All Posts from Art Curator for Kids

• Glenis Redmond
• Glenis on Instagram
• Glenis on Facebook
• “Literacy at Work: How to Write a Poem with Glenis Redmond”
• The Christening by Jonathan Green
• Julia Cameron’s Course: The Artist’s Way
• Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear by Elizabeth Gilbert
• 82 Questions About Art

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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. I have another super inspirational and fabulous guest for you today on the podcast. I cannot tell you how much I loved this conversation with poet, artist Glenis Redmond. I just felt, after talking with her, that she is just pure love and wholeheartedness. I can’t say enough of how lovely the conversation was. Glenis Redmond is an award-winning poet and teaching artist. She has been a literary community leader for 27 years. This past year, she was awarded South Carolina’s highest award, The Governor’s Award for the Arts through the South Carolina Arts Commission. She’s a Kennedy Center teaching artist in Washington, DC. She is amazing. Check out the show notes for more links about what we talked about in today’s episode but without further ado, I am so happy to introduce to you Glenis Redmond. I am so excited to welcome Glenis Redmond to the podcast. Welcome, Glenis.

Glenis Redmond: Hi. It’s so good to be here, Cindy.

Cindy Ingram: I am so thrilled to talk to you. I saw you on a webinar recently. Your words were just so very powerful. Then I went on a binge of YouTube and watched some of your work on there. I just knew that the Art Class Curator community would love to hear more about you and your work. Can you introduce yourself? Tell us about you, your background, and experiences?

Glenis Redmond: Sure. Thank you for reaching out because I am a big believer in community as far as the arts are concerned. I am a poet and teaching artist. I’ve been doing this work for 28 years. My love is of course writing but also teaching. I’ve been going across the country, preaching the power of the gospel of poetry and the arts to teachers in school districts, and administrators across the country as a community center teaching artist. I am a mother of twin girls and a Gaga to a seven-year-old grandson, and a six-month-old granddaughter. 

Cindy Ingram: Wonderful.

Glenis Redmond: I think that sums me up.

Cindy Ingram: What brought you into poetry?

Glenis Redmond: I think many of us are born poets. Not to say you can’t learn to be an artist. You can, but I think I was always, from a very young age, noticing the world and how people interacted, how nature and how I responded to the world. I wish somebody would have told me at a very early age, “You’re a poet,” but nobody knew. I grew up in a family of artists too but nobody did it as a profession. I was just that mismatched child but I knew I was different but I was a dancer. I thought I was a visual artist too. I was all of that.

That was my way to respond to the world. I didn’t know until I left the counseling field in my 30s at probably the age my daughters are now, that I was restless. I was restless. I love counseling. I still love people. I’m still a people person but there was an itch inside of me. The itch was a greater call of the arts. I had a chronic illness, fibromyalgia at the same time, so my boss at the time said, “Hey, you need to take some time off because you just need to get your health together.” It was there. I took The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. I never went back. I never went back to counseling, those were in the early 90s. Long story short, I always knew I was an artist poet. I didn’t know how to get there. In my 30s, that’s how I finally said to myself life is too short literally. I went down the path of poetry. I’ve been doing it professionally ever since.

Cindy Ingram: I can imagine, I think as kids wanting to be artists, it feels really hard to imagine that being a job when you grow up. I can imagine poetry being even more foreign. You don’t hear about people being professional poets all that often.

Glenis Redmond: Especially for me, I had two things going on. I’m a first generation college student. I had a couple of siblings that went but didn’t finish. That was a whole new world, then to graduate from college, then decide I was working on a PhD in counseling, then decide I wanted to leave a PhD program and become, “What? A poet?” I mean everybody thought I had gone mad. I had lost my mind, I probably had but I had gained my heart in the process because I stopped thinking about what I had seen as far as role models and what did I want? That was a whole shift. Once I got aligned with what it is that I want to do aside from being a mother, a daughter, a sister, a counselor, what is it that I want? I wanted to put pen to paper, I wanted to put pen to heart, and I stopped asking the questions how. I just started doing it. Magically, the pathway opened up.

Cindy Ingram: I was going to ask you what were your first steps but I think you nailed it on the head right there with, “I didn’t worry about how, I just started to do it.” That really resonates with me and what I’m doing. It’s just like, “Well, I know what I want to do. I’m just going to do it. We’ll see what happens.”

Glenis Redmond: I forget who said it but, “The genius is in the boldness of doing it.” You don’t give yourself all these excuses like, “Well, I don’t have this, I don’t have that.” No, you just start. If you want to do that, just do it. I didn’t have anybody tell me that I couldn’t do it—I mean I did have people telling me I couldn’t do it. I had a lot of people telling me that—but I didn’t listen because that burning inside of me, and I don’t know if that’s how you felt, I just felt like I had nowhere else to turn but inward or just to give up on life in a way, just to say like, “Well, is this all there is?” Not to say that all the things were for me, they were valuable but there were other things I needed to do to expand. I gave myself tasks. I said I wanted to do five poetry readings a month after I did The Artist’s Way. I am going to get published. I got the Poet’s Market, 1995. I started going to professional development. I just took it on as a job, a type-A person. Even though that doesn’t go along with being art as a poet, I had both sides of my brain lit up, so I was doing the head work. I started one day a week saying, “This is my poetry day.”

Even though I was raising twin toddlers and married at the time, I still had a committed space for my work. That was a game changer because once I started guarding that day a week, then other people started guarding that day a week. That grew into a practice for me as a poet, an artist. I don’t think I would be where I am today had I not guarded that Thursday once a week that was dedicated solely to poetry because that space expanded. I think that space out in the world now, of me as a teaching artist, stems from that Thursday that I guarded for myself.

Cindy Ingram: You gave that space to yourself to create. I love that. I was reading Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert recently. I’ve read it multiple times. I love that book but she talks a lot about the discipline of writing and the discipline of being an artist, that it’s not just that words are constantly flowing but that you have to develop these very specific processes and time. I like you’re showing that in that space you gave yourself. 

Glenis Redmond: I love that. I haven’t read her Big Magic book. Of course, Eat, Pray, Love is amazing. I think of her book, what is it?

Cindy Ingram: The Signature of All Things. I haven’t read that yet.

Glenis Redmond: She’s right. She’s dialed in of course. I think it’s important to dial other people in. Once you get dialed in, you change who you are. Even in the community, I think you are a soul flame that sends up a flare and that ignites other people. That’s one of my things as a teaching artist. When I go around the country and teach workshops, I’m not trying to make people poets. I’m trying to help them find the poetry within their lives. Some people do want to do it professionally. Some people just want to just do it. I think we all as artists, what happens with artists with art, it builds in this capacity for empathy, which we need in this world. I find that quite beautiful and a wonderful charge for us as a community.

Cindy Ingram: Definitely. You started dedicating your time to writing, reading, and sending things to be published. What made you decide to start teaching?

Glenis Redmond: I love poetry in all aspects. I started the first poetry Slam in Greenville in the early 90s but I also like very academic heady page poetry. I loved it all. I would slam poetry at night, then I decided I wanted to give away the form, so I had nighttime poetry and daytime poetry. I had something for everyone. I just was so on fire for poetry. The Slam was not enough. It wasn’t going to hold me. That was a great power to be with those folks but I also had this power to talk to young people about poetry and talk to teachers about the importance of poetry in the classroom. I had all of these aspects of poetry that I wanted to realize. I didn’t want to limit myself in the teaching artist part. It really spoke to the extroverted part of me. I have the introverted part. That’s the writing part but the extroverted part is the giving it away, whether performing or teaching in a classroom.

Cindy Ingram: I can imagine your background in psychology fuels that need to connect with another BA.

Glenis Redmond: Yeah. My workshops were often poetry circles, like my group sessions that I used to have, my group counseling. That’s how you came into my poetry workshop. I wasn’t counseling. Although there were a lot of tears and I welcome tears because I think when people meet themselves at deeper levels, which poetry does, what art does, people do need to release. I don’t know how many times, especially with my teacher workshops, people have been told really bad things about themselves when it comes to writing and the arts like, “You can’t draw. You can’t write.” That’s a horrible place to be arrested. What I found myself is going into the community and opening those doors of where people have had arrested development, and say, “You can do whatever, creatively. You can do it. You can do it right now. We’re going to do it here. We’re going to have a dedicated space.” That space I gave to myself on Thursday, I gave it to others. Even if it was only for an hour or it was only for three hours, guess what, no one else is in here. We’re going to go. This is what we’re going to do. I just gave permission in these rooms. People are hungry for permission to gather, then also permission to go deep. I’m going to stand here because I have done that for myself. I’m going to facilitate this space. It’s going to be safe for you to do it.

Cindy Ingram: I love that because so many of us have these just really thick armors built up around our hearts or when it comes to our creativity, our emotions, the things that we want to express, it just keeps people trapped. I think these experiences are so magical.

Glenis Redmond: It’s true. It is magical. It’s sacred in a way. It is sacred when you say, “I’m going to give myself these many minutes or these hours.” To me, it’s like I never talk a lot about the aspect of poetry where just reading a book, that space to give you that luxury you give yourself, you’re like, “I’m tuning out the rest of the world. I’m just going to read this book. I’m just going on a journey.” That’s the same way in a workshop when you say, “I’m going here.” When you sign up for a workshop and you say, “This is just for me,” it’s a gift. I feel like in the last 28 years, I’ve been able to go around the country and give people the gift of time to themselves, and to deepen their relationships with themself.

Cindy Ingram: That’s beautiful. When you’re working with teachers and students, what’s your main goal? What do you hope to accomplish with your work?

Glenis Redmond: There are several goals but the objective is to expand the margins of poetry, depending on what the workshop is but to introduce them to the form, to craft, and allow them to be inundated in the craft itself. A lot of times when I’m in school, they do want a product but the product to me is an aside to the whole process because my objective is to open doors and for them to create. I write a lot of autobiographical poetry or poetry origin work. I want them to get on that path. I want them to get on that journey. For teachers, what I’m trying to do is ignite them and say, “Hey, poetry is a wonderful supplement in your classroom to go hand in hand to whatever you’re teaching. I don’t care what it is if it’s history.” If it’s English, if it’s literature, there’s a place for poetry. I’m doing lots of different things in that workshop but the big thing is that I’m a door opening and hoping the process will lend itself to further experiences, and experiments in poetry.

Cindy Ingram: It’s beautiful. I watched a video of yours. I don’t remember the topic. I’ll find it and put it in the show notes for people to watch too but you were leading students through this process of discovering who they are and you had a white board, and you were like, “This was me as an 11 year old.” You’re writing everything about you, then they were writing everything about them, then they created these poems that were so beautiful, so vulnerable, really deep. These were probably middle school or fifth grade kids. They were really going for it, then they were sharing. How do you, with a group of students, get them to go that deep and get them to share their vulnerability in it with the other classmates?

Glenis Redmond: We’re a couple of things. Number one, I will say what you were looking at was the self-portrait workshop, which I think is great when we’re talking about the visual arts because I think it’s a great place for arts teachers to have them write their self-portrait but also paint their self-portrait and create text. That’s what that was. What’s interesting, a lot of times when I’m going into a school, I’m usually there for a week or two weeks. If I’m lucky, with the state theater, which is where I was in that video, it’s three weeks but I’ll have maybe three times with the kids. Sometimes, the class period is 45 minutes, sometimes, it’s an hour. That’s not a lot to gain trust, so I have to go in there and do it really quickly. What I do is I let kids know a little bit about myself. I do some poems, then I say, “Hey, I’m talking to your head, the academic self but I’m also talking to your heart today, so through these poems, I want you to connect and notice what you connect with in these poems, and what do you notice in these poems.” I’m engaging them in the work already.

I don’t talk down to them. We have a little discussion, usually five to seven minutes. That’s it because I don’t have much time there. We talk about the poems, “What did you notice? How did you connect?” They’ll say, “Oh, my mom was like your mom.” or “I didn’t have a mom like your mom. I’m so sad.” They’ll notice and we connect on that level, and I say, “This is important because we’re engaging, we’re inspiring each other with our stories.” Then I will give them a craft lecture, maybe give them 15 minutes on. “Okay, this is how this poem is set up. This is this form, this is what you need.” I inspire them first, then I give them the craft information, then I give them maybe a poem or two from students the same age as them to inspire them a little bit more, then I tell them, “We got 10-12 minutes and we write.” By that time, they are so ready for me to shut up, so they can write their poem. We brainstorm, we list make because you can’t do any of that. You can’t leave that step out. Once you ignite the inspiration, you have to make sure there’s a place for it to go. It’s very methodical, it’s very scaffold but it’s like lightning happening, then they’re ready like, “Leave me alone. Why don’t you be quiet, so I can write my poems?” We never get into the place of, “Oh, I don’t have anything to write about.” We have already unearthed. We’re doing this archeological dig. I’m mixing my metaphors but we have this archaeological dig that we found, found, found, found. Now, you go and you find your nuggets and put it on the paper.

Cindy Ingram: I love that because it’s just like creating a thumbnail sketch or something for your artwork. You need to have a place to start. Just hand them a piece of paper and be like, “Write a poem.”

Glenis Redmond: No, never, never will I do that. I’m going to lead you and we’ll do activities that lead. I let them have conversations with each other. We have broader conversations in the classroom. Then really what I think art is you having a conversation with yourself. If I’ve done my job right, I’ve given them skills and tools to have a conversation on the page with themselves. They can reflect deeply. They can write it out. We can edit later but the jewels are just putting it out there. That’s where I go when I workshop. People say, “You only give them 12 minutes?” Yeah. The pre-writing is going to be 40 minutes. We have to build up to the writing. It takes the whole class period to build up to that 12 rich full writing time.

Cindy Ingram: I love that. I also loved what you said about listening to the poem and connecting with one through your head, and also through your heart. I wrote that down because I think that we could do that with works of art too. I can ask, “How do you connect this artwork with your head versus your heart?” How do you get kids to really tap into their heart? Do you have any strategies that you use for that?

Glenis Redmond: Tapping into the heart all goes back to stories. We’ll probably talk about this but where I feel like art and poetry merge is that I do a lot of what we call ekphrastic writing, which is writing to artwork. I think because I am a closeted visual artist, I really went back to paint. I never really did that professionally but I still do it for myself. That’s why I love works of art. My home is just full of artwork. There’s one person who I love. His name is Peg Leg Bates who’s a one leg dancer from Fountain Inn, South Carolina. He taught my parents. He became world famous. There’s a sculpture in Fountain Inn you can go and see him. I just think he’s phenomenal. He died in 1998. His story is amazing for so many reasons.

I wrote a poem to Peg Leg Bates, to the statue, to that place. I think engaging students in that way, the stories, if I say, “Well, how do you connect to this Peg Leg Bates story?” They’ll go like, “This man had one leg. He could dance. I have my own challenges and these are my challenges that I come up against.” I ask them to engage the artwork and talk back. That’s how I get them to engage by the heart. It’s not all the, “Okay, now we’re going to write a persona poem. We’re going to use alliteration. We’re going to use that.” Those are all craftings that they need to learn but those aren’t inspirational. The hard part is the inspirational part. How are you connected? What are your gifts? What are your challenges.” The questioning is how I engage them by heart and they tell me their stories because everybody wants to talk about their stories, even if they are incredibly introverted. As a matter of fact, I think introverts are even bigger storytellers. They may not always want to be on stage but they have a story to tell. That’s how I get the heart to speak. When you get the heart speaking, it never wants to be quiet. It can be a whisper. It doesn’t have to be a shout. 

Cindy Ingram: It’s just that natural desire to be seen and to be known. I’m an introvert myself. The stories are there just as much.

Glenis Redmond: That’s probably richer because that rich interior life is great. You may not want to broadcast it but you may want to speak it, you may want to whisper it, whatever way you want it to come out there but I think the rich interior life is alive in all of us. I think it’s tricky when someone says, “Oh, they can’t do that.” I have rarely found that to be true in classrooms. I find students may not have the agency. They may not have the access but once you give them the skills and tools, they have plenty to say. The other side of that is just to listen. Maybe I’m the first person who’s asking them to write about themselves. “Tell me about your life.” But if you ask that question, you have to really be there and hold what they tell you.

Cindy Ingram: I love that. That’s perfect. It’s so good. Where do you see the intersection between visual arts and poetry? How does that come into your work?

Glenis Redmond: I’ll tell you this. I tell a lot of people in my workshops, writing is visual art. Anybody who thinks it’s not is off the mark because number one, it’s the land of metaphors. It’s image based. I write from images. Everybody’s different but I do write from the image. I see. I don’t see words. Even in a story, it’s dream-like. It comes in sequences. I write from those images. I pin them down with words. I think writers in a lot of ways we’re behind visual artists because I think we primarily as people understand the world through images first before the written language came much, much later. We’re a step removed from writers. We’ve gotta invoke that image through our words. There’s that. I pull from visual art so much because it’s such a great example, like we were talking about earlier how to get to the heart. When I go to museums, it’s hard. I can’t go through a whole museum. I can’t. It’s just too much. I see people go through and they’re doing it like they’re ordering a fast food menu. They just go through. I can go through a section and I go, “Okay, that’s enough.” My heart just gets full, full, full, full, then I go. I can’t really absorb anymore but that’s how powerful imagery is. I feel like they really do dovetail. That’s why I go back to ekphrastic work a lot. I’m looking at visual arts.

One project that I have been very much involved in for maybe the last eight, nine years is this work by a visual artist by the name of Jonathan Green. He is a Gullah landscape artist in South Carolina. If you’ve ever come across this work, he really writes about the African-American story, which is really integral, especially when I came across them in the 90s because we had been bombarded by all this negative imagery in the black community. The Mammy Jars and just all the stuff that as a kid, I just got this whole internalized, all this negativity. Until Jonathan Green came along and I would see his postcards first, I saw his calendars and it’s us, these hybrid colors, celebration, and this beauty, I just started getting this sense of pride. That’s how he got on my radar. Lo and behold, I find his work and literally, I find him. He’s the one who put me on the path to poetry because he’s like, “I don’t know why you’re counseling. I think you should be writing.” Those many years, he did me a favor and helped me get on this path.

But long story short, he was painting in the 90s this enslaved potter poet by the name of David Drake. Why is David Drake so important? 50, 60 miles from where I grew up, you have this enslaved person making pots, which is not unusual because many enslaved people have these artisan jobs or side jobs but he learned to read and write. Not only read and write, he put his poetry on his pots, couplets on his pot, which is forbidden, get you killed. One of his most famous couplets is, “I wonder where is all my relations/Friendship to all – and every nation,” which is a powerful couplet. “What? You’re putting a misabout to us, to your people, where they are.” It’s so beautiful.

So Jonathan Green had painted Dave. He brought him to life. There’s no photographs of David Drake. He brought him in vivid color, so we could see him. He dubbed him “Sir Dave.” He put him into the line of royalty. I didn’t know Jonathan Green had done that. I was working with some University of Delaware professors, Dr. Gabrielle Foreman and Dr. Lynnette Young Overby. We had been working on Harriet Tubman, Harriet Jacobs, and Harriet Wilson but Dr. Foreman said, “Well, I think you should look at David Drake. He’s from South Carolina.” But I wasn’t ready. Right after she said that, every school I went to, somebody would say, “Do you know David Drake?” I’d be in Birmingham, Alabama at the museum, they’re like, “We have a pot we want to show you, Glenis.” I go in there, it’s a David Drake pot. Finally, I said, “Okay.”

Cindy Ingram: Universe, message received.

Glenis Redmond: Message received. We decided to bring Dave to life and Dr. Foreman had her students dance day. Dr. Foreman is an African-American literature scholar. She had all the facts about history on Dave, then I brought him to life through poetry. We have a book coming out of the University of Georgia Press called Praise Songs for (Dave the Potter) David Drake, with the Art of Jonathan Green and Poetry of Glenis Redmond. It’s an eight year long process but any art teacher that’s interested in Jonathan Green’s work will love it. It will be a wonderful teaching tool because it interviews Jonathan Green essays, the collaboration, then the artwork itself and me writing to the artwork. That’s another bridge to poetry and visual art. It’s just this wonderful conversation of the artists, talking to each other, in a sense visual artist poet but also how the work itself talks to each other. I think that is a palpable tool to teach students as well how to look deeper, how to notice deeply. I think this work will amplify because there’s so many hands that’re lifting it. It’s not just my voice, not just Jonathan Green’s eye. It’s so many voices looking at work and how the community works as well.

Cindy Ingram: I love that. When is the book coming out?

Glenis Redmond: It comes out in 2022. 

Cindy Ingram: We’ll keep an eye out for it.

Glenis Redmond: The book is slated to come out. I shouldn’t say spring 2022. I think the book will be coming out in the fall of 2022.

Cindy Ingram: Awesome.

Glenis Redmond: Yes, I’m excited, we’re all excited because it’s been a labor of love. We all have work that we do aside from that work that we get paid for. This was all a labor of love because of the love of David Drake and what Jonathan Green had done with art. I think that’s another testament that art comes before in a way, then poetry can enter in and connect. I’ve seen so many ways where I think art and poetry hold hands. Another thing that I do a lot is teach praise poetry, which is another autobiographical art form for students to talk about who they are and honor themselves. When I was here, I went into a visual arts class with the teacher at one of the high schools here at Travelers Rest. The art teacher had me teach the praise poem workshop. Her students wrote praise poems but from their praise poems, they had to take the text and create their self-portrait, their praise self-portrait, which was really powerful and lovely. It was just how you see because I think poetry is seen one way. The visual art is seen in another way but when you merge the two–

Cindy Ingram: You’re seeing multiple sides of a person inside and out.

