s going to be really hard to not look at my phone,” or do whatever, but I got settled. The only reason I knew that 20 minutes had passed—because I wasn’t smart, I didn’t set a timer—was that I saw one of the other workshop participants walking back downstairs. I was like, “Wait, what?” and I looked at my phone and it had been 20 minutes. It was so great.

Cindy Ingram: Yeah. I try to but I don’t deliberately spend quiet uninterrupted time, not on a device, not watching a show, not even reading a book. I was very quiet, settled on moving time, undistracted time. It was really lovely to be in that space. Then it was really lovely for me too, as the leader of this event too, I was feeling these energetic tugs in all the areas of the museum. I felt connected to everybody in the museum that was with me but they weren’t with me, looking at the same artwork. I was alone for 20 minutes over this artwork but I didn’t feel alone, I felt I was with you all still. It was a really weird feeling but it felt really good.

Madalyn Gregory: It was very meditative. It just made me want to go and do that every single day. It was hard to even fully articulate, but whenever we did come back together as a group, everybody said the same thing. They were worried. They thought they were going to get bored but our brains are story making machines so even if you’re looking at something very abstract, which a few people had chosen, you don’t stop coming up with new ideas and new insights. We’re connection making machines in a way. It was great.

Cindy Ingram: We all did that then we joined back together in a gallery. We didn’t walk around to everybody’s artwork because there was a big museum, everybody was tired at that point, but we all shared which artwork we sat in front of and what our insights were. It was so wonderful to hear all the different connections people made. There were a couple people who made really strong connections to their own art-making practice. They picked something that is something that they maybe would be drawn to like in their own practice. They learned some drawing tips by looking at it. They learned ways of composing. There was someone who recently had a death in the family and they had an intense connection with the artwork because of that. Didn’t you choose like more like a feminist type of one? Did you do the one upstairs with the text?

Madalyn Gregory: It didn’t have text. I do this weird thing whenever I really have a strong connection with art where I don’t take pictures. I don’t know why but I don’t remember. I don’t remember the artist or the name. It might still be there but it was black and white. It was from the neck up, a portrait of what looked like a black woman but then there was also a theater scene in the back. It was all smooshed. It looked like someone had taken the wet paint, flattened out the top of it and so it was almost ruined but not. 

Cindy Ingram: It was Lorna Simpson.

Madalyn Gregory: Yes, yes. There was an iceberg feeling.

Cindy Ingram: It was just so powerful to just sit in a room and hear everyone’s personal connections to the art that they saw. It made me want to do more activities like that and more groups like that. Coming up in the next couple months, I’ve got a new program coming up that’s not related to this. If you’re just really inspired by this particular part, we’ve got more for you coming up too in addition to this workshop. We did that then we had lunch. We were at the Modern. We ate lunch at the Modern because it has a delicious cafe. They have that food that was really good. We had lunch and then we met back again at the Fort Worth Community Art Center after lunch. This is spoiling it a little but hopefully, it’ll be fine.

Madalyn Gregory: You’ll forget.

Cindy Ingram: You’ll forget, yeah. Don’t think too hard about this or remember it too hard. We got back and we talked a little bit about how we like to pair art making with the art connection experiences. We don’t want to do copy versions. We want to be inspired by it but we don’t want it just to be like, “Here’s an iceberg, let’s paint icebergs.” We want you to find a personal connection. What we did with the art making in the afternoon is we said, “Okay, so you spent this time with the artwork, now make an artwork that is inspired by your experience with the artwork at the Modern.” We had an hour, maybe two, or an hour and a half, I don’t remember, it was plenty of time, everybody had time to finish, and we had collage materials out. We had paint. We had markers and colored pencils. We had the leftovers from people’s covers for the sketchbooks. We just let it be open. I like more structure so I was worried about this. I was like, “Oh, what if this just flops?” Oh, it didn’t flop at all. It was so good. The art that those teachers made so deeply personal and related to their own personal journey, related to the art but not copies of it, you could see their personality in the artwork, it was just pure magic.