Glenis Redmond: Exactly. The internal landscape and the external landscape, which is all the world to me. The world’s coming together.

Cindy Ingram: I love that. I can make guesses on what a praise poem might be. Can you describe that a little bit more?

Glenis Redmond: Sure. When you say praise, it can be weighted for people because they’re like, “Oh, I think church related.” Let me back up and say most indigenous cultures have praise poetry. What it is, is especially pre-literate societies where you carry the lineage through song, you carry the lineage through storytellers. A praise poem would be a way of announcing yourself to your people. I believe in that form, I think we need more of this ritualistic ritual in our society. This is me when I come in and I say, “You’re going to write your praise poem.” It’s not saying, “You’re going to do this braggadocious thing. What you’re going to do is connect.” Because praise in a lot of West African languages is linked to the word tendon. It’s not praise up here. It’s praise in connection, what makes the connection between nature, yourself, and others.

That’s what a praise poem is. You do it through your height, the color of your skin, the color of your personality. Again, you have the outside and the inside world, an animal, how you walk in the world, what you would like to be, your profession, and all that. You do that metaphorically. You talk about yourself metaphorically. When I came in, I didn’t know that about that student. I didn’t know that’s what they thought but when you give them the skills and tools to reflect on themselves, they come back with some really powerful beautiful praise connections. I’ve been teaching praise poetry for almost 18, 19 years. It never gets old. It’s beautiful when we read. I’ve taught it to kindergarteners, to senior citizens. I just love to hear people make connections in their life.

Cindy Ingram: I just want to go write one. That’s what I’m doing next.

Glenis Redmond: You can do it.

Cindy Ingram: But I love that because one of the big social, emotional learning standards is really understanding yourself and your strengths. I think so many of us are taught to tone it down. “You’re being too much. You’re being too braggy. You’re being too proud.” Pride is like an emotion that is almost shamed. Being prideful or being proud of yourself is so fulfilling.

Cindy Ingram: I love that. 

Glenis Redmond: It’s building an agency, what you’re saying. Who knew I was doing social, emotional learning? I did. I was a counselor, so I knew that I’m building a foundation for social, emotional learning. Because when you reflect, how do you think you get to be who you are and understand? I don’t know if you’ve had this experience with yourself. You see yourself as a student and when you were a child, and what it took for you to get. When you look back and you do this hindsight, you go, “Oh my goodness, this was in operation but I had no clue.” That’s maturity. You gain insight. To me, what poetry does, it speeds that process up because you are giving young people, you’re giving teachers, you’re giving them the tool to do that. It’s set in the form, especially in praise poetry, to lift up out of their life, gain hindsight, foresight, and be present at the same time. We are writing a poem but we’re doing what Dr. Engler, my bible professor at Erskine College, was always telling us, he said, “This is for the test.” He would wrap on his desk three times and we would all write it down. “Okay, this is for the test.” Then if he hit the desk once, he would say, “This is for life.” At the time, I didn’t realize what that was happening but I got used to the three times, scurry, then I got used to them. Oh my goodness, this is a life lesson. That to me is what is embedded in praise poetry, in the arts, these skills and tools that are for life that build a way of seeing, and a platform on which to stand to advocate for yourself. It’s not bragging. Praise is not bragging. It’s making connections in your own life that oh, wow. You might see some things that are uncomfortable too but you also start ownership, a very accountability at a young age. It’s a great tool.

Cindy Ingram: I went to a painting retreat last week and at the beginning of every day, we did this circle and she had us do this one activity where we were in the circle, then one person at a time would go to the middle and we would say like, “I’m Cindy and I am blank or I am here to blank.” We just had to say something, then everybody in the group would say, “You’re Cindy and you’re an artist.” I said, “I’m Cindy. I’m an artist.” They say, “You’re Cindy and you’re an artist.” Then everybody would make eye contact with you. I think we were doing praise poetry because it was so powerful to just stand there and say something that you know to be true, and want to be true and to hear it reflected back by everybody in the group.

Glenis Redmond: Yes, it’s affirmational. Number one, you’re being affirmed by yourself because you have admitted, you’ve gone, looked, and said, “I’m claiming this.” Then your facilitator had it echo back to you, which is really a powerful stance. That’s how I feel about the reading of praise poems. There’s the writing of it, which is the claiming of it, then the reading of it is where you’re meeting the community. They’re listening to what you have affirmed. I don’t like to put spirituality on anything, especially when it’s coming to school but there is something powerful and palpable that is happening. It’s more than just the standards. Yes, we are meeting the standards but we are doing something even beyond that. It’s the Dr. Engler, “For life.” We are doing the one, two, three, and the one at the same time. We’re getting it all.

Cindy Ingram: Yes, we’re so lucky to be in this work. That’s so amazing to just imagine the impact on all of these kids and students. I think that was actually a super beautiful way to wrap up our conversation but I do want to ask you just a few more follow-up questions. One is how can listeners connect with you online?

Glenis Redmond: You can connect with me online at my website, which is glenisredmond.com. I do newsletters periodically. The other place if you want to follow my journey is Instagram. You can find me pictorially there. That will not be solely poetry. That’s grandkids in all of the like when I’m allowed to post but my Instagram handle is glenismakingpoetryreign.

Cindy Ingram: Oh.

Glenis Redmond: Yes, because my students said, “You got to be cooler than that.” I said, “Okay, I’m going to make it reign, not rain.” You can find me on Twitter but I don’t really quite know what I’m doing on Twitter. You can find me there but I’m kind of not there. Then I have a Facebook page.

Cindy Ingram: We’ll link to all of that in our show notes as well. Then my one final question that I like to ask everybody and I think you might have already answered it, and that is, which artwork changed your life?

Glenis Redmond: It has to be Jonathan Green but before David Drake, a community decided to buy a Jonathan Green painting back in the 90s. I was a mother of twins and did not have much money, so what I was able to offer was like $50 but I thought it was a huge amount but I’m so glad that I did. My name is on the plaque for The Christening. It’s a beautiful scene but what that did for me because of what Jonathan Green had done for us as black people but also for South Carolinians, it allowed me to be play space because I talk to students a lot and I’ll say, “What do you feel about the city or the town you live in?” They all think wherever they live is boring. They want to get out.

I taught the kids in New York who say the same thing like, “Are you kidding? There’s so much going on here.” It’s all about the eyes, it’s all about the mind’s eye of what you really see because every place we live is rich. What Jonathan Green was telling me with that painting is to see. To see beauty, you can see struggle but to fine-tune and get closer. Find that gaze. I would have to put it in The Christening by Jonathan Green. You can Google it and find it. It was another doorway for me to discover myself as a poet and a teaching artist, and to move out in the world to always make room to connect and notice the surroundings. We are more than what we think we are ourselves, then who we are engaging every day. I’m still living that life’s lesson from the visual artist to see deeply.

Cindy Ingram: I love it. We’ll share some of his work on our website too. We’ll link to that image so that everybody can check it out. I was Googling it while you were talking, so I could get a taste of it.

Glenis Redmond: Good.

Cindy Ingram: I love it. Thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today. It was such a pleasure.

Glenis Redmond: It was my pleasure to talk to you. Thank you so much, Cindy. Thanks for all you do. Hello to all the educators out there. I hope you connect. It’ll be great to connect with you on some level.

Cindy Ingram: Wonderful.

If your art appreciation classes were anything like mine, they happen in dark rooms with endless slides and boring lectures. Art in the dark. But art appreciation doesn’t have to turn into nap time for your students. Start connecting your students to art with powerful class discussions. It can be intimidating to start talking about art with students, so teachers always want to know what they should say. The real question is what you should ask. You can get 82 questions to ask about almost any work of art for free on the Art Class Curator Blog. The free download includes the list of questions plus cards that you can cut out and laminate to use, again and again. These versatile questions can be used in everything from bell ringers to group activities to critiques. Just go to artclasscurator.com/questions to get your free copy today.

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.

• Beyond the Surface: Free Email Course
• Eric Booth
• The Everyday Work of Art: Awakening the Extraordinary in Your Daily Life by Eric Booth
• Tending the Perennials: The Art and Spirit of a Personal Religion by Eric Booth
• The Book of Delights by Ross Gay

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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. I am so thrilled to introduce my guest for today’s podcast. This is a full circle moment for me in my career when I first graduated from graduate school. I worked at an organization called Big Thought, a non-profit. While I was there, we worked with this teaching artist, Eric Booth. He did a lot of our staff development training, he did a lot of the programs that we worked on, but he was a consultant high up in the company. I’m straight out of college, a young mess of a person at that age, and it was so thrilling to me to be able to reconnect with him now and have a conversation about this topic that we both deeply care about, which is the connection between art and spirituality. I’m so excited to share with you our conversation. We also talk a lot about his path as a teaching artist.

Just to give you a little bit of information about Eric Booth, he was given the nation’s highest award in arts education in 2015, the Arts Education Leadership Award from Americans for the Arts. He was also named one of the 25 most influential people in the arts in the US. He began as a broadway actor and then he became a businessman, a consultant, and a teaching artist. He’s authored seven books and we are especially talking about two of those today; The Everyday Work of Art and Tending the Perennials. It was such a joyful pleasure for me to have this conversation with Eric Booth and I hope that you enjoy it as much as I did.

I am so excited to welcome Eric Booth to the podcast. Welcome, Eric.

Eric Booth: Hi, Cindy and listeners. Nice to be with you.

Cindy Ingram: I am so excited to talk to you today because in my very early career, I worked at an organization in Dallas called Big Thought. You had a really strong relationship with Big Thought at the time and did a lot of our training and worked with us on a lot of projects. I just feel a little bit like I’m fangirling to a degree because you were a part of my early career. I 100% know you probably don’t remember me but it’s just really a full circle moment for me so I’m excited to talk to you.

Eric Booth: Well, so nice. Thank you. Big Thought sounds like a good title for where you have lived the subsequent years since we’ve met.

Cindy Ingram: Yeah. Every now and then I come up with Big Thought as a title for something and I’m like, “Oh, shoot, it already exists.” I love that. For our listeners who are not familiar with your work, can you tell us a little bit more about you, your background and experiences, and what led you to where you are today?

Eric Booth: Sure. What I am is the oldest living teaching artist. I trained classical training as an actor, was having the career that actors want to have, lots of broadway shows and touring and all that stuff and didn’t like it. I found out I did not like doing eight shows a week. I didn’t like the agents and soap operas and all that stuff. Around when I was first noticing that, I had a little project opportunity on the side at Lincoln Center to learn about this thing called Teaching Artists, which sent me into schools. On my very first day, it was so much more interesting and satisfying to be addressing the innate artistic birthright of kids.

Seeing what they came up with and discovering the power of art with them felt so much more satisfying to me than cranking out the same show eight times a week down a couple of miles on broadway. I just followed that direction. It was fortunate that this field of teaching artistry was just growing up at the time. Over the next 40 whatever years, I’ve been able to grow up and help that field grow and work with artists of all the different art forms and work with museums and orchestras around the world in helping them think about how we open up what those who are practitioners of an art form and teachers of that art form, what they know in their bones that happens within that art form, how do we open it up wider so that everyone has their birthright access to the power that’s in those arts?

Cindy Ingram: Oh. I love that. That was so good. There were so many follow-up questions I came up with already. But one thing you notice about not liking it, I always wondered that about the theater—I’m a huge musical theater fan—and I go and I look at these actors on the stage and like, “These guys have to do this every day, multiple times a day. How do they bring so much energy and power and emotion again and again and again?” It feels just impossible.

Eric Booth: There are some artists who just have a gift for that. They’re naturally wired and they go deeper and it becomes this meditative space where they are in full presentness all the time. But it didn’t work that way for me. It may have been because on Broadway, I wasn’t playing the lead role so it wasn’t challenging enough. But God loved those ones who can be fully present and fully fulfilled by that return to the same body of work eight times a week. It’s really the only place in the arts where that is one of your artistic challenges. Symphony musicians get a one week run for any piece of music. Writers spend 20 years creating one work of art. It’s different every day. It’s an unusual challenge that some are well attuned to and that isn’t right for others.

Cindy Ingram: Oh. That’s really interesting. The oldest living teaching artist, how have you seen the field change since you first started doing it?

Eric Booth: Oh, boy, you’re getting to my favorite stuff, because it’s so rare to get to see a field get born and go through its first stages of development in one lifetime. Especially—I want to start with an apology to arts teachers—in our first phase, these artists who came into schools—early 80s mostly—didn’t know much, brought a lot of good intentions, but they also brought a lot of arrogance and condescension. In those early years, I’m not sure artists were always particularly helpful. They came in with a sense of their specialness and a kind of disregard for how much artistic knowing was already active and alive in that classroom. A little bit of chip on the shoulder, lucky you, the artist has arrived.

The field got over that phase of ignorant arrogance in, I don’t know, 10, 15 years, to recognize we really only serve young people if we partner with the strengths that regular sequential instruction teacher is bringing and then that little bit of extra energy and different perspectives that an outside artist can bring in, in close coordination is where we started to discover our stride in terms of having impact. Then over the next chapters, teaching artists were growing up. We were learning, we had responsibilities to contribute to what the classroom teacher was addressing. We had to learn about assessment. We had to learn about deep partnering, not just partnering of convenience but really serving what the other one needs and knows.

Up till the time of the pandemic, teaching artists had really become a fairly strategic tool that could be used. I know there are some school educators who hold an old view that maybe teaching artists was a cheap way to replace teachers. It actually was never true. There are far more examples that a teaching artist excited a school or a community about what the arts can do that they went out and hired a full-time art specialist. But there’s much more coordination, much disrupted by COVID and in fact, the researchers on how the arts have been impacted, the pundits of our field have identified teaching artists as taking the single biggest hit of all people in the arts from COVID because teaching artists fall between the cracks because they’re freelancers because they’re not generally covered by unemployment, so it’s been a brutal hit for teaching artists.

Cindy Ingram: Oh, yeah. I can imagine that because teachers took such a hit that it became about survival and teaching artists are extra people that you add into the classroom, extra germs that you’re bringing into the classroom, especially when the classroom doesn’t even exist anymore and it’s online.

Eric Booth: Right. They’re expendable and everyone, teachers and teaching artists have done heroic work to try to keep things going to serve that artistic flame in young people. Whereas we may not have been able to advance it in the ways that we and the kids find exciting as much as we have in person, we’ve kept it going and looks like we’re going to get our chance to start to recover some of the opportunities that have been missed.

Cindy Ingram: Yeah. I loved hearing your journey about how the teaching artist field has changed because I do think that there are a lot of teachers out there that one, they’re trying to get their jobs replaced but that two, that piece about the artist coming in with that ignorance, I know that a lot of teachers inherently know that not anyone can just come in and teach, especially, my degree was in art history and I was taught how to teach art history by just being taught art history and then I leave and I’m like, “This is not the right way to teach. Lecture in a dark room? No, this is not how you learn things.” I think that journey from being an artist and having something to say and having these brilliant ideas to learning how to actually teach that, that’s hard.

Eric Booth: You bet. One of my big lessons, I remember this with such fondness, was a research project back in the early 90s that put me in classrooms of one elementary school that was a research focused school where I was in the classroom of elementary teachers and elementary arts specialists for like a year. Those ladies kicked my butt for all my arrogant intellectualism. Even though I was a good lively teaching artist and could make stuff happen with kids, they just squeezed the bologna out of me like nobody’s business to what needs to be done, how you make a room really work, how you accomplish accessible results. It was the real turning point in my recognition of how much skill is involved in teaching arts in a classroom.

Cindy Ingram: Yeah. Just classroom management alone, that’s a hard one. For teachers today who have the idea that they would like to work with a teaching artist and bring a teaching artist into their classroom, how do they go about doing that?

Eric Booth: There are really two ways aside from just if you happen to know when stuff can happen. The two ways are school-to-organization partnering. In almost every city and town in the US, there are organizations that provide services to schools. If there’s a relationship that can be made with budget, it’s not a high expense item but it is an expense item, you call the after-school providers in the arts and they will probably have one in your town that provides dance and music and certainly visual art, you may contact the local museum or gallery. That’s one way for an individual teacher to do it. The other way is when school leadership, either a PTA, a school principal, or a district arts coordinator, if a teacher says, “Can we make this happen?” usually people are willing.

Money is sometimes scarce but there’s funny pockets of money that can be tapped for bringing and teaching artists in or an organization that provides teaching artists. I must say there is almost always a universal benefit. The extra infusion of energy, it’s like an oxygen hit in that there’s extra energy coming from the outside affirming what’s already happening in that classroom. It’s well worth doing and teaching artists have become so dedicated and really respectful of what their role is as an additive measure, not as a special something on the side but as really a tonic to advance the work that’s happening in the classroom. It’s almost always worth the extra effort and paperwork.

Cindy Ingram: Yeah. I’ve learned, especially with COVID, I think a lot of teachers before COVID didn’t ask for things that they wanted. If they wanted something, some supply or if they wanted some training, they were less likely to ask. I’ve noticed with COVID, all of a sudden teachers are like, “I’m doing enough. I’m going to just go ahead and ask,” and then they’re being given what is being asked for. These school districts are finding these bits of money, especially with the extra COVID money that they’re given, but I think teachers have had a nice lesson just the last couple of years to just, “No. If you want it, just ask for it.”

Eric Booth: Exactly. It applies to their partnering with the teaching artist to say, “There’s this part of my work I would like to pour some extra energy in. How can you create some extra creative engagement around that idea?” That’s when partnerships really work because then the teaching artist can take all these amazing skills she’s got and pour it into exactly the skill development that teacher has been wanting muscled up a little bit more.

Cindy Ingram: I love that. What does a good teaching artist partnership look like? How long would a teaching artist typically work with a group of students?

Eric Booth: I would say it is nice to think ideally, always customized to reality, I would say probably in the US, the average number of visits in a unit of study involving a teaching artist is three or four. There are some quick one shots and then there are these beautiful longer ones that over an arc of weeks. But let’s just say a three visit unit, in an ideal situation, the teacher and the teaching artist focus on a specific something they want to develop, a specific skill set. In music, that might be “I want kids to have an experience of composition in small groups or in an art classroom.” It might be “I want kids to encounter a new artistic medium and in just three visits, notice how they come up with ideas or notice how issues of quality apply.” It’s not just bringing a teaching artist so that you can mess around with Raku pottery, but it’s using Raku pottery to emphasize something that’s essential to that teacher, a way of noticing, a way of thinking, a way of trying out a creative process so that it has a much longer ripple effect after the teaching artist has gone because the kids own that skill set more deeply and the teacher can rely on it.

The other thing I would say about an idealized teaching artist project is there’s quite a bit of planning up front to make sure that time is maximized and then I think of it as slow down to speed up. You actually slow down the work in one particular area and you may spend a surprising amount of time looking at the processes and trying out and purposely making mistakes so that you go way slow in the beginning of that project. The gamble is, which is backed up by research, you actually go significantly further as a result of that slowing down. Slow down, speed up, and then have a carry through that the teacher can use to surf quite a distance beyond the teaching artist’s time.

Cindy Ingram: Oh, I love that, because I feel like a lot of teachers feel this need to cover things. You’ve got to get this, you got to cover this and this.” With Art Class Curator, we tell teachers how to introduce works of art into the classroom and then we’ll say spend an entire class period with one painting, really dive into it, talk about it. I think teachers get a little scared, they’re like, “Oh, that’s wasting a lot of time.” I’m like, “Oh, it’s not. There’s so much happening there, so much they’re digging into and learning about and they’re just enjoying themselves.” I love that slow down to speed up.

Eric Booth: It’s really true, teachers, the pressure for coverage in a classroom is so intense that sometimes it can help to have an outsider, like a teaching artist, disrupt the coverage imperative, it feels almost like a vacation that you get to actually dig in and go deep and explore. It sure has been my 40 years of experience that the payoff for even just the courageous adjustment of three or four class periods, the payoff is enormous.

Cindy Ingram: Yeah. Especially if we’re talking about artists, that’s not how artists work but they don’t just “I’ve got a painting idea. I’m going to go paint it. I’m going to just rush right into it,” there’s a long process of thinking, sketching, imagining, and writing about it. There’s so much more that goes into the beginning that once they’re ready to paint it, they can paint it probably pretty quickly, but just all of that thought that goes into it before they get there. I love that.

Eric Booth: You got it.

Cindy Ingram: Okay. We got the teaching artist stuff out of the way. I know I wanted to talk to you about that before, but what I’m really excited about your work is you have a couple of books, The Everyday Work of Art—well you have more than two books but these are the two books that I particularly am most interested in—and then you have a newest one called Tending the Perennials: The Art and Spirit of a Personal Religion. Let me tell you a funny story about The Everyday Work of Art. I’ve had that book on my shelf since I worked at Big Thought. Someone gave me a copy. For the last 15 years, I’ve thought I had a signed copy of it and I pulled it off my bookshelf to talk to you today, it’s not a signed copy, it’s someone’s name from who worked at Big Thought and I’m like, “Do I have her book?” It’s not you at all. I’m like, “Oh, it is signed but it’s just signed by the development team.” I was like, “Man, I have to carry it with me next time I’m at some event that you’re at and be like, ‘Can you actually sign my copy?’” But anyway, all that aside, can you tell us about these two books?

Eric Booth: Sure. That’s funny. I won’t accuse you of swiping that book but we now know the development department wasn’t interested in reading it and they were really happy to find somebody who was. That book, The Everyday Work of Art, which starts with the single best sentence I ever wrote in any of my books which is “Art, like sex, is too important to leave to the professionals.” The idea behind that book was something that had been brewing inside me for a long time that really was about distinguishing the nouns of art from the verbs of art, and noticing how addicted we are to the nouns of art, in the US in particular, and actually how all the goodies, both for our own personal experience and for educators, live in the verbs of art. That book was an exploration of what are these verbs of art? What is it that artists are actually doing inside when they’re in their artistic engagement? How are they making choices, how are they evaluating quality, how are they seeing things and making connections? Then identifying those verbs of art and noticing how all of us, even those who don’t think of themselves as arts people at all, how are all of us using those verbs of art for satisfaction in daily life?

We all know this, we know when the thanksgiving table looks great even if we’re finishing our MBA and haven’t had a single artsy thought in the last four years, that is a moment that matters to us. When we have a personal conversation that becomes alive with discovery, it’s the verbs of art that have led us and our friend to that place. That book is about the exploration of those ideas and how we can take greater advantage of the verbs of art in daily life. As I was finishing that book, I was able to be on an artistic retreat and the thought dropped 24 years ago at this point—it took me 22 years to write this companion book—the thought dropped that the things I was doing in my own personal spiritual work, I would meditate sometimes but almost beyond meditation, when I would feel that sense of connectedness to things, when the world made sense like there was a compassionate energy flowing through the world, I noticed that the things I was doing inside were actually the same things I was doing when I was in artistic flow.

I began to get this sense of the connectedness between the verbs of art and the verbs of spirituality. It took me 22 years of research and writing and then giving up on it for some years and then coming back to it to put together that second book that tries to do what the first book did by making that juncture, that overlap where the verbs of art and the verbs of spirituality are the same things, how can we gain greater access to that and how can we make greater use of that in our daily life for a more grounded spiritual participation in daily life, that for me and a lot of people happens around artistic media but in fact, for everybody, is accessible through the verbs of art whatever media they’re dealing with.

Cindy Ingram: Oh, so good. So good. I have a little anecdote that just literally just happened last week, that I saw this happen in my life. I’m reading your book at the same time as it’s happening so that’s probably not a coincidence, but I have been trying to meditate forever. I read about meditation. If you can count all the hours I’ve spent reading about meditation, it’s probably 20 times the amount of time I’ve actually spent doing meditation, but I noticed that when I go to art museums and I’m in front of a work of art, I can sit there forever. I’m just in the flow, I’m in it, I’m connected to the artwork and I’m just there. I was like, “Oh, that’s meditation.”

But then I went to this painting retreat last week and we had to just paint and we weren’t allowed to talk, it was silent, we weren’t allowed to comment on other people’s artwork. It was just pure silence, us with the paint. I noticed what I was doing was meditating the entire time. There was some thought about what I was going to paint. I was just responding to the paint but I was like, “This is meditation. Why am I wasting my time with all of these recordings of people telling me what to do? I know how to meditate. I’m doing it right now.” I had this big aha moment, I was like, “My meditation practice doesn’t have to look like what everyone else says it should look like. I can just paint.”

Eric Booth: Cindy, that’s fantastic. That’s so true to unhook people from the particular practices that work for some people. But so many people feeling inadequate or like they’re not spiritually good people because they don’t do particular practices, I’ll tell you if you find yourself in the flow experience, you are in the spiritual zone. People find flow experiences doing all kinds of different things. How many people have described to me their state of mind when they’re cooking? How many people have described where they get to inside when they’re walking in the woods? These are the spiritual experiences we have. Almost everyone, if you were to draw them out, they start using aesthetic vocabulary to describe it. This is the overlap zone. We call stuff beautiful not just because it’s attractively framed on a wall but because of the quality of experience we are having. We imbue the sense of beauty. It’s not that we buy it and then we have it.

What you’re describing as having spiritually connected meditative like experiences in arts material, I think a lot of your listeners have that experience and they have the cooking experience and they have the walking in the woods experience and so the book Tending the Perennials is about “So if this is so available to us, why don’t we take greater advantage of it?” That’s what the book tries to point out.

Cindy Ingram: Yeah. I love that. You gave an example in the book about you listening to the water flowing over rocks and noticing the tones and the music or the musical aspect of it and noticing like the layers of the sound. It gave me chills because I was like, “Yeah, that’s exactly what you’re doing.” You’re putting the same amount of attention into listening to this water as you would maybe listening to a symphony but you’re doing the exact same thing, you’re using the exact same skills.

Eric Booth: Exactly. The one thing I have found—and I bet we all know this from experience—that if you get into attending to things like that, one starts to have that quality of attention to all different kinds of things in life. It’s like a skill set that we developed largely through the quality of our attention, which we usually reserve just for special pockets of activity. But in fact, if we start attaching to the verbs instead of the nouns, suddenly the sound of the soup boiling and the quality, the timbre of the voice in our neighbor’s hello, suddenly these start to reward us in ways that had just been unavailable to us before. We hadn’t been able to have those aesthetic spiritual experiences peopled throughout our days. Man, life is tough, we need some more of that stuff as a regular color in daily life.

Cindy Ingram: Yeah. I love that. It reminds me of quote I read recently, I know I’m not going to be able to pull it out, but one part of it was we have to risk delight because the world is so hard and so heavy and there’s so much going on that it’s risky to take the light and little things like the bubbling sound of the water.

Eric Booth: I bet you were reading Ross Gay’s book, The Book of Delights, were you?

Cindy Ingram: No. But I need to.

Eric Booth: Okay, you want to have it. This guy Ross Gay has written this amazing book where he spent a year just attending to the times he felt delight and writing about them. They’re so ordinary and exquisite. Noticing the way someone put on a weird outfit that day and how they’re wearing it, and noticing how a memory connects to something a waiter just said, all those little subtle delights that are there for us but that we usually miss because we’re busy doing other stuff.

Cindy Ingram: Yeah. Slowing down and developing those skills of the verbs of art. In the book, you were talking about things like noticing awareness, responding, yearning, and you talked about all of them as skills. I think that I loved that distinction of them being skills that we can work on. It made me think of how to talk about my work just a little bit differently too because when you’re looking at a work of art, you’re doing all of those skills, but those aren’t the skills that are in the standards, learning how to pay attention more, it’s not in the standards necessarily, maybe it is. I have to go back and look.

Eric Booth: If I were 20 years younger—and I’m going to pass this idea for someone else to do—I would start mapping the overlap between these skills you and I are now talking about and socio-emotional learning skills. Because the vocabularies are still separate but the actual experiences are hugely overlapping. As a way to introduce more legitimately those kinds of opportunities to young people in schools, especially nowadays where they’re really struggling with how would I be back in school and what is the social part of my schooling, to actually have the space and the authorization, to focus in on those SEL skills a little bit through the lens of the verbs of art. I think arts teachers have a whole lot to offer. We don’t have the language or the curriculum that makes it clear to the systems yet, that’s why I need someone else to go take that one on, I’m too old now, but I think that’s there for the grabbing.

Cindy Ingram: Yeah. Definitely. That really is. When you’re talking about the verbs of art, what are the ones you’re thinking of? What are the verbs?

Eric Booth: Let me just name a couple, you just did a pretty good list for me. A lot of it is stuff like how you attend to actually become intentional about attending the way artists are. When an artist is looking at a draft of her work, or as you did the other weekend, is looking at a work of art somebody else made, to know how to navigate that intentionally, not like a kid does who hasn’t really been learned how to do it, not just look at it, wonder if it’s good and hope to get told how to make it better, but in fact, to begin to attend with that odd balance of seeing the part and the whole together, the educator Elliot Eisner who was one of the great gurus of arts education in the 20th Century, said, “The arts teach this one skill better than anything else in a child’s life,” which is the relationship between parts and holes. That is a verb of art. To be able to navigate that relationship and that way of seeing for what is the specific here, how do I make adjustments in that specific and then zoom back to be able to assess the effectiveness of that idea, so the capacity to see and navigate the relationship between parts and holes is one.

Another one is to be able to run the continuum, I think of, as making a choice, recognizing what led to that choice, like what are the influences working on you that lead to that choice, and what is the outcome of that choice, what is the effect. A little continuum of making a choice with a sensitivity for its lineage and its consequence, that’s a skill of art. Man, that will carry you well into life. If you can learn in school to pause at choice, recognize there are many choices, I’ve made this one, what are the influences that led me to make that one? Maybe I want to make others, but for this one, what is the consequence of that choice? You can live a life better if you develop that little habit of mind. They’re habits of mind maybe as much as skills, the word skill as you know from reading, at least, one page of my book—I’m an etymology freak—I’m always exploring what a word originally meant and how it’s migrated into usually our more pedestrian usage of it, but the word skill, an important word for arts educators etymologically means the capacity to make a distinction.

The skill is not out here in your hands. That is the manifestation of your skill. The skill is in your head when you can go, “Oh, that. Not that.” That’s the moment you have the skill. What’s important for us as arts educators, particularly teaching artists who don’t have enough time often to see the skills that have been established cognitively, being able to be manifested well out in the hands doesn’t mean you don’t have the skill. The skill is the inside and the practice enables you to demonstrate that discrimination. I think the capacity to make new discriminations is the work of the arts educator. That’s why teachers, even art on a cart teachers who don’t have enough time and personal relationship with students, to really get those skills out there in a way that’s satisfying for everyone, plant that skill, set up enough attractiveness of experimentation that the kid takes at home so that the kid is messing with stuff at home and trying stuff in the margin of her paper. That’s when the hand skill catches up to the internal skill.

Cindy Ingram: Oh, so good. Every time you go answer a question, I’m just like, “Oh, this is so good. I’m really happy for our listeners to get to listen to what you’re saying.” But I didn’t notice that in your book about the etymology and I thought at first, “Oh, gosh, this is going to be really overwhelming to me,” but then as you started to get into it, I was like, “Oh, this was really fascinating, each word.” Then some words, the etymological root of the word was not how we use it, like wonder was an example of that and I was like, “Ooh, that’s fascinating.” I really enjoyed that aspect of it.

But one of the things that you talked about in the book is the difference between big Art and little art. You did the same with big Religion and little religion because you’re talking about both in the book. What is the difference to you between those two?

Eric Booth: Yeah. I must say, those capital letters A and R, as much as they have authority in the world with the institutions of art and all those institutions of religion, in a lot of ways, they lose the direct experience of what that word is when you give it a small ‘a’ so that all art in America, and if you look at the research it’s really only six percent of Americans who feel they are people of the arts, they identify as someone where the arts are a big part of my life. Six percent, it’s your birthright. A hundred percent of us have the small ‘a’ experience in our lives but the institutional representation has allowed us to define it as that six percent noun. The focus certainly of arts educators is invigorating the relationship to art with a small ‘a’ which, etymologically, I’ll do it again, means to put things together. It doesn’t mean make art objects that others will say that’s beautiful. It’s an intentional investment of yourself in making something you care about.

In fact I don’t use the word art much anymore. I use the words “make stuff you care about” because I want kids making stuff they care about in artistic media and in lots of other media as well, with religion similarly. There are probably too many pages in the book about the ways that formal religious institutions have taken us away from the universality of that small ‘r’ where the etymology of religion is to bind tightly. It’s about our feeling connected. It’s not about dogmas and practices and institutions. It’s about feeling connected. The more we can apply energy toward that sense of connectedness, and some capital ‘r’ Religions do it great and some of them do it great for some of their people and not for others of their people, what I care about is not the institution but people have their birthright direct gigantic relationship with this human right and this capacity that brings us some of our greatest satisfactions and meaning in life. It’s sitting right there ready for us to access if we can get those skills sharpened.

Cindy Ingram: Yeah. That really has very much described my journey over my adulthood of how I figured out that art is an intensive part of my personal religion. I feel like your book came to me at the exact right moment. I believe that happens. The book comes when you’re ready for the book and this was like, “This is exactly what I’m writing for right now.” I loved what you said about art changing art to creating something you care about. I noticed in your first book, you talked about it as creating worlds and I really loved that distinction too. You not only talked about creating worlds but it was three-parts: creating worlds, responding to worlds–

Eric Booth: Entering worlds and reading the world.

Cindy Ingram: Yeah, and I love, love that.

Eric Booth: Yeah. In The Everyday Work of Art, it really boils down to their three main actions. There’s the making worlds, which are these coherent somethings that hold the way you see things, and if all is well in our lives, we have the courage to share those with others, whether it’s the telling of a good story or the painting of something we care about, or the thanksgiving table. Then the second one is entering worlds: how do you set aside your preconceptions, your judgments to actually enter a world someone else made and discover what it has to offer. Not coming in with opinions and judgments but actually having the skills of audience to discover it on its own terms and find its value. You did that the other weekend with the paintings you were exploring, but we do it when we empathize with a friend telling us a story of something confusing that happened to him. We do it when we enter a foreign country very often. It’s as another set of verbs that artists use exquisitely but that reward throughout life. Then the third one: reading the world is that readiness to the serendipity of what the world will serve up to us if we walk through the world awake.

I’ve always been astonished that when I’m thinking about renovating my kitchen, I’m suddenly noticing stores that sell dishwashers. It’s not like they popped overnight, popped up, they were always there. But I never thought and my attention was not drawn to them because they were irrelevant. In our complex cognitive processing, they didn’t rise to merit attention, but we can actually mess with that, we can attend more broadly and discover all kinds of amazing things that are out there in the world. Reading the world is a way of walking through our lives with our aesthetic antennae active. It delivers up more goodies than you can imagine.

Cindy Ingram: Yeah. One of my favorite things to do is to go through where I live and look at it through the lens of if I were traveling here. What would this look like to me when I’ve never been here before? Then all of a sudden, things are more beautiful, things that I thought were just mundane are actually quite charming. It just allows me to just look at where I live, just with a change of lens. I have these little beautiful moments at stoplights when I remember to do that.

Eric Booth: That’s it. One that I ask myself often is right where I am now, what are three things about this space I never noticed before? Or if I’m in a classroom, ask the kids, “What are three things about this space that you think probably no one else in the room is noticing today?” Those little practices start to develop that skill muscle of attending. It always pays off.

Cindy Ingram: Yeah. I love it. One of the other skills that you talk about in the book—and I loved the way you did it because it was responding but you would put response-ability and I was delighted by that use of words—but responding to me is one of the ones that we work on so much at Art Class Curator with responding to works of art. Can you give us any tips or ideas on how to develop responsiveness through responsibility?

Eric Booth: Yeah. Of course, if you quote responsibility, you’re inviting an etymology quick break, an etymology break, respond means promise back. It is the ability to promise back. In standing in front of a painting, young people and not so young people generally don’t know what to do so they do the single least useful thing which is have an opinion about it before they’ve really seen it. I watch people go through galleries, it’s like watching dogs pee on fire hydrants. It’s like, “I had an opinion about this one, I had an opinion about that one,” and they haven’t even seen them. The way one begins to practice the skill of response-ability is to slow down and offer a little challenge—visual thinking strategies are really good ones, it’s a very common one—by using those simple questions to get people to ask questions, to just notice a specific something and not interpret it.

I see that there’s a piece of wood in the snow in that painting and to guide it to actually “What is it you’re actually seeing there?” “Oh, well it’s a piece of brown paint,” “Oh, and how’s that thing shaped and what made you think it was wood?” That’s when we actually start to have a relationship to the thing. Little assignments like I had one colleague, to develop responsibility, would have her students stand in front of a painting and do nothing but ask questions about it for about five, six, seven minutes and then at the end of that, have the students decide which questions would be the most interesting to answer together. They would spend 20 minutes in front of a painting with her doing a little bit of teaching in teachable moments but it was really about the practice of overcoming that knee-jerk gratification impulse to actually start to see and then watch them carry that to the other paintings in the gallery.

One little exercise I’ve loved to do for years is as young people come into the gallery, they have a handful of little, I call them chits, but they’re little prompts on pieces of paper like “This is the one that would cost the most money to buy,” or “This is the one I would want to have in my living room,” and they go lay those down in front of the painting that corresponds to the different prompts. Then they have a conversation based on how the class voted basically. Why do you think everybody, like so many people, wants this on their living room wall? What is it about this painting that has a living room feel to it? Suddenly, you’re having an investigation based on what is relevant to the learners that you feed in some interstitial information but it’s about curiosity, it’s about activating what they know and what they wonder about, and that heats up those skills. It builds a sense of relevance and competence that carries forward into the relationship to a gallery even when you don’t have little slips of paper.

Cindy Ingram: Yeah. Next time they go, it gives them a new way to engage with the art that they hadn’t thought about before.

Eric Booth: Yeah. One of my favorite little chit prompts is “This is the most spiritual painting in this room,” because you end up with young people in a conversation about spirituality in their lives and they have a really welcoming access to sharing what they think and feel, and that is often a memorable bit of conversation with young people.

Cindy Ingram: Oh, yes. I love that. I’m going to do that with adults too. Most of the time these days, I’m with adults in the galleries, because spirituality means such a different thing to so many different people. That sounds super powerful. Every time I get an idea, I have to stop for a minute and just let my brain remember that. Got it, it’s there. I really love that. Your book is so much about these intersections between art and spirituality. If you could, I guess, besides having someone pick up your book—which I recommend, I’m about halfway through and I’ve just been enjoying every second of it—what is one thing that our listeners can do right now to become more connected with that art and the divine?

Eric Booth: What a good question. In the book there are a lot of little exercises for people to try to do. I’m not remembering any of them right at this moment so let me speak in general rather than try to recall one that I’m not thinking of at the moment. The thing, I think, people have ready access to at any point is, well let me say one of the ready accesses, is through the experience of beauty. We assume beauty is in the thing, that’s that noun mind that we have, whereas it’s actually a quality of investment in us. Activities that have to do with inviting people to number one, reconnect to things that they have had beauty experiences with previously in their lives, that’s why these things are on our walls, we don’t always look at them, in fact, we don’t look at them very much, but to reconnect and remember, re-activate the sense of beauty, and then the exercise to look at something that is not beautiful by our standard definitions, and stay with it long enough to discover what’s beautiful about it.

That is one of the most simple powerful little exercises you can do on the bus, you can do with the stop light, is to look at the beat up garbage can, to look at the tree that’s not a great looking tree, and empathetically connect to its world, enter the world of it enough that we are reconnected to the experience of beauty, because its potential is everywhere and the experience of beauty is the one that starts to open us. It’s both an indicator that we’re in that state and it’s a gateway to enter that state. The simple practice of remembering to open to the inherent beauty of almost anything, maybe practicing with beautiful stuff but getting on to the not so beautiful stuff, is a way to just step over the threshold into the spiritual space almost any time you want.

Cindy Ingram: I love it, so good. Since you brought it up, you do have these exercises in the book. I’m an avid reader, I read a ton, and a lot of non-fiction books will have these little exercises at the end of the chapters that are like, “Okay, now do this,” and use the journaling prompt. Usually, I never do them ever because they’re always just like, “Tell me your thoughts on beauty.” They’re just not very engaging to me. But I noticed in your book, your exercises, I could tell you’re a teacher, I could tell you know how to get someone from here to there by the way they were worded, and I think that’s why I’m going a little slower with the book is because I get it in the chapter and I’ll be in bed and I’m like, “Oh, yeah, I got to stop because I’m going to do that exercise,” and I’ll just be doing it in my head while I’m falling asleep. But I was so tickled by those because they are just so well crafted. You could tell you’ve put a lot of effort into those little sections.

Eric Booth: Well, that’s so nice and that’s really where my teaching artists years come in to be able to just shape a small invitation. I don’t do these activities at the ends of other books, I don’t do them either, but I was determined to make these inviting enough, and I guess I would say elegantly targeted enough, that it’s not like a generic suggestion you’re throwing out, it’s a real educator’s point of view.

Cindy Ingram: Yeah. It’s how I craft a lesson of, “Okay, this is where I want the student to get. How do I get them there without just telling them? How do I get them to get there on their own?” That’s exactly how those were written. I think it’s a masterclass on how to write those. Anybody who writes a book needs to go look at yours.

Eric Booth: Thank you for that. It takes a lot of hours to do them as you well know so I’m glad they worked for you.

Cindy Ingram: Wonderful. We have been talking for a while so I think we probably need to wind it down. Before we do that, can you tell listeners how to connect with you online if they want to follow what you’re up to?

Eric Booth: Sure. Probably the easiest way, I’m really bad about letting people know what I’m doing but things I’ve written or important stuff that’s going on, my website’s the best way. It’s ericbooth.net, it’s that simple. That’s where there’s a lot of the free materials I’ve written and that’s home base. If anyone wants to get in touch with me, there’s a contact button there that’ll come right to me.

Cindy Ingram: Yes, and he gets back to you pretty quickly. I learned when I emailed you about the podcast, I’m so excited. We’ll put links to that as well as links to the books that we mentioned, as well as your books in the show notes for the site. But my last question that I ask all of my guests anytime they’re on the podcast is which artwork changed your life?

Eric Booth: All right. I have to give you the biggie. It was Hamlet. That’s what actors dream of and I got to play it three times. Each time, it was like my whole world. When I was in marathon training, I was running lines, I was still working 20 years after playing Hamlet, I was still working on those soliloquies when I was jogging. I’ve had three entirely different interpretations of it as my own inner life matured. I just got invited to speak to a book group next week so it’s like I spent two-thirds of my life fascinated by spelunking the depth of what’s underneath it. I never knew an artwork could carry two-thirds of a lifetime of fascination. I’d say for me that’s the big one. It may not be quite so fascinating for others but if ever I could play Hamlet one more time, a 75 year old Hamlet, Gertrude would probably have to be 125 at that point, but if there were such a production, I’d be there in a sec.