Madalyn Gregory: I am getting teary thinking about it. I want to find the right words because, like I said, everybody was starting to connect more and more and find their people even within the group. We almost forgot to look at the art together because—we haven’t talked about it yet—but we did another thing after they made the art but before we all looked at it together and they’re like, “But oh no, we’ve got to show each other the art.” It ended up being the absolute best part because art making is always deeply personal no matter what it is about. But to have just sat in front of art and had this intense experience, to immediately go back and be inspired by it, and make something from it, everybody had something different but every piece revealed something about themselves. There’s always going to be a couple that aren’t as talkative. Even those people, it came alive. I felt like I really got to see every individual person and it just overwhelmed me. Several people were teary because it was so good.

Cindy Ingram: That day, it’s a highlight of all of my teaching life. I feel it was a highlight and I’ve taught a lot of groups of people over the course of my career. That was one of the best days, absolutely one of the best days. Because it came together, we saw all the things we’ve been talking about with art connection, all the things that are meaningful to us that we spend so much time thinking about, talking about at Art Class Curator, just to see it happen in real time right in front of us, it was so good .

We did another activity too that day. I honestly can’t even remember all the days. We’re recording this in October. You’re going to listen to this in November. The workshop was in July so I don’t remember all the art, I do have videos of it all. I just remember the one where she took elements of everybody’s book covers and collaged them together into a landscape with a boat.

Madalyn Gregory: Yeah. She made leaves out of the different parts of everybody’s notebooks but it was like a river or lake scene. It was like a pop out because she likes to kayak. There’s the kayak going into the notebook. That was incredible. 

Cindy Ingram: So much good. The last thing we did on that day was—I like to do a culminating activity—we went to our third museum, which was the Kimbell Art Museum which is another really beautiful space. They have a very wide collection of art. It’s perfect for this activity. They have art from all over the world. They have art up until basically when the Modern started their art in the 1940’s, Kimbell goes up until that date but they have Egypt. They have pre-columbian art. Then they have one or two of each type. They don’t have 10 examples of ancient Egypt art. They have one really good example of ancient Egypt art. It’s a really cool museum. What we did was they got into groups then they planned an art activity. They looked at the artwork together. They thought about how they would teach it with their kids. They planned the discussion, planned an engaging activity, and planned a project. Everybody went and did that, then everybody presented their activities to the group. That’s always really fun because you get to just take everything that you learn from the whole two days and apply it all together, and actually practice what you’ve been learning.

Madalyn Gregory: I feel like the way we talk about art education is so different than what I feel like anybody else is doing. It’s amazing to see the teachers who, whether they have followed us since the beginning or just recently found us, wanted to do a workshop to see the absolute magic of doing it this way, of not just being a 100% art making and project focused but to really dig deep and get to the emotions and the stories, not just behind the artwork but behind the individuals, behind your students, and behind yourself, to see that culminate in lessons and questions that they wanted to ask their students. They wanted to show them artwork that was going to mean something to them. They did have fantastic project ideas at the end of it. Every artwork was so different and every lesson was, even though they all followed the same format, they were as individual as the teachers themselves.

Cindy Ingram: It was so fun. The one that stands out to me the most was I’m not participating in the activity, I was just walking around watching people taking pictures and dropping in on groups. I was watching this one group with this painting. It’s Frederic Leighton’s Portrait of May Sartoris. I was watching them pick this painting and I was like, “Oh, that is not the one I would have picked. That one seems weird. I can’t wait to see what they did.” But they were into it. I was watching them and they were talking and talking and talking and then they went over to a table and they’re working and working. They were just so engaged in this activity. Then the activity that they chose, that they did was so good. It was about fashion and the kids planned their own. I don’t know what the project was but it was some fashion related project. I was just amazed at where they went with it because it was just not one that I would have chosen, that I would have naturally been drawn too, but they were so into it.