Cindy Ingram: Yeah. My guess was that’s the one you’re going to say based on what I’ve read. I loved, in your book, listening to you, you talk about your process for getting into the character and really fully understanding him. It was really fun for me to watch that. What do you think it is about Hamlet that has captured you for so long?

Eric Booth: I think it’s got just the right amount of mystery where you never exactly know but you feel like you’re getting closer to this deep thing, that really is you’re getting closer to something of your own but you think it’s something out there. It’s just perfectly designed to take you deeper into your own understanding. The reason that play as opposed to another one for me is that’s the area I’m most interested in, that stuff of questions of ethics in the world, questions of the relationship to what do we do in life and how should we hold death, I love that stuff and so I want to spend a lifetime exploring it with some really great language.

Cindy Ingram: I love that. I just had Vanessa Zoltan on the podcast recently and we talked about using text, just secular texts as sacred texts and it sounds like that’s exactly what you’re doing with Hamlet. You’re learning from it about the world that you live in now, you’re learning from it about yourself, you’re feeding new understandings every time you engage with it. I love that. Thank you so very much for joining me today. I had such a blast talking with you.

Eric Booth: Oh, Cindy, so fun to talk with a spirit mate who’s seen the world the same way and is sharing it out with lots of other listeners. Welcome, listeners, who like to explore the world in the same way we do.

Cindy Ingram: Yes, thank you.

What’s keeping you from showing more artwork to your students? Do you get stuck trying to choose a work of art or do you fear your students will ask a question that you don’t know the answer to? Have you tried to start a classroom art discussion but didn’t know what to say or how to get your students talking? Are you worried you’re going to spend a ton of time researching and planning a lesson that none of your students are interested in? That’s why we created Beyond the Surface, a free professional development email series all about how to teach works of art through memorable activities and thoughtful classroom discussions. With Beyond the Surface, you’ll discover how to choose artworks your students will connect with and learn exactly what to say and do to spark engagement and create a lasting impact. Plus, you’ll get everything you need to curate these powerful learning experiences without spending all of your time planning. Sign up to receive this free professional development email course at artclasscurator.com/surface.

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.

• Sopa d’Europa by Miquel Barceló
• Art Connection Circle
• Full Frontal Living podcast
• 82 Questions About Art

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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 delight 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. And I have something I’m super excited to share with you today. Over the last many months, I have been really exploring what really brings me joy in the work that I do. And you’ll learn in a few weeks on the podcast about this experience we had over the summer at a summer workshop that we offer at our class curator. That episode will be coming out in a few weeks. I don’t know which exact date it is, but we had a really magical, powerful experience with the group of teachers that came on the second day. And after that, and along with all this work I’ve been doing throughout the last few years, I’ve really realized that I am super passionate about spending time with people, with works of art. And helping teachers, bring them to their students is wonderful and valuable, but I also really want to be the teacher again, you know, be in those conversations about the art, rather than helping you facilitate them. So, I have a brand new program that I’m going to be offering, and it’s not just for teachers, it is for anybody. 

And so, in this episode, I am actually doing an interview with Lisa Carpenter for her podcast called Full Frontal Living. Now, Lisa Carpenter is a friend of mine, she is also my former coach, we’re also colleagues, business colleagues. I’ve known her for several years and we have a really special, special relationship. And this conversation with her for her podcast, after it was over, I realized I really wanted to share this conversation with you as well. So, you will hear her interviewing me and you’ll hear her talk about the things that she likes to talk about. Her podcast is a lot about self-care and helping you manage your work-life balance and getting out of the doing and into the being. It’s a really– she’s a wonderful coach and a wonderful human being. And so, I encourage you to listen to her podcast if what she talks about today resonates with you.

So this is an episode from her podcast reposted on my podcast. I’m the guest on the podcast. And I even walk her through an art interpretation exercise in the episode as well and also share a little bit about these new art connection circles, which we’re going to start soon on November 8th. So if you’re interested in that, you can get more information at the end of the episode, you can also visit artclasscurator.com/circle, and get more information about this upcoming program. But I’m super thrilled about this interview and she’s super thrilled about this direction that we are going in, and I can’t wait to have these powerful personal conversations about art with you if you join us. All right, thanks so much to Lisa, and here is our interview.

Lisa Carpenter: Hey, hey, listeners, thanks for tuning in to another episode of the Full Frontal Living podcast. And I have a really special guest on with me today. I was super excited to bring her on the podcast, and we’re talking about something that I haven’t really ever dived into, but if you’ve been listening for a while, you know I talk a lot about how to care for yourself, we talk a lot about emotional fluency, what it means to feel your feelings. And this lady, Cindy Ingram, who is a former client of mine, she’s also become a good friend, she’s a colleague, we have quite an interesting history together as I’ve gotten to know her. She is going to walk us through, today, art as a way to connect with our emotions because this came up in a conversation between her and me a while ago. 

You probably have never thought about this, but art is such a great way to connect with your emotions. And especially during the pandemic, I know for me art has become really powerful, but not necessarily your traditional what we think of as art. So we’ll talk a little bit about that. But Cindy, can you go ahead and introduce yourself to everybody? Let them know who you are, what you do, your background, because it’s so– there’s such an interesting story about where you were and versus where you are now.

Cindy: Yes. Hello, I’m so excited to be here, and always fun to talk to you. So, yes, my name is Cindy Ingram and I am a former art teacher and a former museum educator. So, when I was in school growing up, I always wanted to be a Disney animator. I was obsessed with Disney movies. But I lived in a small town and we didn’t have like art museums or, you know, art to explore, so my only way of really connecting with art was in my art classes, and then also, watching these Disney movies. And I realized pretty early on in my life that there was something about me that had a really intense emotional connection with works of art, theater, movies, visual art, music, like they always just deeply moved me.

And I saw Lion King at the movie theater 12 times when I was in the eighth grade.

Lisa: Wow.

Cindy: I would cry every single time. So that was like my first real art connection, was The Lion King. And I realized too throughout my career, I went to Europe when I was in high school when a teacher led us on a trip around Europe, and that’s when I got to see real art for the first time. I saw that people worked there, and I saw that there are people that get to spend their lives looking at art, talking about art, being in the presence of art. And I was hooked from then on, I decided to get my degree in art history and really have just followed the magic of art ever since.

And it wasn’t until I was trying to get my Ph.D. in art history, I was doing my applications and I was doing my GRE and filling it all the Ed, make writing all the essays, and then I went to an art museum and had this interaction with there a work of art. And I couldn’t believe it. I was like I was punched in the stomach. I was crying. I was mesmerized by this painting. I couldn’t walk away. I just stood there for probably an hour or two hours. My husband saw the whole exhibit and then came all the way back around. And I’m still there in front of this painting. And what I realized at that moment was that I don’t ever want to lose this sort of magical, emotional connection I had with art, and I worried if I got my Ph.D. in art history, that it would be… 

I would learn too much and it would lose the magic that it had. At that moment too, I realized that I want everyone else to experience this magic too. And that’s when I decided to completely shift gears and do education instead of art history because I really wanted everybody to have this sort of powerful experience that I am capable of having. And so I started to teach about works of art in creative ways. And then I eventually started my business, Art Class Curator, where I help art teachers connect works of art into their classroom with their students. Because a lot of our teachers don’t know how to do that. They mostly know how to make art, and the ‘looking at art’ is not something they’re really taught all that much.

I’ve been helping teachers for the last few years. And as I’ve been doing that, I’ve just been diving deeper, deeper into realizing that my emotional connection toward works of art is my magic, that is something that has always been– something that has driven me, and it’s always been something that I have loved. I didn’t until the last few years realize that what I’m doing when I’m looking at works of art is self-development. What I’m doing is working on myself. I’m not learning about art, I’m learning about myself through my interactions with art.

Ever since I really had that connection, that click, it’s really been so fun to explore and to help other people explore their own connection with art too.

Lisa: It’s so profound, because, you know, one of the things that we worked on when we were working together, which you really coming back home to feeling safe, feeling your feelings, like with most of my clients, right? They’d rather be up in their heads and think their way through stuff. So it’s really fascinating that all along, you’ve been a very deep feeler and an empath. And art was always that connection where you felt safe to feel your feelings, but out in the world, you didn’t. And for so many of us, right? Like, when I have clients who say, “Well, I’m not a crier.” I’m not of this or I’m not at that. If I can say, “Well, have you ever listened to a song and cried, or have you ever looked up at a beautiful sunrise or sunset and cried?” 

Almost every single one of them has that kind of experience. But we don’t necessarily tie it to the fact that oh, art is one of the things that allows me to safely feel my feelings. And I know, you know, over the pandemic and I’ve– you know, I’ve had Joan Murray on the podcast before because she did that beautiful painting of me, and that literally shifted something in my body when I saw it. It’s still a very powerful thing that I ground myself with. And over the pandemic, I was joking with you about how much time I’ve spent watching art, but not necessarily in the traditional sense, but most people don’t know is like, I’m a total, like, I died over watching creatives create. So whether it’s body painting, tattoo artists, metal sculptures, glassblowing, we talked about it, like, if there’s a reality show where people are making shit, I am all over baking. 

Oh my God, the amount of like baking cake creating things I’ve watched, because to me, that is people expressing their art in such amazing and phenomenal ways. And I’m always moved by it. I mean, if it’s like a cake, that’s a monster. I’m still moved by it because it really art has this ability to profoundly shift us. So you’ve been working with teachers for a long time and now, you’re starting to realize that you have a gift that needs to reach even more people in terms of talking about how they can use art as self-care and as self-development like you said. So can you talk a little bit more about what that can look like for people? How they can start thinking about art as play and self-care?

Cindy: Yeah. So, I’m going to tell you an example of this to help illustrate it. That you talked about how, you know, me, feeling my feelings, art was a safe place to do that. I’m obsessed with the musical Hamilton. Superfan Hamilton has seen it like four times. I’m about to see it again in a few months. I’m just totally in love with it. I think it’s one of the best artworks ever made. But I have a hard time with watching the news and seeing, like, really sad news stories. As an empath, it’s just it really wears me down. And then finally, there was at one point in my– I was pregnant. And I used to listen to NPR every day on the way to and from work. 

And finally, I couldn’t do that anymore because I would just sit there and cry about every single news story. And every time I’ve seen Hamilton, there’s been something that resonated about something in my life. Like the first time I saw it, there was in my life– my business was– I couldn’t seem to figure it out. I knew I had this great thing. I knew that it was going to be successful, but I wasn’t getting anywhere with it, and I was feeling kind of stuck with it. So the first time I saw Hamilton, I really resonated with Aaron Birst’s character, you know, he spends the whole time just waiting and everybody’s passing him up, everybody else is getting opportunities that he’s not getting and he’s not seeing. 

And so, every time he was on stage like I would just cry and I was just like, I could really feel connected to him in that way. And so, then, the next time I saw it, I saw it in Houston, and a week before, I saw it in Houston, there was a school shooting within an hour of Houston. And it was, you know, multiple students died in the school shooting, and those get me the hardest, you know, with like most parents and teachers so you get– I was a teacher in my kids, and it’s just the worst thing imaginable. But I never allowed myself to really truly think about it because I will just go into the toes of despair, you know?

But, in Hamilton, you know, his son dies by gunfire, and so I’m sitting there watching his mom mourn the son, and knowing, an hour away, that that is happening in real life, that kid’s died by gunfire and their parents are crying over them, you know? But it allowed me to process those feelings and allowed me to feel them. And I started crying and I was still crying like an hour after the show was over. Like that happens kind of midway through and I was still crying. But it gave me a safe space to process my feelings, to feel them, and to really allow myself to go there when– you know, it feels really scary to just cry about something that feels so hopeless. And so, it really helps me then.

And then, I saw Hamilton again, and that was a really happy time of my life and the whole time, like, all of the Skyler Sisters songs I was, you know, it was like were celebratory songs. So it’s like every art meets you wherever you are in your life. Whatever you’re going with, whatever you’re dealing with, art can help you process it. You can use like you would use spiritual texts, like a Bible or any other spiritual texts. You go and read it and you look for advice in your current life and you look to kind of reframe what you’re going through. You can do the exact same thing through engaging with art as you can with books and spiritual texts, and things like that.

Lisa: So profound, what you said, art meets you wherever you are in your life. Because again, many people may not know like I was very much, like all my clients, like I didn’t even let people hug me and I know you get this.

Cindy: Yeah. [crosstalk]

Lisa: I didn’t let people hug me because I didn’t want to feel whatever I was feeling, and it was a journey for me to get out of my head and learn how to feel my emotions. And even still to this day, I have to watch that I don’t default into doing activities or trying to think my way through and just allow myself to feel. So, I actually have– and I’ve talked about this before, I have a crying playlist. I have a playlist of songs that I put on when I know that I need to cry. And I can look back through. So music has always been probably the most profound piece of art that I’ve always used in my life and nature. You know, I can think about pink, but specifically, like Adele. Adele has those moments for me, like, I remember certain songs, putting them on, and writing stuff and having such a hard time. You know, her new single just came out which is called Easy On Me, and this has been such a challenging year for so many of us, two years. You know, I’ve been having a lot of things come up, and that song came on the other day, and it just like washed right over me and just took me under. And I needed it. Like, I needed to feel that because I needed that music to really allow me to completely emote. And when we kind of like, you know, we loosen the radiator cap, so to speak, we let enough out to give ourselves a little bit of relief, but then we’re still pushing down that emotion. Eventually, it’s going to create illness in our body or it comes down to bad behavior. So, I just think that most people don’t think about how they can use different forms of art, whether it’s music, pictures. You even hear about artists all the time. Like, so many artists will say “My art saved me. I found art because I need-” you know, “This thing happened in my life and I needed a place where I could pour my energy into.” I just don’t think most people are thinking about art this way, and I think so many people have, you know, Brené Brown calls them like, what is it? Art? Art wounds?

Cindy: Mmm.

Lisa: What we don’t believe that we’re smart enough to look at art. Because even when you said, like, standing in the gallery and seeing all these works of art, and I’m like, “There’s such a stigma around or only hoity-toity people.”

Cindy: Oh, yeah.

Lisa: What is a hoity-toity person, right? Like, who am I to go in and look at a piece of art? So how do you walk people into understanding that art is for everyone, especially when we’re talking about, you know, real, like works of art paintings on the wall?

Cindy: Yeah, that mindset is so prevalent. It’s something that museum educators and museum staff have been working to fight for a really long time. When I was teaching college, I would assign my students a museum visit. But before I did that, I would do an activity that was like a museum personification, I’m like, “Well, if the art museum was a person, what would they be like?” And so, they’d have to write an essay. And their answers were always like, really well-dressed, really cultured, really rich, drives a fancy car, drinks fancy wines, things that are better than– you know, it was that sort of vibe. And so that’s how I got to talk to them about like, why do you think that? What’s true about that? 

Who’s making you think that way? And kind of break down those sort of stereotypes of what a museum is. I think a lot of people feel like, you know, art capital, a fine is something that is outside of you. It’s something that is, you need something to be able to enjoy it. You’re not good enough. You’re not good enough, you’re not smart enough, you’re not deep enough to connect with it. Or you find it– and so, you’re just automatically shut off to it. And then, also, there’s a lot of boring art in the world, to be honest. There was like a picture of cows and you’re like, ‘Oh, I don’t get this.” I think a lot of people think if they don’t understand a particular type of art, they don’t like a particular type of art, that there are automatic– there’s nothing wrong with them. There’s not something wrong with the arts. It’s something that is-

Lisa: I just wrote that down. If I’m looking at something and I’m like, “How is this worth hundreds of thousands of dollars?” Like, am I missing something? Am I stupid here? Like, what is going on? Because I’m not getting how this is better than what Jake has done when he was eight, right? It’s kind of like this disconnect around, okay, how can I just appreciate it for what it is?

Cindy: Yeah, and you don’t have to like all of it. You know, I’ve dedicated my life, I’m 40 years old, I’ve spent most of my 40 years looking at and learning about art. There’s lots of art I don’t like. There’s nothing wrong with the art and there’s nothing wrong with me, it’s just it doesn’t resonate with me, and that’s totally fine.

Lisa: That’s true with music too, right? Because for the most part, I like many genres, and then there’s some that I’m like, “Hmm.” I can’t get there. I just can’t get there. And even, you know, recently, we had an opportunity to do the immersive Van Gogh, it was here in Vancouver. So Jake was a little bit bored with all the reading stuff and I had to read it all, right? Because I was so fascinated with his history and his background. I really love the stories behind people. I think that that’s really what captivates me with art too, is I want to know more about the artist and the life and the story and what they were struggling with and all those things. 

But, I mean, when we walked in there, it literally took my breath away. And there were many of his paintings that I’m like, “Nah, I’m not digging this one in the field with the farmer.” And then there are other ones where I’m just like, “Ohh, I just want to lie down here. I just want to lie down and let this wash all over me.” So I think that that’s really important too is that you don’t have to like everything but are you willing to be open and curious and explore and even ask yourself, like what about it that I don’t like? Because there are so many things that we can learn about ourselves just in that. So instead of just saying, “Well, I don’t like it.” Well, what don’t you like about it? Just with curiosity, not with judgment. You know, it’s the same thing when we meet people. I don’t like them. Well, why? Like, what is it about them? Because it’s telling you something about yourself, maybe about your values or some of your beliefs.

Cindy: Yeah, that’s what I was going to point out as the– yeah, it’s going to tell you something about your values if there’s something in there that’s rubbing you the wrong way. Like, there’s this one artwork that I came across, it’s in Minneapolis, I think it. The artist is Dorothea Tanning, but I don’t remember the name of the painting, but it’s yellow, and it’s like really cloudy. And there’s like, there’s fingers in there, but you can’t really make them out. And I instantly saw that and like recoil, like my body had this like, this roll, like disgust, like anxiety. And I was like, “Well, I can’t look at that one.” But I kept kind of going back to it because I was like, “I wanted to explore why.” Why am I feeling that way? And so, I ultimately figured out it was that lack of clarity, it was that lack like the fogginess. There was no certainty in there and you couldn’t tell anything that was going on and it was just, it was really just uncomfortable to be in that space. But it allowed me to think more about like, “Well, what other places am I uncomfortable when it’s like that? When it’s that cloudy and foggy?”

Lisa: Yeah, all the different insights, I mean, I have a client right now who– she composes music, which I think is just like a [inaudible] because I can feel the finished piece, right? I can hear the finished piece, and I’m like, “How do you even–” like “How do you layer in? How do you know what instruments to put in? Like, it’s such an art.” But she came in, and she described all of my other clients by different instruments. Right? Like, seeing people as, if they were an instrument, this is what they would be. And I just thought, “Wow, that’s a beautiful way to describe people.” Also, through an art form, right? And she uses her art to heal people and tell stories, through music. There are just so many amazing ways out there to really use art to heal, and I think that that is such an important place where we’re at is, you know. So many people think that self-care is about going and doing something, right? I got to go do this. I got to do that. I got to go get my nails done or whatever.

And self-care, for me, is really, you know, that’s a way of being. How can I appreciate my day? What questions can I ask myself? What do I need to explore? And art is such a simple way to pause like it. So somebody doesn’t like journaling. Well, there’s nothing stopping them from looking up a piece of art or listening to a piece of music. And then just saying like, “Okay, well, what’s here for me today? Can I learn from this at this moment?” And this is really kind of what you’re starting to dive into with this new project that you’ve decided to put together. So do you want to talk a little bit about that? Because I’m super excited about this, and this is why I wanted you on the podcast because I believe that many of my listeners will be really curious about how they can approach art in a different way, and in a healing way. 

Because I really believe that after everything everybody’s been through, I think most people don’t recognize how much– I’m going to use this word, it might sound a little dramatic, but how much trauma we’ve all walked through? Because it has been trauma. It’s been a lot of sadness, grief, anger, fresh, like you name it. We’ve gone through the whole emotional gamut this year, but most people aren’t really expressing those emotions because they don’t know how. So that’s why I was really excited about this idea that you’d put together. So, talk a little bit about what it is, how it’s going to be able to help people, and how you’re going to have so much fun. You’re going to have so much fun doing it.

Cindy: So excited. Yes. Okay. So, you know, I’ve been serving teachers for the last 7 years with my business and I’ve been helping them help their students connect with works of art. I’ve been feeling really disconnected from that because, to me, those conversations that, like, when I was teaching, there was nothing better in this world than standing in front of a work of art with a group of students, no matter the age, adults, kids, any age, and just talking about it. And I miss that so much. I’m teaching other teachers how to do that, but I– that fuels my soul so much having those conversations. So I have decided to create a program for anybody, not teachers, just anybody who wants to explore their connection with works of art and do so with a group of people who also are interested in doing that. So I’m creating what’s called an Art Connection Circle, and I’m kind of feeling it almost like a book club, kind of, where we’re coming together with the goal of exploring works of art. 

And, you know, I will lead through the process, I will teach the people in the program some strategies for connecting with art, some strategies for interpreting, some practices that will help you kind of dive deeper into the meaning of the artwork. So it’s kind of some hand-holding, but also, a lot of freedom to really explore what you bring. And what’s so magical about this experience is you bring one painting to a group of people, and everybody is going to have a different experience with it. So, being in a group where we’re all talking about it together, you learn from the other people, you hear what their insights are, and you relate that to yours, because everybody’s problems and issues are so similar, just tweaked in different ways. And so, like, hearing everybody’s insights on a work of art is just so incredibly meaningful and powerful. So I want this to be a really kind of intimate group of people, we meet and we discuss art and we talk about our feelings, and really dive into that connection. Not just to learn about art and how to look at art, but to learn about yourself through your interaction with art.

Lisa: And this isn’t like, just so we’re clear, people, this isn’t like thousands of people. This is going to be…

Cindy: Oh, no.

Lisa:.. intimate a group, you put together a Google doc, there’s nothing fancy here. You know, Cindy and I were talking about how, you know, especially right now in our businesses, just wanting to do things that feel inspiring to us, that really bring us closer to that sense of joy. And as entrepreneurs, we can so often get caught in the doing and the point B and where are we going, that sometimes we forget to just do things that just really fill our souls. So that’s why I was excited about you doing this and I just think it’s going to be so fun for you and the women. Is it open to men too or just women?

Cindy: Oh, that’s a good question. [laughing] [crosstalk] I almost put women in there.

Lisa: [inaudible] do things in perfect ways.

Cindy: Yeah. I was like, a fat woman in there, it took it out, and with– I was like, I don’t know… because somebody has-

Lisa: I have to wait for the right guy.

Cindy: Yeah, I think it would because I envision it being mostly women. I really do. All women. Because I feel like that safe space, there’s something really special that happens to them when it’s all women.

Lisa: Yeah. However, there are some men who really hold space for that too, right? So we have to be careful not to. I’ve definitely learned that in my work that there are some men that really are open to that as well. And sometimes, I don’t think we give men enough spaces to show up and be vulnerable into. But, again, she ende the day, like, you have to decide what fits the group better and people can reach out to you. So, you had asked me. So we’re going to do something kind of fun. Fun. As soon as Cindy told me, I was like– right into my perfectionism, I’m like, “Wow, look how quickly that showed up.” We’re going to do a little exercise, we’ll post the link to this piece of artwork. I haven’t even looked at it yet. We’ll post it in the show notes so that you can follow along. And Cindy’s going to walk me through a kind of– we’re going to look at a piece of art, right?

Cindy: Yep.

Lisa: And you’re going to ask me questions.

Cindy: Uh-huh.

Lisa: I have not looked at this, so I’m already like, I’m like, “Wow, I’m feeling anxiety.” But this is what Full Frontal Living is about. This is what I preach, right? Like, we’re not– whatever comes up is going to come up. All right. So do I get to open it now, Cindy?

Cindy: Yes, you can open that.

Lisa: I get to open it?

Cindy: Okay. Yeah. So, for you all listening, this artwork is Sopa d’Europa by Miguel Barceló, and it’s at The Meadows Museum at SMU. So if you Google that and then– Lisa said, I think, she’ll post a link on the show notes as well that you can find a picture of the artwork. And I don’t normally ever give the title before I show the artwork, so you can pretend you didn’t hear that even though it was in Spanish then you probably didn’t really fully understand what it meant.

Lisa: Oh, my God, this is like inside my brain, Cindy.

Cindy: Okay. So, what does-

Lisa: Did you pick this just for me?

Cindy: Oh, no, everyone resonates with this one, so this is a good starter one. So, why don’t you describe what you’re seeing?

Lisa: So, I am seeing a man, or figure, I guess it could be a woman. But immediately, I thought, man, sitting in a room with a round ceiling that’s covered in picture frames, stacks of books to one side. You know what? I don’t know what he’s looking down at, but immediately, when I saw it, I thought it was a book, but that was my brain going to making it a book. It’s not a book. There’s a globe off to his right as well and another open book. But he just looks so defeated, my interpretation.

Cindy: Yeah, do you want me to tell you why I was like, “Ohh.” Okay, so good. So yeah, he’s in–it looks like some sort of like European library or something, like, there are the golden frames, but everything’s covered at the sort of this black paint over the gold, and the gold is kind of showing through the black paint. So it’s really dark, like a dark painting with these gold highlights. And then, he’s in the front and he’s not looking at that bag behind him at all. So, we’re going to go through a process which is called Lectio Divina. It’s actually a spiritual practice from, like, if you were to interpret a passage from the Bible. We’re just doing that with this instead. So our first step is, we’re just going to talk about the narrative. So what do you think is happening in the story shown in the picture?

Lisa: That he’s studying something. This is totally my interpretation, for me [crosstalk]

Cindy: That’s what it is.

Lisa: I’m like completely projecting my own stuff onto this paint.

Cindy: That’s what this is all about. Okay. Because I know exactly what he’s doing. So he’s having to learn something or do something and he’s having a hard time with it, and he doesn’t really want to be there.

Lisa: The darkness is kind of like how it feels this, to me, this picture, so fascinating because, you know, for me, I’m such a kinesthetic learner. So if I do hands-on, that’s how I learn. But back in the day, when I used to have to study like we all did, I would have to program in extra time for me to go to the library because I would open up my book and I would immediately fall asleep because it was like that part of my brain that’s like ‘you’re not smart enough’ would shut down. So this picture, this is why I think this is so interesting. Do you pick this one? This picture, like totally brings me back to that feeling of “Oh my God, I have to do this. I have to pass. And I hate this, this is so hard on me.” Like the whole painting feel so heavy, right? Like, literally, it almost looks like he’s in a tunnel.

Cindy: Yeah. Okay. Good. You kind of skipped ahead a little bit which is great because you’re going straight to that personal connection. So the second, you got the narrative there that you think he’s learning something and he’s struggling to learn, he’s got the stack of books, the open book. He’s got this like a– in person, it’s a lot easier to see, but it’s like a bowl and it’s like a really thick texture and it has this really like mysterious thing and there’s like little specks of like plastic in there that are blue and you can’t like make out what’s in it. So it’s like this murky bowl in front of him that he’s like staring into. So that’s just for the listeners so they can really try to get a mental picture. You can look at this but don’t do it while you’re driving. I forgot to do that [inaudible] and I never would someone like indirect because they’re looking at art while [inaudible]

Lisa: You know, it seems like a straightforward thing people would know. But nowadays, I feel like we always have to, you know, [crosstalk]

Cindy: [inaudible]

Lisa:…on that.

Cindy: Yeah. Oh, and one other thing I wanted to say before we move to the next step is, you keep saying ” in my interpretation,” which is awesome. And something I always tell the people I’m working with is that your interpretation is just as important and just as valid and just as real and just as true as whatever the artist thought, as whatever the art historian thought, whoever wrote the museum label, whatever I think, whatever the guy in the museum who’s walking around being pretentious, like whatever he thinks, like your interpretation is on par with everybody else’s because once the artwork leaves the artist’s hands, it becomes the viewers’. It’s now yours. So, no matter what the artist meant this to be, it doesn’t matter. It’s whatever you want it. Whatever it is to you. That’s another disclaimer I should have said in the beginning.

Okay. So the next step is to look for symbols. So, what are some things in here that you’re seeing that could symbolize different things?

Lisa: Mmm. So, the globe, to me, is all about freedom because you know how much I love to travel and I want to see the world, so that’s obviously something that’s really near and dear to my heart right now. The bowl that he’s looking into, right? So I’ve made this all about learning from you that he’s not actually looking into a book, he’s looking into like this blackness of nothing, right? which is really appropriate for where I’ve currently been, which is really struggling on holding my attention on possibility and not going into like the black hole of like, “when are we going to be on the other side of this?” You know, for me. And then, just all the– I know they look like picture frames, but my heart immediately says, “Oh, those are all mirrors and things are just being reflected back at him.” 

So he’s looking in the deep dark well that, you know, if he just shifted his interpretation– Jesus– if he just shifted his interpretation and look up at the mirror, he’d have a completely different vantage point, and that is literally what I’ve been working through over the last little while, is, you know. And I’ve shared this with you, being a coach, we can have all the tools in the book, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t still get lessons about where we’re holding our tension and using those tools. And I’ve really had to look at like how can I see the world differently? Because I know one of the things that, you know, one of my mentors talks about is, the world is this way or that way. Because we tell ourselves the world is this way or that way. And I’ve been really fighting for, “But the world is this way. The black pit of despair.” When, really, even in this painting, right? If he just, you know, if he looked up and saw the mirrors, what might he see reflected in the mirrors that would give him a completely different vantage point, you know, than what he’s looking at. So, I also think it’s really interesting in that, so he’s got like it’s almost like wood panels behind him.

Cindy: Uh-huh.

Lisa: And I’m drawn to like there’s a little– Do you see the figure of the man?

Cindy: Yeah.

Lisa: Okay, so that’s not just me making that up. But that’s just interesting. I’m like, “What the hell is that doing there?”

Cindy: What do you think?

Lisa: Curious standpoint. I don’t know. I don’t have an answer to that. I was just like, “Oh, that’s really interesting. It doesn’t like– it seems like out of place.” But then I assume that the artist would have put it there intentionally, but I don’t really have an answer as to why. To me, I’m just like, “Huh?” It’s almost like someone came along and key to me.

Cindy: Yeah.

Lisa: Keep a little manage to the wall. So that’s just interesting too.

Cindy: Good. Okay. So, we talked about the narrative, we talked about the symbols. The next step in which you’ve kind of been doing all along, which is where’s the personal connection to your life. So I think you’ve pretty much already answered that pretty well, but are there any other thoughts you have about how this relates to your life?

Lisa: No, I think I kind of covered everything. It’s just really like as soon as they pulled it up on the screen, I’m like, “Wow, this relates to where I am now, how I’m feeling now, how I felt in the past” Like, just different aspects of my life because I’ve even been thinking about, “Well, maybe it’s time for me to get another certification or take another course.” Because I haven’t taken a lot of courses in the past well, intentionally. Right? because it’s so easy to get into that story of, I don’t know enough, and I really needed to put that story down. But as I’ve been thinking about potentially taking another course, this whole feeling has come up again “Am I going to want to read a bunch of stuff? Am I going to have to listen to a bunch of videos? Is this going to bring me joy?” And I see this and I’m like, “Oh, God, Lisa.” You need to really think about this, right? Like it has to be something that’s really going to light me up for me to do it because, to be honest, still to this day, studying very much feels like that. And that is, you know, that’s just an old belief, so it’s just fascinating to see that it’s still very much got its teeth in me, and I’m allowing it to. Doesn’t have to be that way.

Cindy: Yeah. So good. You’re so good at this. Okay, everybody’s good at this. And that’s the thing is you– I have these conversations with people and they think you can talk about this because this is something you do. Like, you’re natural at this. But, every single person I’ve ever discussed art with, they can do it. Like, it’s natural. It’s brain-wired for you to find narrative, for you to find meaning, and for you to find a connection. Like, you’re born with it. And so it’s easier than you might think, you just need to like allow it to happen. So the last step of this, and this, I think, you’ll resonate with too because I’ve done coaching with you and it’s always– we’ve talked it before about having an awareness of your issue is one thing. But actually, like, doing something with that awareness is something else that some people don’t typically do.

So the fourth step of this is, what are you going to do differently now that you had this connection with this artwork? What are you going to do next?

Lisa: It’s a really interesting question because the more I look at this, the more I feel that it’s almost like a tightness in my chest. And it’s also like this picture too, I don’t know if it does this for you, it almost has like movement to it. So when you guys look at this piece of art, it almost looks circular, like the walls around him are going to start turning, which is really interesting because one side of the painting is more gray and the other side is more gold, almost like there’s light shining on one side. No light shining on the other side. So, for me, it’s really just about, you know, and this has been a question I’ve been asking myself a lot and I know I asked my clients a lot is, you know, what am I going to continue to tolerate? And what am I going to stop tolerating in myself in my life? Like, what stories am I still working from? Where do I need to shift where I want to interpret things in a different way? That’s really what it comes down to for me right now, which has been happening. But I think this piece is about learning and the beliefs that I still hold onto about learning, so I don’t believe anymore that I’m stupid. Like, I put that to bed. But there is still this part of me that believes that learning is really, really hard for me and very arduous. Like, literally, I feel like my soul is being sucked out of me just looking at this figure because that is how I feel unless it’s like a hands-on thing. Right? And I think that that’s often why business can feel challenging for me as well because when I’m coaching, like, that’s my art, whatever comes through me, when I’m on the podcast, whatever comes out of me, I just trust that that’s no longer for me, it’s for the world, it’s for my client. It’s not for me. It’s not about me. But that part of me that’s like, where am I holding myself back from my growth because I’m still afraid of what I am and what I’m not capable of within my business? You know, the things that feel hard for me, right? We talked about this, like, some of the things that could we both share as coaches that feel arduous. Like, you want me to do what? I have to sit down and do research and messaging and feels hard like, “Ohh.” Open up the paper, I got to read, I got to think about stuff. It’s totally what I’ve been bumping up against, right? It’s like all the things I’ve been told for years that I need to look at within my business are really like, now that I’m stepping into that next level have really come up for me, and I’ve really been fighting, not particularly wanting to do it, because I feel like this man in this painting.

Cindy: Yeah, you got to look up and see all those beautiful golden mirrors around you, and make it easy.

Lisa: How did you pick this picture? Just intuition?

Cindy: Yeah, it’s in a local museum and I’m using that I’ve done workshops at. And so I’ve led this activity with teachers. And it’s the perfect artwork for this activity. Everybody can relate to. But I’ve heard so many different interpretations, and everybody is slightly different, and I think it’s really amazing. My favorite one though, and it shows how entrenched we are in this like art being this expert thing that only some people can access, is I actually let a docent training at the museum where this is at. And the docents, since they already knew so much about this painting, they had a really hard time separating what the “real” meaning is. You know, it’s called the Soup Of Europe, and it’s about the struggles in Europe before World War 1. And there’s like some assassination of someone. And I was like, “No, you guys, stop. Don’t think about what it’s supposed to mean, think about what you see in it. It’s a totally different thing. Don’t go reading about it. That’s why I don’t give the title, I don’t tell people to do any research because the answers are in the picture. The answers are in you, you don’t need to find them somewhere else. So, yeah, it’s just a perfect artwork. But there are so many out there that you can really connect with and have these deep moments with, which is what my program is going to be, lots of moments, just like what you just did.

Lisa: Well, and I just have held space for small intimate groups of people in the past, right? You’ve been in rooms with my clients. I just know the shifts that happen when people show up and share their own interpretations about what’s going on and their own stories. How much healing happens from that? Because somebody else would look at, you know, for instance, this painting, and say something and I’d be like, “Ooh, oh, I can see that now too that might apply to me.” And, you know, even looking at this through the lens of you don’t care about the background of the painting because that’s not what it’s about and I think– I’ve never thought about it that way. Like, I think I believe that I needed to know the painting and know the artist and know the why. And then, instead of just saying, “If I just look at this and this artwork was created for me, right? He painted this for me, some dude, back in whenever, what can I learn about myself? It’s such a beautiful way to allow people to explore their relationship with themselves. I’m really excited for you about this. This has been super fun for me because I’ve never experienced you in your work.

Cindy: Yeah, you haven’t.

Lisa: No, I’ve never experienced that. So, it’s really– so knowing you the way that I do and knowing how challenging it was for you to really connect in with your emotions and now seeing how this work has always been a part of you and now because you actually know how to access your emotions all the time and not just with art and how to work with them, how it’s going to be so powerful for you to bring people together? because not only can you hold space now for people with their emotion and art, but you know how to hold space for people just with their emotions period because you’ve made peace with your own.

Cindy: Yeah.

Lisa: That’s really cool, Cindy. I’m like having a proud coach moment here. Because now, it’s like I see the bigger picture, like the full circle moment about what you’re here to evolve into. And I think that there are so many people like you and like I who are very deep feelers, and emotions can feel so overwhelming, so much so that we shut them down.

Cindy: Yeah.

Lisa: And this is such a beautiful gateway for you to walk people back into their emotions and also express them in a way that feels safe around others and have these deeper conversations without talking about the actual things in their life that are necessarily like, you know, going on. It’ll just come out naturally in conversation.

Cindy: Yeah, and it’s really amazing to see what happens. Because when you have the artwork there, it provides– it’s like a safe, it’s just a safety net. And I’ve noticed it with students, they’re willing to talk about things that they wouldn’t know– you wouldn’t say, “Okay, let’s talk about gender bias right now. Tell me your thoughts on gender.” And they’re just like, “Ahh, wait, what are you doing to me?” But if you put artwork and there’s like a sense of gender something or other, they can talk about it because they can talk about something they see, they can relate to things they know, and it just makes it easier to have those really hard conversations, and the same is true for your feelings as well. I think, when you and someone else are looking at something together that’s outside of you, it makes it just a little bit easier to feel those feelings and talk about those feelings than if I just said “Talk about your feelings” you know? feel your feelings.

Lisa: I know that Jake, at his school, he’s specifically in art therapy classes

Cindy: Wonderful.

Lisa: to help him access emotions. And he’s so creative, and so many people are so creative. And then, you know, that shutdown as not being valuable, that’s a whole other conversation for another day. But, art is incredibly valuable. And I hope that moving forward, and especially even with this conversation, that people start to look at it through a different lens of how it can actually help them heal, help them feel, and bring them some peace in these times, right? Like, there’s something to be [crosstalk]

Cindy: Yeah.

Lisa: Just losing yourself in a piece of art. Well, this has been amazing. Thank you for walking me through this. I was totally nervous. I’m like, “Okay, we can do it live.” But this is how I do things, right? Like, let’s just go for it. I don’t have [crosstalk] vulnerable.

Cindy: You did it awesomely.

Lisa: I feel like I’ve gotten to know you on an even more intimate level, which I really love and appreciate.

Cindy: Yes, me too. It was really fun to be on the other end of the– it was like I was the coach for just a minute, and that I enjoyed that.

Lisa: I love it. And you know what? you’re amazing at what you do. So now, I’m even more excited that you’re putting this new, you know, art connection circle out there. So, where can people find out about this? Because again, there’s no fancy sales page. So don’t be running off, Cindy now is making a sales page. I’ve known her for a long time. We’re just going to stick with Google doc and have fun with it.

Cindy: Yeah.

Lisa: So, how how can people reach out to you, find out more? Yeah, some basic details here.

Cindy: So we’re going to have the link at artclasscurator.com/circle, and it will probably redirect to the Google Doc. But I can’t promise you there won’t be a sales page up, but I– there will–She does know me well. But yeah, there will be– So artclasscurator.com/circle, and on that page, we’ll probably have an email opt-in as well. This is brand-new so we’re just– this is going to be the kind of easy, low-key launch. We’re going to start the program the week of November 8 and it will be a five-week program with the break off for the U.S. Thanksgiving. So basically goes right up until Christmas. And, a small group, they will really get to dive into this content together with assignments and live calls to share.

Lisa: So good. So let this be your permission for anybody who’s listening. If you think you have to have, like all your shit together before you go out and start something that’s going to make you happy, just start.

Cindy: Yeah.

Lisa: Like, I literally built my business just by saying, “I think I’m going to try this thing.” I am really, really excited for you. Thank you for spending this time with me. This was a super fun episode for me. I love this kind of interaction. That painting is going to stay with me, I think, all day today.

Cindy: Mm-hmm.

Lisa: It’s a little bit haunting. So make sure that you do check out the show notes and go and take a look at it because it really is worth sitting in front of for a few minutes and seeing what comes up for you. I can’t imagine anybody looking at it and not feeling something about it. The longer I look at it, the more things I see too, which is really fascinating. That is the power of art. So, thank you, Cindy, for spending this time with me. I adore you. It’s so fun.

Cindy: Thank you for having me. Yes, I had a great time.

Lisa: I can’t wait to see how this unfolds for you and for all the lucky women who choose to jump into this container with you.

Cindy: Thank you.

Lisa: So until the next episode, everybody listening, you know, I say this over and over and over again, you are responsible for making yourself a priority, and that means looking at ways you can care for yourself. And remember that self-care isn’t something you do, it’s a way of being. And it doesn’t need to be hard and it doesn’t need to be complicated. But if you want to show off as your best self, if you want to achieve more in this world, it really is about learning how to slow down and do less. So, go and make yourself a priority. Go find a piece of art, music, whatever it is that floats your boat, and just let yourself be with it.

And then, make sure you head over to Instagram and tell me how this episode and this piece of art impacted you because I would love to hear. So, until next time. I will talk to you guys on the next episode.

Cindy: If your art appreciation classes were anything like mine, they happen in dark rooms with endless slides and boring lectures. Art in the dark. But art appreciation doesn’t have to turn into nap time for your students. Start connecting your students to art with powerful class discussions. It can be intimidating to start talking about art with students, so teachers always want to know what they should say. The real question is what you should ask. You can get 82 questions to ask about almost any work of art for free on the Art Class Curator Blog. The free download includes the list of questions, plus cards that you can cut out and laminate to use again and again. These versatile questions can be used in everything, from bell ringers to group activities, to critiques. Just go to artclasscurator.com/questions to get your free copy today.

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.

• Free Lesson Sample
• The Curated Connections Library
• Drawing Description Game
• Episodes 60 and 61 with Madalyn

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. I am so excited to welcome Madalyn Gregory back to the podcast. Hi, Madalyn.

Madalyn Gregory: Hello.

Cindy Ingram: We are today going to do another art discussion, art conversation. We have done one in the past. You can go back and check that out. We talked about Death and Life by Gustav Klimt. Today, we’re going to talk about The Anguish of Being and the Nothingness of the Universe by Marcos Raya. I thought we would start by just describing it for the listeners. We will put this in the show notes, so you can go onto the show notes and check out the image of the artwork when you’re not driving but Madalyn, you want to start with a description?