What I loved was the way we talked about art connection, it’s not about art history, it’s not about, “Okay, let’s learn about Frederic Leighton and let’s learn about how he painted and let’s learn about May Sartoris, whoever this is in this painting. Then we’re going to learn all about them and I’m going to tell you all about that, then you’re going to write that down, then you’re going to do a portrait.” It’s something different, something bigger, or something more connected that yes, the student doesn’t then know all about Frederic Leighton or May Sartoris but they have looked at this painting and they found their way into it. They found themselves in it. I think that to me is more important than any fact I could tell them or anything. I think you don’t really truly understand it until you’ve been in the room and experienced that magic for yourself. Once I realized it existed, I became addicted to it. I dedicated my whole life like, “I gotta keep doing this because this feels so magical, important and meaningful to me that I just want everyone to have that same experience, the same magic.” 

Madalyn Gregory: It’s the teaching high and the light bulb moments all rolled up into one. The last couple years, everybody has been abuzz about social emotional learning and teaching the whole child. This is that. If you look back at your own school experience, do you remember every fact that you wrote down? Do you remember the perfect timeline of what you learned in history? Or if you did have art history in college? There might be moments or little details that you remember but we remember how people made us feel and the connections that we make in learning far more than we remember dates and figures or how to draw a line or any of that. This way of connecting with art, connecting with students, and connecting with each other really is the whole package. If you can do this consistently and have this in your classroom, like you said, you made your own little museum and that’s what the classroom can be. That’s what you can be for all of your students if you just let it happen.

Cindy Ingram: That was good. That’s all that needs to be said about that workshop. That was really so powerful, so good and that’s what this can be in your classroom, like what Madalyn was saying. It really can be that way. I had a lot of these types of moments in my classroom where you just saw those light bulbs, you saw those connections. You knew your students better and they knew themselves better. It’s just truly beautiful. If you want to come to this workshop, we have it scheduled.

Madalyn Gregory: And you should.

Cindy Ingram: And you should. Absolutely, you should because it is so so good. The workshop will be June 22nd, 23rd, and 24th, 2022. You notice I added in a third day. Like I said the first workshops we did, people wanted more. That happened this time too, they wanted more. We’re not adding a full third day, we’re adding in a reception or a social hour, social time on the 22nd in the late afternoon or early evening. The bulk of the workshop will be the 23rd and the 24th, which is a Thursday and Friday. It will again be at the Fort Worth Community Arts Center. Then on the 22nd, we will have a special get together and that way we can get to know each other before we dive into the art connection and learning, we can have a little meet and greet. The hours of that will be sent to you once you register. But if you do register, you can plan on something at four o’clock or after on the 22nd in the afternoon.

If you would like to register, you can go to artclasscurator.com/experience. We have early bird pricing right now until the end of 2021, so until January 1st, you can register for $389 and that’s what we charged last year and so we’re adding more to it. If you’d register for our workshop before the end of 2021, you can get a bonus of getting all of the recordings for Call to Art 1 and  Call to Art 2, which are the conferences that we did in 2020. It has over 50 hours of professional development sessions. I think the number of presenters is 75 plus presenters. Tons of amazing sessions to hold you over until the summer. You can get that if you register before the end of the year as well. You can register at artclasscurator.com/experience and we will accept a P.O if your school wants to pay for it. I promise you this is going to be another really magical, I keep saying magical but it just really was, a really wonderful, wonderful session that we hope to meet you at. Any final words from you, Madalyn, about this amazing workshop?

Madalyn Gregory: Just come, be unironically enthusiastic about art with us, and you’re going to connect with art and connect with other art teachers. Just enjoy yourself and it’s going to be a vacation and professional development all rolled up into one. You’re going to love it, so come.

Cindy Ingram: All right. Thank you again, Madalyn, for joining me to talk about this workshop today. 

Madalyn Gregory: Always a pleasure. 

Cindy Ingram: I hope to see you all listening at our summer workshop in June of 2022. It’s artclasscurator.com/experience. I will see you again next week on the Art Class Curator Podcast. Bye.

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