Madalyn Gregory: Oh, man. There’s so much. It is circular. I don’t have a good gauge of how big it is.

Cindy Ingram: It’s big. I saw it in person this weekend at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. It was bigger than I expected it to be. 

Madalyn Gregory: It says 176.5 centimeters overall.

Cindy Ingram: My American brain does not understand that. About 70 inches.

Madalyn Gregory: 70 inches, okay, yeah, that’s bigger than I am.

Cindy Ingram: It’s exactly my height. No, it’s 5’3. I’m 5’8 but that’s not 5.8. It’s different. Anyway, we’re rambling. It was big. It was way bigger than I expected.

Madalyn Gregory: Wow, that’s cool. Like I said, it is circular around the border. Just because that’s simple, I’ll go there first. It has a black circle, then it fades out to white but in the center, there is this strange majestic being. It reminds me of a skeleton, especially around the nose and the mouth, it almost looks like teeth but then his eyes are open sockets that have stars, the universe, and celestial things going on. There’s these canonical eyebrows, I guess you could say. There are three layers on each eye and there’s also a couple that come down around his mouth, almost like a mustache, then behind him, I don’t know if you’d call it hair or if it would be like an outfit of some kind but it goes up in orange, yellow, green, and a little bit of white, like shoots, this is a really hard one to describe.

Cindy Ingram: Enjoying it.

Madalyn Gregory: Because there’s also an edge because on the side where his neck would be, there’s green but there’s an edge that follows it that looks like cardboard to me, like whenever you look at the side of a cardboard, the edge. It looks like a being but it could be like a spaceship opening. It’s very strange, ethereal, and amazing. That was super probably not helpful.

Cindy Ingram: No, that was. I should have not been looking at it as you said that because I was trying to imagine if I had never seen this, what I would have thought of your description. To me, it looks like you’re looking into your ear in the skeleton’s head. You are the skeleton because it’s you looking out through his eyes. There I go saying “his” again but I guess the artist is he. This is potentially representing him. Then the mouth curve, it’s a concave. We’re both doing hand gestures.

Madalyn Gregory: Totally not helpful.

Cindy Ingram: Just imagine my hand is doing emotion. We’re inside his head essentially. Their heads. Just go to the show notes and look at it if that doesn’t make any sense because it’s a good description. As you were talking, I was like, “This one would be good for the drawing description game because I never thought about that with this artwork before but this would be really fun to describe.” If you all don’t know that listening, you have one student describe the artwork and the other student draws it based on the description. Maybe the listeners, before they check out the show notes, should go back and listen to your description, then draw it, then see what happens, then they can send it to us in the email.

Madalyn Gregory: Oh yeah, that would be amazing because this will come up with all sorts of things but it reminds me almost like a 60s sci-fi movie poster. I keep thinking of 2001 or something, which was much more minimalistic than this is. It’s very cool.

Cindy Ingram: I can see that reference too, especially because of the roundness. In 2001, they had the house, this round light thing. What do you think it means?

Madalyn Gregory: Oh man, I have so many thoughts and so many tangents that my brain could go on, especially now that you’ve said it’s like we’re looking through their head almost or their body. Like you said, the teeth are concave too. You really are stepping into this. It makes me think of other people’s perspectives but it also makes me think because it looks so alien, because we’ve got the stars, and all that, it makes me wonder about the wider perspective of the universe. I have a tattoo of Orion, the constellation, on my arm. The reason I did that was because it helps me remember that there’s a bigger life out there. There are bigger worlds. There’s other people. There are other planets. Who the heck knows? Put things in perspective. That’s really my initial reaction to this is to just try to remember everything.

Cindy Ingram: I love that.That’s really what I see in this too. I especially see the connection between the personal and the universal because most of the canvas is him or them inside. Because it feels like it’s me, so most of it is the person. We see the universe through the glasses. We see the universe just through the teeth, then also along the side but then the rest of it is presumably the inside of this person’s skull. We’re seeing color, we’re seeing tubes, we’re seeing patterns, and we’re seeing these little eye-shaped things. I don’t know if those are like bones or stitches or something. We’re just seeing all of this stuff going on the inside. It feels to me like some representation of a mental health issue. Some disturbance inside the brain. It just doesn’t feel like very, very peaceful inside this head.

Madalyn Gregory: Yeah, I can totally see that because the colors are really rich but it’s off-putting. It’s like watching a surgery video. Sometimes, I remember I have a skeleton and I get a real freak out. I think we can walk around feeling we are our thoughts, we’re what we do but we’re a sack of meat to a certain extent. I see that here. We didn’t mention it but there’s this line that goes up from the nose area up to the top, the border. It looks like there are lines that crisscross about halfway between. It looks almost like a line drawing of a star or like a dandelion. Sometimes, you’ll see it drawn that way. I feel like that connects to what you were saying with the mental health part, maybe where the brain would be and the spark of everything that we are. 

Cindy Ingram: You know what that also could be is the third eye?

Madalyn Gregory: Oh, yes.

Cindy Ingram: It’s a symbol for intuition. I’m wondering if that line is maybe us seeing through space too. Maybe the light is breaking through from the stars into his head.

Madalyn Gregory: That almost makes me think like the Big Bang, the moment of creation, and all that. It’s just right there, following us through.

Cindy Ingram: It’s like in your own head, you’re wrapped up in your issues, your thoughts, your stories, your anxieties, your day-to-day life. It feels really all-encompassing. It feels really overwhelming. Especially, when you’re happy, going through a rough patch, it feels really cloudy. I’m talking from my own personal experience. I think that this really captures that really well.

Madalyn Gregory: It reminds me of the quote, “You are the sky. Everything else – it’s just the weather.” Pema Chödrön said that. I believe that she’s a Buddhist monk. I could have that wrong but “You are the sky. Everything else – it’s just the weather.” Here, we’re seeing the sky literally, like the universal sky. The weather is what captures our attention but it’s not really who we are. At the end of the day, it’s not who we are inside but it still shapes how we see the world.

Cindy Ingram: Oh, I love that quote. I’ve never heard that one before. I think this helps me remember that what you had said too is that we are the universe. Everything that is in me was once stars, planets, and dust. I am now a person because all of those things came together and created me. Somehow, in that process, it created my consciousness, which then allows me to know that I’m a part of this universe and to know that I’m part of the sky. It puts your day-to-day issues into perspective.

Madalyn Gregory: It’s interesting to me because I love that it’s Carl Sagan that said we are all star stuff or whatever but I also like the fact that every time you drink a big glass of water, statistically, at least one of those little water atoms in there was dinosaur pee at some point.

Cindy Ingram: I didn’t know that.

Madalyn Gregory: It sounds like a really weird thing but it makes it mundane at the same time. It’s like this huge, universal, big, majestic, amazing life that we’re living but also like dinosaur pee. I’ve gotta get my kid to rehearsal. I guess it’s the duality of life because we can’t always be in this celestial headspace because that’s just not what life allows but also, it’s beautiful. I like the dinosaur pee. It’s real. It’s true. It’s just like life is messier. Even here in the stars that we see through his eyes, I don’t know all the terms but there’s some cloudy birth of a new planet.

Cindy Ingram: Nebula. 

Madalyn Gregory: Yeah. There are new things happening there but that’s a very violent process in the universe. That’s not something calm and meditative. That’s like a lot of explosions—it’s probably not explosions—but stuff had to happen, stuff had to crash into each other and burn. I think it’s messy. I see that here. You talk.

Cindy Ingram: I’m just sitting here like, “Oh, Madalyn is so good.” Something I’m also noticing too, you’re talking about the complexity of space and how it’s not this blue space with dots on it, that all of those are light from a long time ago, explosions from a long time ago, all this tumultuous stuff happening in the universe but it is so complex and it’s chaotic, but then also, it makes me think of how complex we are and our bodies are. I think that shows that here, you have the little tube-looking things above his eyes, which are like an eyebrow shape but to me, they look like maybe optical nerves or veins or something, then they have these lines coming off of them. To me, they look like they could be representing nerves, but the inside of us and the whole complex system of our bodies are so complicated. We don’t have to do anything. I’m just here. I’m alive. I’m breathing. My heart is pounding. I’m talking. I’m thinking. My body is just letting all that happen. It’s a thousand different things. A million different things are happening in my body right now to allow this conversation to take place.

Madalyn Gregory: I think that’s a really good point that we can look up at the sky and we just see the pretty stars that have come to us. We don’t see everything that had to happen to make that happen. Just like we don’t see everything that’s going on in our bodies unless something starts to hurt or do something it’s not supposed to. We’re just not aware of it. I see that in the artwork too. We talked about the corrugated cardboard edge. I think like what do the lines represent? Are there nerves? There are also these lines that are coming up from his mouth that because of the way they’re angled, they almost look like Roman numerals but they just are like little “i” shapes or capital “I’s” I guess. But I feel like everything has a metaphorical meaning happening because three of the teeth are missing, what does that represent? Is that something more from the artist specifically? But even then, is that the wounds or is that the pain that has happened? Because it’s hard to see that.

Cindy Ingram: To me, it looks like he is broken in many ways. He’s got the missing teeth. Above his mouth, there are these white things that come together, then there’s these little blue lines that look like stitches. That part is sewn together. Then maybe those Roman numerals could be like staples or something. It almost looks like he’s not this perfect pristine fit self. There’s messiness, brokenness, and humanity represented here.

Madalyn Gregory: For sure. One area we haven’t really talked about maybe is like the throat or the esophagus or something but it’s got these little almost like a wave lines that go up toward the mouth. To me, they almost look like steps. It’s making me think like his mouth is open and we see the stars but from the internal space of our bodies, what we hold inside. There are all these unseen processes happening but also, there are all the things that we are aware of that we do think about that we don’t share, we don’t say. It’s just making me think our throat is like a ladder for our voice. We don’t climb that ladder a lot. I feel like those are the steps we have to take to share ourselves because we are all in this encasing, looking out at the world and the only way that we can be in community with others is to actually communicate. I never thought about that community and communicator real clicks.

Cindy Ingram: I see that too, that being his throat. it doesn’t feel like he is going to talk. It feels like he is actively keeping it down. I don’t know what is giving me that impression but to me, it feels like he has something to say but he’s not saying it or doesn’t want to say it or can’t say it.

Madalyn Gregory: It’s very pristine looking. Going back to the 2001 thing, even though it’s complicated and there are broken parts, none of them are bloody. It’s fixed now. We put ourselves back together and we’re whole. Everything’s fine. It feels like he’s not or they’re not allowing that to come out. I think that fits too with the fact that we’re inside of their head because we don’t get that inner perspective. Even whenever we try to communicate, it doesn’t always come out right. It feels like they are trying to be proper. We are just getting insight into what it actually feels like to be inside this person.

Cindy Ingram: Now I’m wondering, depending on who’s looking at this. I want to put 10 people in front of this and see how they feel being in this person because to me, it does not feel comfortable. 

Madalyn Gregory: No.

Cindy Ingram: I am not enjoying necessarily looking at this for a very long period of time. I’m enjoying the conversation about art. I think it’s amazing but it is making me feel a certain way. It’s not letting up. It’s just getting me.

Madalyn Gregory: I agree. It’s hard to imagine looking at this and being like, “Oh, that’s cool.” Maybe it’s like Led Zeppelin. Let’s listen to music and have experiences or whatever maybe in that. I feel stressed every time I look at this. I feel like what you were saying earlier about everything that our bodies do and all that, it reminds me that I contain multitudes. Also, there’s that book about all of the bacteria that lives in us. It’s like a very significant part of what our body is. He called it, I Contain Multitudes, which I think is brilliant because it goes back to that mundane and universal thing that’s all co-mingling. It’s not separate. You can’t have one without the other. I feel that in this. It’s like we’re looking at the messy parts that we pretend aren’t messy.

Cindy Ingram: It’s painted very smoothly and very precisely. You can’t really see his brush work. The gradients are just so smooth. That is really interesting to me too because even though he made it so smooth, it does feel so messy.

Madalyn Gregory: I feel like that’s a part of what makes it so impactful is that it is so pristine because I feel like it would be a much different artwork if there were big splotches of color on the canvas or whatever. It just wouldn’t have the same feeling.

Cindy Ingram: It’s funny, when we were talking about what artwork to do today, I suggested this one and you’re like, “Ooh, that one creeps me out.” I was like, “Oh, that makes it good to talk about.” But now I’m like, “Oh, this creeps me out too.” I like it. What do you think about the cardboard situation, why cardboard?

Madalyn Gregory: It’s interesting to me because like life does, I very recently heard something else about this, which was the reason that cardboard has that piece that goes up and down or whatever, it actually adds a lot of strength. The thing I saw was talking about how brick walls could actually be built like that. If you’re not worried about space and stuff, it actually is much stronger. The fact that’s like the edge, that’s like his skin, it’s protecting them from whatever is outside and from all of this turmoil in the universe, and these nebulas that are being born but also the fact that it looks like cardboard, we all know cardboard will come across the country or across the world. Whatever’s inside of it will be safe or maybe it got a little bit wet, then everything’s broken. It’s something that can protect and can contain but it’s not impervious. Even here, it’s opened up.

Cindy Ingram: It’s strong and protective but it’s impermanent. It’s disposable. It’s something that will eventually have to be replaced, which is true of our bodies as well. They are impermanent. We are bags of meat that will eventually become stars.

Madalyn Gregory: Flowers or dinosaur pee. 

Cindy Ingram: Dinosaurs probably would come again.

Madalyn Gregory: Yeah, why not?

Cindy Ingram: If not on Earth, somewhere else.

Madalyn Gregory: They’re birds. They’re chickens. That’s true. I think that really is speaking to the fact that this perspective that we’re looking through is temporary. It’s not going to be here. That makes me feel a little bit less freaked out.

Cindy Ingram: I was going to say the same thing. It made me feel better.

Madalyn Gregory: Yeah. The fact that this is open, they are allowing us to look at the universe through their eyes. I feel like there’s always stories, whenever people are close to dying or they’re getting older, where they want to impart knowledge. Advice is the thing that you do whenever you’re trying to make everything neat and better for whoever you’re talking to. It feels less scary because that’s also a universal thing. Everybody goes through it. Everybody dies.

Cindy Ingram: It made me just feel a sense of relief once we started to talk about that. This is temporary. All pain will end eventually, then you will be whatever you believe will happen after you die. I think it’s very soothing. Also, it made me think too that it is a privilege to see through this person’s perspective because we don’t show people our full range of pain, our full range of joy, and our full range of anything because every individual person is so filled with all of their experiences, their trauma, their thoughts. Even if we did try to show it, we can’t ever really fully show who we are to someone else.

Madalyn Gregory: Language isn’t perfect. You can’t be in someone else’s body. I think that’s why Freaky Friday has been remade so many times. Like the idea of walking around in someone else’s shoes literally is scary but how different would the world be? There’s a lot of disagreement in the world, there always has been but whenever it seems to spike, articles and stuff will come out about how to talk to people you disagree with. The biggest thing that they all say is like, “Don’t go in trying to change somebody’s mind.” You have to listen because we don’t listen to each other. If you’re not going to listen, they’re not going to listen. I do really wonder what life would be like if we could just, even for a little while, even in a cardboard box, feel what other people have felt because there’s no good way to do that.

Cindy Ingram: It made me think of this—and this is a really nerdy reference. It’s a reference from someone else—but my husband told me about this video game that he plays. I don’t know the name so I apologize but if you’re just dying to know, you can email me and I can ask him but he says that in the game, you can see other people’s memories. You can step into a character and look around in their memories and then in their experiences and then you can come back to your own character, and he says that it’s the most fascinating thing because it makes him think about what it would be like to do that with another person. It’s like the closest he can get to doing something like that. But everything that the person sees, everything that they think…

Madalyn Gregory: Yeah. I guess it’s the whole nature versus nurture thing. But it’s both and it’s always been both. We can’t account for that. We don’t have an abacus that can be like, “Okay, if you do this and you do this, then this is the person that you–” Even if we could, it’s not clear to us and it never will be. Art I think is one of the only ways to try to experience that.

Cindy Ingram: Yeah. I had another thought about the cardboard. It also I think could be a mask that the artist has created to show the world like we’re seeing the inside of the person but then that cardboard could be what they show to the rest of the world. Maybe it’s showing that it’s not real, it’s fake, whatever they’re portraying to the world is fake.

Madalyn Gregory: Yeah. I think that’s super relatable because I remember, I had this point early in adulthood where I was like, “Am I just lying to everybody all the time? Because I feel like I’m one person with this person, I’m one person with this person. What is wrong with me?” It took me way too long to realize that that’s just being a human and that’s just being a person because the different sides of yourself are going to come out. I contain multitudes and which multitudes are being shown depends on the situation. I think we give ourselves a really hard time for the masks we wear or whatever, but I also don’t know how else we could really do it. I don’t know, maybe with the right people in the right situation, your mask is more representative of the blood and bone beneath.

Cindy Ingram: Yeah. I had a similar moment in my life where I would feel, for a long time, really guilty that I wasn’t telling everybody everything that was going on with me. If I kept something to myself of, “Oh, this is just something I want to think about for me.” I felt like to be an open honest person, I have to share that with everybody and then I would feel guilty about that. Ultimately, it became this weird battle in my head and then I felt I was lying to people by not telling them these personal things. I still do that and I don’t know where that comes from. I have to keep telling myself, “Stop, you don’t need to tell everybody everything.” But it just feels dishonest for some reason.

Madalyn Gregory: Yeah. I think it’s interesting because I’ve also heard people coming at it from the complete opposite side of, “You don’t owe anybody anything. You don’t owe your story, your truth, or any of that.” I think I still do have at least a little bit of a battle raging inside because that’s true, I do 100% agree that you don’t owe anybody your life story or whatever, but also I guess it’s just a matter of the masks because trust has to be built and space has to be built for that. There are reasons that we wear masks, because we’ve all been hurt and we’ve all been told things. I think sometimes we don’t even see the masks. We don’t even know they’re there because that takes work to see it and to be able to take it off. Maybe that’s what the artist is saying here. He’s done the work or he’s trying to do the work at least for this specific mask so here, I’m going to take it off and let you look through it.

Cindy Ingram: Oh, yeah. Maybe we’re not looking through his perspective but we’re looking through the masks of this one mask’s perspective. Hold on, I’m confusing myself so no, I don’t think that’s true because then we wouldn’t have the bones. The mask doesn’t include the bones and the veins and things.

Madalyn Gregory: I think it could because, I don’t know how scientifically accurate it is but I think we’ve all heard your cells get replaced every seven years or whatever and so your taste buds change and all this. We are literally physically not the same person we were as a child and as 10 years ago or whatever. We are constantly being renewed. I think it would make sense for the bones and the teeth and the veins and everything to come along. Maybe it’s even more substantial than, “This is the mask I wear around people. This is the person I was.” You still carry that person forward I think.

Just the other day, my teenager was saying, “Oh, my goodness. I know I was like that when I was 12.” I’ve even said every couple of years, it’s like I look back and I hate everything that I was. I feel that’s maybe a little strong but also, I don’t think it ever goes away. I think if you’re not looking back every few years like, “What was I thinking?” that’s a sign of growth, that’s a sign of embracing the change that is always there.

Cindy Ingram: I can relate to that a lot because I have this problem where I think that if I haven’t seen someone in a long time, I just assume they start to hate me, it’s a problem. I’ve always done it. That’s why I’m like, “It’s been a year. Uh-oh, they definitely hate me.” A year later, I’m like, “Oh,” it’s an anxiety problem. But I also then, when faced with talking to that person again after it’s been a long time, I’m like, “Well, gosh, I’m a different person than I was when I saw you three years ago. Am I still going to like you? Are you still going to like me?” I don’t know where I’m going with that but whatever you said just resonated.

Madalyn Gregory: Like you said, what is it going to be? You don’t know until you know. I think that’s why everybody does have that feeling if you’re going to see somebody that you haven’t seen in a long time. Maybe there are some people out there that don’t feel like that but in my experience when I talk to people, that’s something that everybody feels. Sometimes you get there and it’s like no time has passed and sometimes you get there and you’re like, “The switches are not clicking anymore.” I think that’s fine and I think that the hard thing and the scary thing, but the good thing ultimately, is just to keep trying to connect whether it is somebody from three years ago or whether it’s somebody you met yesterday, or whatever. You can’t connect unless you’re trying to connect and you can’t take off your mask and let somebody else hold it or see it or look through it unless you’re actually realizing that you have a mask.

Cindy Ingram: So good but I am going to completely change the subject because I just realized something about this artwork. I got a sense of relief for a bit after we talked about the impermanence of life and cardboard, but I am back to feeling uncomfortable because I just realized I have been looking at this artwork as if it is my father.

Madalyn Gregory: Oh.

Cindy Ingram: He’s been popping in my head the entire conversation, just nuggets here and there. My biological dad was an alcoholic. My mom and dad divorced when I was five and then when I was in the third grade, he disappeared. I didn’t know he was an alcoholic until years later and he would come in and out of my life for a while and then eventually he died when I was in college. But he was missing teeth last time I saw him. He had a rough life. Alcoholism just destroyed his life but he was missing teeth and so I think that’s my main reason that I’m seeing the missing teeth. But then also to just to give you a little bit of information about the artwork, what we know about this artwork is—and I had read that before we had this conversation—it says, “This artwork depicts an inside out view of the artist’s head as he explores the social impact of technology on humanity,” and then it says, “Along with his personal battle with alcoholism.” I had alcoholism on my brain already and I was like, “Oh, I can see that, the alcoholism in the artwork. I can see that.” The reason I can see it is because of the missing teeth and I have that personal connection.

I’m just looking at this. I’ve worked my whole life through the trauma of that experience. I’m not going to sit here and cry about it or anything, but as an adult who has struggled with mental health issues, I look at my dad differently than I did when I was a child. As a child, it was abandonment, it was anger, it was deep, deep sadness. But as I’ve gotten older, I really wish that I knew him, I knew who he was, and I knew what was going on in his head and what his true thoughts and feelings are because now I do know more about alcoholism, I know more about addiction and disease, that it’s a disease. I could never accept that as being a disease when I was younger. That didn’t explain away the pain. That never could explain away the pain of being left and abandoned. But now I look at it and I’m like, “I just want to know what he was like. I want to know what he was thinking.” But I don’t know. So I’m looking at this and I’m seeing this broken toothless, stitched-together person who looks like they’re in a great deal of pain, who looks like they’ve got their voice cut off. That’s how I feel about my dad. I didn’t get to hear his story. I never got to hear his story. When I’m looking at this, maybe I am going to cry about it, but that’s what I’m seeing is I think it is making me feel maybe more connected to him as a person than I typically ever allow myself to think about. There’s that.

Madalyn Gregory: That’s perfect though because that is what we’ve been talking about. We don’t always get that opportunity and even when we do, it’s not always satisfying to know what was happening because I think a lot of people can’t articulate it. Even if we can, it’s not going to be the complete story. What a gift it would be if he could hand you a mask and be like, “This is what it was like.” We don’t get to do that, and like you said, you have to heal yourself to even get to the point where you’re like, “Okay, but what was it like from their side?” I don’t have a great relationship with most of my family. I’ll talk to my grandmother sometimes and one conversation we’ve had again and again is that I want to know more about the family history because it got erased whenever her parents came here and I want to know that. She’s said many times that she’ll send me stuff, that she’ll send me pictures and she’ll write it out or she’ll tell me, “We’ll do this whole thing,” and then it never happens. I know that the years where that will even be possible are getting smaller and smaller. So much is lost and not being able to connect. Maybe if everybody made art. What if every family sat down to dinner and then also made art? I want there to be a way for us to see behind the masks.

Cindy Ingram: Yeah. It’s something I do try with my children. I want to make sure that they see me as human, that they do see that I have feelings, that they do see when I’m hurting. I don’t want them to look at me and just always see this happy mom that just has her sh*t together. I need them to see that it’s okay to be human, it’s okay to have feelings, it’s okay to feel pain, all of these things are okay. Because I feel that is something that I missed out on. I guess I saw the brokenness of my dad, I was too close to it too.

Madalyn Gregory: Yeah. I think it’s a balance for sure because I definitely saw the brokenness of my parents but not in a healthy “I’m going to be real with you, child.” I constantly walk that tightrope with my kids too because people have that story of like, “That’s the moment I realized my dad wasn’t perfect or whatever.” I don’t know if my children had that experience. I hope they didn’t though, especially whenever you’re an authority figure to someone else, it’s very easy to not be vulnerable at all with them or to think that being vulnerable with them is big red X “Don’t do that.” I don’t think that’s true. I think there’s a way to balance it and we’re not always going to get it right because we’re human, but at least trying, I think that’s something that this generation of parents is doing more than, at least, in the US maybe, but we’ll see, but I do think that that’s something that’s happening more and I’m very interested to see how our kids grow up and how their kids grow up.

Cindy Ingram: Yeah. Oh, so many topics in this artwork.

Madalyn Gregory: I know. I like the few things that it could bring around the edge too because for the most part, it’s very even, but the thing that keeps ringing in my head is if you look at the evolution family trees that they’ll do, that’s a circle and it comes out and there’s a line for that species and that species and they all branch off the tree, it makes me think of that, the tree of life or the bush of life depending on which one you’re looking at, but they all have all the lines. It makes me think that all those lines are, I’ve heard John Green say this, I don’t know if it’s actually from him though, but he talks about all the people that loved him into being. There are people that loved us into being and there’s people that affected us maybe not with love, but all of that and all the star stuff, I feel like that is everything converging to make this.

Cindy Ingram: Oh, I love that. I don’t have anything to say other than I’m just now I’m looking at it through that lens and I think that is so neat. Let’s talk about the title.

Madalyn Gregory: Yes, it has a good title. It’s so good.

Cindy Ingram: When I’m sharing artwork with students, I don’t ever tell them the title until after we’ve had the conversation because I don’t want it to sway what they’re thinking but this title is called The Anguish of Being and the Nothingness of the Universe.

Madalyn Gregory: Dang. I’m a little bit depressed just hearing it but it’s so good.

Cindy Ingram: But it fits exactly what we’ve been talking about, the anguish of being. Being a person is hard. The human experience is hard. I was watching the Oprah and Prince Harry series they did on mental health, it’s called The Me You Can’t See, and they chronicle different people’s mental illnesses. I’m about halfway through, I think there are seven episodes, but Lady Gaga was on there and she’s talking about her trauma she experienced after being raped and all of her mental health issues. They were like, “What was going on in your life while you were experiencing all this pain and depression and stuff?” She’s like, “I won my first Oscar.” She’s like, “People look at me and I have privilege and I have money and I have all of this stuff,” I forgot who said it in the show, but it was, “The human experience still applies or the human existence still applies.” No matter who you are in any walk of life, wherever you are, you’re still human. The anguish of being is still hard.

Madalyn Gregory: Yeah. Goodness, even that title ties in perfectly, The Me You Can’t See. Where does all of that come from? Is it just that we’re so alone that we’re trapped in our own heads? What causes the human condition?

Cindy Ingram: Yeah. When did it start? Did cave people, did paleolithic people have anxiety?

Madalyn Gregory: I mean, they were out there making their art and telling light shows. I bet they did.

Cindy Ingram: I feel like they did. Our brains are the same.

Madalyn Gregory: Yeah. They didn’t have to deal with the technology that he’s talking about in this artwork but also they were having to run from creatures that were trying to eat them. It’s like what’s the cure for the human condition, let’s solve this on this podcast. It’s so sad that it’s so universal but it’s also comforting in a way, but also we just have to do the little things that we can do to make it better however we can. At least we’re talking about it now. It didn’t get talked about before.

Cindy Ingram: Yeah. I like that, the doing the little things. I’m looking back at the artwork and earlier, I was thinking, I didn’t feel like there was a lot of hope in this picture at the beginning. To me, it was just I was feeling stressed about it. I didn’t see a lot of hope. But now that I’m looking at it through the lens of, “Okay, we’re all experiencing this anguish of being.” Our main job is to find those moments of joy, the things that bring us peace and happiness. Maybe the areas where he is stitched together in the artwork and the little burst of light on his forehead, the ability to see the vastness of space and experience it and sense it through just having five senses, it’s pretty awesome, or more than five. Now I’m starting to see there’s more hope here and he’s alive and he’s here, which it’s hopeful in itself.

Madalyn Gregory: Yeah. The stitches that we talked about earlier, they show that he had pain and brokenness, but also it shows the possibility for healing and for coming back together and just being able to go on. I feel like that’s something that I’m still recognizing in life. The change is constant and the pain is always there in one way or another, but as far as we know, there’s no other way to live, there’s no other way to be in this world without having that. We have both things, we have all the things. I think that’s interesting that it’s the nothingness of the universe because we can look at the universe at large and think it’s so empty, barren, and scary but it’s both. That’s what we’ve been talking about the whole time. It is anguish but it’s also ecstasy. I feel like a lot of the language that we use to talk about this stuff is turned into platitudes. You can’t have the good without the bad. I feel like I hear people’s stories of going through a life-changing experience whether they’re talking about it or a book or whatever. There’s always this clarity that comes with just accepting the fact that you’re not ever going to have all great positive days.

Like the quote earlier, you’re the sky and everything else is the weather. Finding that core within ourselves that exists regardless of the masks and regardless of the anguish, that’s all we can do, but also maybe that really is enough even though some days it doesn’t feel like it. I don’t know that we’ll get another choice though.

Cindy Ingram: No. I don’t think so.

Madalyn Gregory: You can make it enough or not. What good does that do? What good does it do to feel like it’s not enough? It doesn’t. So we might as well say that it is.

Cindy Ingram: In the end, you’re impermanent. In the end, you’re infinite at the same time. No matter what happens, that remains true so we have to do everything we can to feel at peace with that I guess.

Madalyn Gregory: Yeah.

Cindy Ingram: I think that’s a good ending. Knowing us, in 10 minutes, we’ll realize we forgot something really big. That happened last time but I don’t think there’s a lot of race gender issues necessarily here that we need to talk through. I think we’re good.

Madalyn Gregory: It’s on the other side of the mask.

Cindy Ingram: Yeah, that’s the other side. You’re right. All right. We have a lesson for this artwork in our membership, The Curated Connections Library, a complete lesson with activities, discussion questions, information, powerpoint, worksheets, video. You can see that we spent an hour talking about this artwork through a lot of different lenses and I know that you might be listening and thinking, “Well, these two people spend a lot of time talking about art so my kids can’t come up with this stuff,” but I guarantee you that your students will surprise you. If you show them this artwork, you talk to them about these issues, it will resonate with them, they will have lots to say, and it will be really a profound experience. You can check that out at The Curated Connections Library. If you’re not a member, you can join at artclasscurator.com/join. Thank you again, Madalyn, for joining me today.

Madalyn Gregory: Yes. I always love it and it always surprises me.

Cindy Ingram: Yes. In the best ways possible. Thank you all. I’ll see you next week.

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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Cindy: 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 delight 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.

Cindy Ingram: Hey everybody, it’s Cindy Ingram and I am so excited to welcome you to the Art Class Curator podcast. And I have a really awesome guest for you today. Today, we have the executive director of the National Art Education Association in NAEA, Mario Rossero, and he came onto NAEA in January of 2020 right before the pandemic, right before just the world exploded. But what I am so excited to share with you is his, you know, how he came to this role. His story is really exciting and encouraging and inspiring, but also to share with you the direction of NAEA and the priority is that it has right now. I really loved this conversation. I feel like I could have talked him into him for another three or four hours about all of the issues facing our field right now. So I hope you really enjoyed this conversation as much as I did. So, without further ado, welcome to the podcast, Mario Rossero.

Cindy: All right. I’m so excited to welcome Mario Rossero to the podcast. Welcome, Mario.

Mario Rossero: Hi, Cindy, thanks so much for the invite and for having me.

Cindy: So, I am so thrilled to talk to you because you are such an influential and important role in NAEA at this moment. And this has been a very historic time for all of us in the last couple of years, especially with your roles. I’m really excited to dive in and talk to you about that. But before we do, can you tell us a little bit more about you and your background and experiences and what led you to where you are today?

Mario: Sure, and I’ll do my best to keep this concise. I’ll hit the high points. But originally, I am from Southwestern Pennsylvania about 45 minutes, Southwest of Pittsburgh. And I grew up on my mom’s families’ farmland. So we weren’t farmers, but we grew up in a very, very, very rural environment and I attribute that partially to how I found my love and passion for art-making because that was sort of the only thing that I had available to me, where my sketchbooks or materials- like I made lots of puppets and things when I was a kid, so I was constantly making things from as early as I can remember.

And then, as I became more into my teenage years, I definitely fell in love with drawing. And I was obsessed with drawing and comic books and that passion just stayed with me and I wasn’t sure that I was going to go into art education, even though in college, or like planned so that I could. And I made my schedule. I didn’t have to make that decision till probably my junior year if I was going to pull the trigger and do student teaching and all that. It really wasn’t until my senior year when I was student teaching that I realized that I had just as much passion for education as I did for art and seeing those two things married together was- I mean, part of the greatest discovery of my life because it’s just been my path since that point in time.

I taught elementary visual art, in a district just outside of Pittsburgh, Shaler Area, school district. I taught elementary and middle school there. I was there for about 7-8 years before I noticed that I had some burgeoning leadership abilities and qualities. But so often, as in the case in an education setting, the art teacher might not be the first place that folks are looking to for that leadership. But it was coming out of the- it’s sort of like, large scale collaborations with the Andy Warhol Museum and the Mattress Factory Museum and bringing the community together to create these installations. And I was like, “Oh there’s something.”

I understand something about bringing people together and focusing them for the common good. So then I started looking to grad schools. And I thought that I was going to do an MFA and it just- it wasn’t the right… Sometimes my work might be a little bit like social practice. Like the way that I work with people, even though I make tangible two-dimensional drawings and paintings as well. But that wasn’t really something that was formulated yet in the public discourse or that kind of practice.

I wasn’t having luck finding the right program and I swear, this is a true story. My first NAEA convention was in New York City and my colleague, Alice, and I submitted a project we are working on this identity project that our fourth graders had done. At the end of that session, we walked to the back of the room and she greets her grad school professor from Bank Street College, and I talked to her colleague. I’m just being friendly and respectful to her colleague and she suddenly starts asking me, “Who are you? What’s your work? What are you interested in?” And I’m telling her, “I’m really looking for a grad school, I can’t find the right next step.” And she reaches into her bag and pulls out a flyer for this program that was supervision and administration in the visual arts.

It was built around a teacher schedule. So, you go in the summer to Bank Street and some of the Upper West Side school for education and then you do the first half of the week there, and the second half of the week, Parsons School of Design in the studio. So it was ideally built for our educator leadership and you got your principal license from it.

Cindy: I didn’t even know that sort of program existed. That’s awesome.

Mario: It was really that rare unicorn but it was the thing that validated some of my instincts around leadership and collaboration, but it also gave me tools to have difficult conversations. Think about a supervisory voice, right? What also keep the artistic creative part in there by the time I’m finished. I’m back in Pittsburgh and I thought, “Okay, I’m ready for a bigger challenge.” And my good friend from grad school is in Chicago and I told my district who was so lovely and flexible. I said, “Thank you so much for the opportunities, I’ve had such a great experience here, but it’s time for me to grow and spread my wings. And I’m going to head to Chicago.” They’re like, “Best of luck.”

I didn’t have a job yet. So I drove- everything was in my hatchback. I drove the eight hours. And Cindy, when I tell you that I went to the convention center for the Chicago Public Schools job fair, there were 700 tables. We had over 400 elementary and the rest were high schools. And they had two different giant convention rooms and they just had tables for every school. And then these little poles with velcro signs for the opening. Some said, ‘Visual Arts’, some said, ‘Fine Arts’, some said, ‘Art.’ I was in my blazer and tie and had my portfolio when I just stood in line and interviewed.

I found this great school called, ‘Harold Washington Elementary’ that was on the south side. Dr. Louis had a real passion for art, the entire school, every flow. It was three floors and was filled with murals. And Harold Washington was a former mayor of Chicago, and they had his Cadillac in the lobby, and a little museum dedicated to him. The school had not had a trained certified art educator before. They had been working with the community artists a little bit, but they just hadn’t had someone who had that background and training.

Even though I had taught for eight years prior, it was a brand new community to me. I was a brand-new individual to the school that I was walking into. And so, what I had to learn was more about how to recognize- I mean, it’s like I have the terminology now, but I probably didn’t have it then. But recognize my whiteness and my privilege and understand that I’m walking into a hundred percent African-American community.

I would like to think that both my kids and I, every day we’re committed to working on that relationship. I showed up every day and then they were like, “You’re showing up every day.” This isn’t always easy and we just kept building on it. I think they thought I was a little crazy because I would be talking about art elements and principles. They were just like, “What are you talking about?” It was like, “Oh, my gosh, art has all these components.” And so we really started to unpack that.

I remember I had 45 seventh graders in a room that had 35 chairs. I have such a soft spot for that. It was a really tremendous experience. But while I was there, I guess it was the end of that first year. I got called to the principal’s office and I thought, “Well, I never get in trouble, I don’t know what this is about.” So I get called to the principal’s office and somebody from the central office is visiting.

Now my good colleague and friend, Carol Ann, she manages The Fine Arts Magnet Cluster program. So it’s like neighborhood schools that have an arts program. She was working to build this program and spread it across the city and she’s telling me the design, if there’s lead arts teachers that have professional development around the arts, and the arts or the core of the community and of the building.

It’s just going on and on and I said, “I’m sorry, no disrespect. I have to interrupt you.” And she’s kind of set back and I said, “If we were one of these schools- I’m the only art teacher here, I would know if we were one of these schools. I think you need my help.” And she kind of laughed and she’s like, “Oh, really?” And sometimes, you know you’re at the right moment, and I said, “I just finished this program. I have really been building my leadership skills. I love my school and I’m really falling in love with Chicago, and I really want to make a difference.” And she’s like, “Okay, great. Nice to meet you.”

And then she leaves, then I go back to class and I finished the year. And that summer, I got a voicemail. The answering machine that was like at your house that you had to call in, you put it at home and she had left a message that they had got this federal grant and she was hiring for a role to coordinate that program at central office.

I was really lucky to go to central office and then work across 60 elementary schools that had arts focus that was across all art forms. It was a program where it was building curriculum community and leadership through the arts. And so we were offering training to art teachers. There were 120 of them across the entire city, which is two big city. Probably six to eight hours a month for at least three years for that grant.

And we started to saw a real change in practice because suddenly they were stepping into these teacher leader roles and they were building the arts into the school improvement plan. And they were assessing the gaps and opportunities at their school in providing professional development and partnerships through the arts.

And through that work suddenly, the principal was like leaning on them and asking them, they part of planning conversations a little bit more and the community was a little bit more invested. I’ll fast forward a little bit but basically, that moment of meeting Carol Ann was just serendipitous. I feel so lucky and I had her mentorship.

I moved my way up through the system over in Chicago about 12 years. I’m one of those rare arts people that have gone deep in the arts to broaden over multiple curricular areas. I was able to manage. I was the director at Magnet schools and programs. So we had a world language, and technology, and a math and science and all these clusters of programs across the city. So it’s interesting to take the art lessons to a broader scale.

And then I would go back and I would go deeper in the arts. When I drove from Pittsburgh and Chicago, I really wanted to lead the arts for the city of Chicago, but I didn’t know what the path would be to get there. When I was kind of feeling that itch, that leadership itch again. Chicago had gone through a big change of superintendent, etcetera and Pittsburgh Public Schools had just finished an arts plan and they were interviewing for a director of the arts. And I thought, “You know, there are some things I want to learn about this role that I might need before I can move up in Chicago.” Like I just… I think I need to go deeper.

And so I was able to spend this year in Pittsburgh where they had done the research, they had created a plan. They had a clear direction and I was able to implement a lot of that work. They probably had what? 60-70 schools in the district at the time. So still, it’s fairly large in an urban setting but a different size and type in terms of scope from Chicago. And so after that year, Chicago kept knocking at my door and said, “Come back, come back.” I went back and became the director of arts to the district which is like what I was really trying to do and I was able to take all those lessons and we had that rare moment where we had a superintendent president of the school board and a mayor, Rahm Emanuel, all of whom were arts supportive simultaneously and we had the cultural community. Lending people like or Rene Fleming to champion the arts.

We had a fire that was lit under us because the Wallace Foundation had done a report years prior. That said, “The arts and arts education in these various cities look like this in Chicago. It looks a little bit uncoordinated and folks just aren’t collaborating and working together.” So we had this energy to work together and show… At Chicago, we’re going to show everybody that we can do this. And so we spent about three months talking to a few thousand community members, parents, teachers, students, art partners and artists about what they wanted from the district for arts education, and we created the first-ever strategic plan for the arts. And we were able to look at graduation requirements, and minutes of instruction. And a number of art forms offered, budgets for the arts, and teacher schedules.

And essentially what we found was that most principles, these decision-makers didn’t have a clear set of goals for what they should be striving towards for the arts and what that looked like. So we basically articulated what the goals were, based on the sort of size of your population. This is what the investment in the arts should look like and we created an accountability system and created the art scorecard that was put on each school scorecard, have an Arts indicator.

And that was the game-changer. We added accountability. I am forever grateful- there’s one principal that suggested that idea and when we heard it and then we have the ability to make it happen. We worked really hard not to make it punitive but just make it accurate to say, “school, A.” You’re a sort of level for because of these great Investments. But this other school, just because you have a lower score, doesn’t mean that we’re saving you. What we’re going to do is actually use this as a gap analysis and then focus the funding community to help you address your needs.

So if you can only provide one art form, what can we do about that? If you’re struggling for professional development or you’re struggling for community engagement? Like how do we help bolster that? And it just changed the whole conversation. So when I tell you, I’m the arts nerd that’s a big fan of strategy. I think those are the two things that when you pair them together, it changes the game.

Cindy: I love that story that you talked about you’re discovering your love of teaching or level of leadership and I can see a lot of my own journey paralleled into that. It’s fun to listen to and that’s a really exciting project. Is there reports online I can read? Because I just want to

Mario: We partnered with my good colleagues. Ingenuity was created as an external partner to the district to be side-by-side. They have done all the data capture analysis so you can look up those reports and see the trend. And folks from the beginning thought, “Well, we all know who’s going to get the high score is going to be, these schools in these neighborhoods.” And some of that was absolutely true. What was also true was that schools across the entire city had historic and well-protected arts investments.

So you saw these great tales of arts champions in every corner, in every neighborhood. That was really special because it was a motivator for schools in nearby communities to think about how they might do that too. It wasn’t just the north side, I wasn’t just this particular neighborhood. It was happening in the south side and the west side, it was happening all over.

And folks are also saying, “Hey, we need help.” And finally, we had a well-articulated path forward. Where you work left to your own devices, we are actually providing options in a roadmap. I guess from there, I did that I went to all the subs- I was the Chief of Core Curriculum. I oversaw all the subject areas in the teaching and learning team before I left Chicago. I wanted to try something bigger and some national work. I was researching what national options and which partners I might chat with about growing this work.

I discover that the Kennedy Center was hiring for a new vice president for education and threw my hat in and was really thrilled to be there. So I moved from Chicago to DC and that was a wonderful experience to learn how to work at a national scale when you’re also a quasi- federal institution that is also a presidential memorial. And seeing a portfolio that’s in every state. It was fun to work in an institution that has that kind of reputation and to see the power it had on communities. They have a great program called,” Any Given Child” that goes into communities and does a community analysis of the arts and then helps them create strategy, which is very similar to the work that was one Chicago.

It’s nice to see that this is happening in cities all over. I was there for five years and I had that itch again, and I was like, it would be nice to be the lead person. It will be nice to be that ED role, that CEO role. I started looking around, and I was like, “Oh, NAEA is looking for their next leader.” And I thought it’s played such a critical role in my life. And I’m so grateful, but I also know art educators inside and out. I had worked at some museums early, I worked at the Andy Warhol Museum early in my career. I had that, I was in the classroom. I was in lots of different settings. I’ve taught at the college level, I worked in some central office, I understand a lot of these roles. These are my people, let’s see how this goes and the interview process was really wonderful.

I really mean this, I was so impressed with the board and the staff. This is a group of folks that are really committed and passionate about this work. What a space to walk into, right? And we’re going to be 75 years old in 22. And this is a well-run and well-cared institution that many folks have embraced for a lifelong relationship.

And the other thing is that NAEA had been really- I thought, was working, to be honest about equity, diversity, and inclusion work in a way, that I think many other institutions that baptize two or three years ago. They started that work. Three years ago I started that work and that was a little bit ahead of the curve. We’re having just honest dialogue to say, “Where are we lacking and how do we create the most inclusive association?” And that particularly attracted me because that’s been one of my passions, throughout my career.

Cindy: Wow. I feel like I can have 6,000 follow-up questions about every single part of that story.

Mario: Okay, rapid fire.

Cindy: I don’t want to go too much into that because that was a cool story and I love just everything that you’ve been a part of. I know you’ve been in all of these different roles and you’ve seen it from the teachers perspective, from the administrator perspective, from the nonprofit perspective, from… I don’t know, I guess they’re considered nonprofit, Kennedy Center. So, what do you feel is the biggest challenge for our field right now?

Mario: Well, there are definitely some competing answers here. But I would say, the thing that I confront the most is the challenge around the value proposition. And what that value proposition looks like to decision, makers. I always talk about this, the inherited narrative of arts education. When I meet somebody new at a function, “What do you do?” “I work in arts education.” Oh, my gosh. I’m so sorry. It’s the first thing to go.

 

We had this old narrative where we like… This is a little bit of the general public. I think it’s holding on to some of these old tropes around the arts and arts education. And so, what I always ask people, I like put this challenge out to the community to say when someone says that to you, you have to counter that with an arts positive story. So I say, “You know, the arts are- it’s a really uneven landscape across the country especially in schools, but let me tell you about this community that has doubled down and reinvested in the arts and it has really seen these kinds of outcomes.” Those are the stories that we need to lead with. Decision-makers are really swayed by these kinds of narratives. Whether you’re looking at the local principal, the superintendent, the state or regional folks, let alone get to the national. One of those biggest challenges is that narrative is still hanging on.

Even if we look at… We’re looking at career paths into arts education and we’re realizing that there’s not really a pathway set up for our younger learners through middle and high school to consider art education. I can’t imagine a parent wanting to turn their child away from a rich life that Mary’s creativity with a job that’s with it, in a community of folks where you can really make a difference like it’s just such a beautiful pairing. I feel so fortunate, I’m sure you do too, it’s served us so well. It’s actually a great career path. So I think from a 10,000 foot view that’s one of the biggest challenge. We can talk about funding and we can talk about policy and other data but I think that narrative around the value, that’s what I’m always trying to change.

Cindy: I’m glad you brought this up because this is something in the back of my head all the time. I hear that all the arts are the first thing to go thing. And always in the back of my head, I’m like, “Is it?” And I always want to look up the data because I don’t have any proof of that in my world. I don’t see that being true.

Mario: Like I said, I looked at this data both within communities. I mean, many, many cities and communities, but also like rural-urban suburban areas all over the country. Like for example, one of the great things that Kennedy Center would give a National School Board Association award to art support of school board. And there was a rubric that was very much like what I described for Chicago. What are these investments across the board? And so you’re seeing all these towns across the country of small and large size that had made these investments.

I want to make sure I respect our colleagues that are struggling, but there are many places that the arts are thriving, and they have a long-term investment. I think that it’s not Pollyanna-ish, it’s being positive around those stories, it can yield more other positive decisions and actions. The only model is that we think it’s the first to go, then that kind of seeps into the public consciousness a little bit. We can get rid of that.

Cindy: Yes, because I worked in Dallas ISD. And it was probably around the same time as your Wallace Foundation thing, but we had gone to Wallace Foundation grant and they paid for all the arts and music teachers and all those schools and all the elementary schools. And so there were teachers at the time that were getting laid off and furloughed. I forgot why. But as an art teacher, I was like, “Well, my job is safe, my job is covered.” Arts and music teachers knew we were safe. And so I guess maybe I’m coming from that paradigm too. But our district was putting resources and energy and attention into the arts at that time.

Mario: I always forget to tell this particular story about in Chicago, once we had our art strategy and because we spent a lot of time welcoming decision-makers, and leaders into the process that they felt like they had ownership, and they did. This is Mayor Emanuel calls the district and says, “I have 11 million dollars and a TIF money, tax increment financing that I’d like to dedicate to the arts.” He also had a plan for wellness. He’s like, “So, here’s 11 million dollars for arts and PE and Mario and Annie should make a plan for how you’re going to spend that.”

I mean, never in my life is that ever going to have. That’s never gonna happen. I know it’s not gonna happen for everybody but we really had a thorough strategy. Then we said, “How do we use this investment where it’s most needed?” And we needed teachers. And so we created- we could invest those dollars more so in the first year, but then the dollars got smaller over future years so that the school could pick up that commitment cause we’re like, “How do we stretch these out?” And even though you want those dollars to stay forever, isn’t it valuable for those students that maybe never had that arts instruction before to get it? And then you’re starting to whet the appetites of the families and of the principals, and the rest of the community and hopefully, you see some changes in decisions.

Cindy: How do you think as a teacher? I think most of our listeners are probably in the classroom teaching, you mentioned, anytime someone comes at you, with sort of the negative… Or so, the first to cut, you come back with the positive, what are some of the things you think that teachers could do to further show that value proposition?

Mario: A hundred percent. So, A: Ensure that the arts are in your school improvement plan. Every school should have to do that annually, make sure the arts are one of the priorities- so accountability. Number one is, find the path to make your school accountable for the arts. So, school improvement plan is a great way to start. School scorecard is another great place that’s going to take a little bit more than just one person to get that done. But yet to start all the conversations early and often so that whenever you need to make those things happen, you’ve already kind of built up some support. So I’d say, accountability and school improvement plan is a good starting point.

I had that basement art room with the back door to the parking lot and I could close the door and make great art with my elementary kit. I remember that, like, we made great art. We were in our own little world like those days are over. The days where I can just close the door and ignore everybody outside of my art room or over. I really encourage our arts educators to step out of their classrooms and be on the school leadership team, or grade level planning team, or work closely with the school counselor.

When you’re planning any kind of arts event, form a parent advisory board or committee or community. It’s about building this coalition of folks that believe in the art so that you can tap into them. It’s like reach beyond your four walls. I know how great it is to be in the studio and just focus on the art but we also have to step outside. And so, I think my next thing would be around teacher leadership. And like I said, early in my story when I first moved in the central office, we spent three years dedicating time to teacher leadership. We saw results.

That is a single biggest thing that I’ve seen results in a variety of settings is really investing that professional development in art educators as leaders because we are unique problem solvers that no one else can make a dime, it feels like $100 right here. It’s like we’re always resource-constrained, material constrained, and space constrained but we’re still delivering high-quality programs. If you put that into a leadership setting and suddenly, you’re the problem solver of the group. You’re coming up with solutions to things that no one thought of.

Cindy: Yes, I love that. I’ve been in that. My first job, I was inaffordable I did not see anyone, I saw them as they waved their glass to me, but that was it and it’s such a challenge. Do you have any advice for how resources or programs that if someone is interested in beefing up their leadership abilities, is there a good resource that we can send teachers to?

Mario: That is a really excellent question. I’m trying not to do too much self-promotion. But art school for art leaders at NAEA is a really beautiful model and I think talking to any of those alumni would be a great first step for someone who’s thinking about dipping their toes into those leadership roles. The folks that I met from Sal are all considering. I’m ready for the next step in my journey but I need a community of support to help make this happen and they’re really bringing problems of practice that are very true to what school looks and feels like. They’re coming from different roles, museums and community spaces too, but that program does a lot of… Looking at the self first and then building out towards community in action. And I think it’s got a really nice phase to it. That’s the one that comes to mind. That’s the top of mind right now.

Cindy: I have some of my colleagues that have gone through that program and I’ve seen them on Facebook, just commenting back and forth to each other about things and they’ll see an issue and they’re like, “We should bring this up to someone.” And I’m like, “Y’all are just teachers, not random people.” But that was doing your job and you’re feeling empowered to make a difference. As I could see the impact of that program just from the sidelines and it’s exciting. I see.

Mario: Absolutely.

Cindy: I love that. So, you mentioned, you had competing biggest challenges for our field right now. Is there another one that kind of pops in your head before I talk about some of the other topics today?

Mario: Well, from the values challenge, it’s probably neck-and-neck policy and budget or probably it’s all interrelated. I did a high-level analysis of arts education policy nationally over the past. It was like sixty to a hundred years. I’m just kind of go like a big frame of it. And what we’ve seen is that we’ve gotten more and more language around arts education. All the art forms included in education legislation. So, it’s in No Child Left Behind. It’s in Essa. It comes out in different forms and then that trickles down to the States. So, when you look at that, I always say, “Is that a win?”

Well, it’s definitely a positive. The challenge is where’s the accountability and funding to make that happen? I think our work is around… It’s the storytelling, it’s the advocacy, it’s the narrative. But I also think that there’s a real opportunity how do arts folks, move into more positions of power. And is that a job? Or is that counsel? Or is that an advisory group? I would love to see more art educators from every division think about how do they move into some of those roles because we need to be affecting and influencing some of those decisions. But the power of policy can be real if you understand what’s most effective.

In my time in Chicago, we realized that graduation requirements that local policy for the district was the strongest thing we had because it articulated everything from the earliest grades. You had to do a backwards design thing. So we’re saying, “Oh, well, we had two credits, but you can only get them in visual art and music. You couldn’t get the Fine Arts credits and dance and drama.” So, I had a board president who had a daughter in a theater class that couldn’t get an arts credit. And so we looked at that and we were like, CPS is one credit more than the state of Illinois, so the two credits were good.

But the Fine Arts being limited, only two disciplines was challenging. So we’re able to broaden it to four disciplines. But we also protected a variety by saying, the credits had to be one in each of two different art forms so that we were ensuring that the school would have at least two, but it allowed for dance and drama to start to thrive alongside the others. And in a district like Chicago, we had the sort of space and ability to do that. We’re working with policy and tinkering with it is really exciting because that had a trickle-down effect that really opened up avenues for elementary and middle schools that weren’t there before.

Cindy: Okay, awesome. So, you started at NAEA in early January 2020. I’m sure you had this exciting vision of what you were going to do and where the direction of the NAEA was headed. And then the world fell to pieces and we had the pandemic. We had the Black Lives Matter uprising after the death of George Floyd. How did your original vision pivot once all of those things came into the landscape?

Mario: It was certainly unexpected. When I came into the role, as I said, I was really excited about the organization’s focus around equity, diversity, and inclusion. I have always worked to make sure that every young person in my classroom felt seen and heard and understood and I try to understand their stories. I think that to be excluded is the worst feeling in the world. I always try to make sure that folks feel that they’re part of what’s happening. And that really resonated with me. I had already anticipated that would be a big part of the work ahead and I could never have foreseen that. Alongside that was really the work of saving and securing the association for the future.

Because when the pandemic hit, I know we all remember, everything was moving both so fast and so slow. I was working behind the scenes with the board on a daily basis to assess what was going on with COVID, but also how that was going to impact our convention which was, later in March We all know that everything shut down March 13th, but the thing is, the story that I never got to tell is that we had to delay our decision to protect the association so that we could ensure that- Minneapolis was calling it and that our insurance would be able to kick in and protect us from the loss of cancellation so that the association could be in good financial shape for the future. There was a lot of mechanic.

That was the most important work we could do. Because we were very wealthy in terms of our people and our members that doesn’t mean were wealthy in terms of dollars. It’s a different thing. And so we spend every dollar so frugally and that’s really served us well, but the convention is the main revenue generator so that was the first and foremost was… Okay. Let’s take care of the convention, let’s make sure the association is financially sound and safe and thank goodness for PPP loans. And of course, we had to do some furloughs and some things that affected staff but we made were able to maintain the whole team that we really looked carefully at every avenue of what we could- where we could have some cost savings to ensure that we could keep providing member benefits which immediately was- how do we help and support folks in new virtual instruction and hybrid instruction? And we were barely able to think about it carefully in purpose and instruction because we have so many questions in early 2020.

And so, we were working with a lot of members and board members and teachers on the ground to create guides and tip sheets and resources. That’s when we launched the town halls because I just felt like we needed to have- I needed to have a real conversation with real people. I love a PDF tool but a PDF is only going to go so far. So, how do we make this real? I really believe in listening, spending a lot of time listening to people and hearing where they are, and making sure we’re serving their needs.

From January 2020 when I started it was like, media and I work strategic vision because it’s time to renew that and then it became very much about survival and sustainability. And then when the Black Lives Matter movement really spiked that summer, and with George Floyd’s death, it was a really hard conversely- not hard in terms of like, we weren’t able to have it, but hard because we felt so emotional about it, it was a hard conversation to have. The leadership of NAEA, because typically, we’re not responding to all the things that are happening in the world. And this here, we’re in a completely different moment in time. We are kind of moving in a new direction and we really care about people and how do we have a people-first approach?

And so, I asked James Rowling our president elected the time and he was the inaugural chair that and I commissioned to, I said, “Could you share as an individual from your perspective? Could you write a response to what we’re living through?” And that’s another conversation that’s invisible behind the scenes. I could ask James could we have a lot of trust between each other, we both invest in that relationship and I said, “I know I’m asking a lot, but I don’t know that the association has a voice yet in this, but I know you as an individual will have something important to say, and I know that’s a big lift. Can you handle it? Can you do that?” And he thought about it and came back and he’s like, “I can do it.” And so, that was one of our first steps, sometimes we need to speak with the voice of an individual to help unpack things.

What we always try to do is just… We know members are facing, we know our educators are facing so many different and new challenges and maybe even some old ones that are reinvented. Not everything is an easy conversation, but we’re trying to say, “Hey, we know this is a burning issue. This is a topic that you’re hearing about. We’re not saying at the take one side or the other, but we do want to provide you with some perspective and some direction to help you navigate.” Because it’s a lot. I just can’t even list all the things that we’ve lived through them. It’s now what, 19 months?

Cindy: Yes, the document that Dr. Rowling came out with that summer was so good. I remember, I read it, I shared, it was so good. And I recently saw him speak in a panel discussion a couple of weeks ago. He mentioned when he was talking that ED&I for NAEA is not just another thing you’re doing. It’s not like, here’s a committee and you’re doing the committee work, but he said it’s now something that is going to inform everything. It’s an anchor for all of the committees and I really loved to hear him talk about it that way. Can you kind of expand on that and tell me what that means?

Mario: So you and our listeners probably know, we went through a big strategic visioning process. Also during that pandemic here, which actually, you’d never know that was ideal time, but it was actually a wonderful container because we could ask folks, “What do you care about? What are you concerned about in terms of visual art, design, media arts education, like what are those things?” And so, the strategic planning process was a listening tour. We heard from every corner of the association and we heard from non-members, we heard from peer organizations.

And we sat down with the board with the ED&I commission, the research commission, some of our editors, different regions and divisions across the country. And basically any time I was in front of a group, I was asking them questions about this and without fail, the number one priority from every group was equity, diversity, and inclusion. And that was the number one topic that they wanted to focus on. And so when we get to the final strategic vision, equity diversity, and inclusion is what we call, ‘super pillar.’ So it’s both a standalone and it’s embedded across the others.

So, of course, learning is the core of what we do. It’s like a course learning is the second pillar and advocacy and policy, research and knowledge, community, vibrancy is core of our work. They’re all interconnected anyways, but especially the ED&I piece because you have to ask yourself questions, “Are my policies the most inclusive policies?” When we’re focused on learning and professional development and instructional design, I think sometimes I always worry, when an individual hears anything- how do we use the letters? Some people say, DEI- whenever you hear equity, diversity, inclusion, do you think one thing? Or do you think like I think where I’m like, Oh, well, okay. Part of that means I have to do some work myself to know who I am, know myself in context, know my privilege and power. That’s not easy.

And then I have to do some work with others. So you and I have to talk and wait to figure out where our trust is and our boundaries and how that works. I’m still the individual and then I have to go, “Okay. I’m going into a classroom, how do I create the safest, most inclusive space for all learners where everyone feels accepted and heard?”

And you’re not even really into the instruction yet, and then you can get into some instructional design. And then my instructional design it’s like, are my teacher moves, the way I set up my class, the way I call them students, the order that I do this, am I being thoughtful and inclusive to all? Let alone, the content and the artistic examples.

There’s so many layers to it, that I really hope that everyone can find their first steps into this because there is an entry point for sure. And it’s not a one size fits all. So when we talk about this work, that’s why it’s embedded across because it’s a little bit of everything. I don’t know that we’ve had the language or the understanding or the platform to talk about it so much before, but we certainly do now.

Cindy: Not bad- where you just said about the self, the others, the classroom, the curriculum, what a great framework. Is that an actual framework you have developed? That’s good.

Mario: Admittedly, it’s how I think about it. But we did an ED&I toolkit last year and it outlines some of that framing. It’s like how to get started with ED&I but we also drew on a lot of resources. There’s so many resources now, but many of them will have those layers and they usually start with the ‘I’ and the work outwards. But I should say, what we found is, it’s certainly not a linear journey. It is cyclical. I’m not going to know the way to be the most inclusive teacher and I’m done, right? My instructional strategies are not done. I’m gonna revisit that over time. I’m going to keep learning and improving. So, that’s I think another thing that I was trying to reiterate, it’s a cyclical journey that where you revisit and we keep learning.

For us, in some ways that works well because we’re committed to continuous improvement and continuous learning because we’re a learning institution.

Cindy: One thing I noticed last summer of 2020, was that so many people that I know. In my personal life, in my professional life, that everybody seemed to- First, they went and worked you know, it was really beautiful to see because I think so many people will look at things like this and they’ll get mad about it and they’ll shout about it and they’ll post about it. But so many people and more than I’ve ever seen stopped and it was like, “What is my role here? How am I complicit in this culture?” And it was so encouraging to watch and people who thought, “I’ve got this covered.” We’re like, no, I don’t, there are still things I need to do and the conversations I was having, it was really powerful. So I love that working on yourself first component and then spreading it from there because I think a lot of teachers can go straight to, “Okay. Well, I’ll just do this lesson plan that is more diverse or whatever.” But they don’t really think about the internalization of the things that are there.

Mario: There are so many layers to it, and I think, I’m spending a lot of time thinking about… I don’t think I know, I think I’m constantly learning, like, I don’t know at all- I’m always open receptive. The first year and a half, I went to every ED&I commission meeting that I could, I spend lots of time with the commissioners to learn about the work and to think about how we were taking up the task force recommendations, but from a leadership perspective, I try to double down on listening, on making space, on inviting in, on stepping aside. Because I think we really need to make space. Many of our diverse colleagues that have not felt welcomed or included or even seen themselves in the association, let alone the field. I’m doing everything I can to make space and to welcome folks. And so, I always encourage everybody. It’s like an open heart and an invitation goes a long way. That’s not going to do all the work but it’s a good starting point.

Cindy: Yes, and one thing I have to noticed about, it’s kind of related but not at the same time is how different all our teachers are. It’s not like Math teachers- well, they might have different teaching styles or whatever. They’re still teaching x+y=b or what mx+y=b or whatever. It’s very straightforward. The curriculum is very straightforward, that teaching is pretty straightforward. But when it comes to art teachers, we have such division in terms of… There’s tad teachers- everybody has their way, they want to do it and everybody thinks their way is the right way. I see a lot of fighting within our teachers about that. I’m wondering if you’re seeing that from your perspective? And also are you seeing that as a side note to that. Are you seeing any sort of push back on any of the ED&I work that you’re doing because of that?

Mario: I’m a big reframer, so I hear what you’re saying and the way I like to look at it is, “Oh, my gosh, don’t we have a tremendous amount of strength?” Because we have so many approaches that we can take. And also, given that arts education is truly a battle. We all need each other. It’s not that I don’t see some of the divisions, but I don’t think that they are important enough in terms of we need each other. We need to be a community and a field that is working together for the betterment of arts education so that everyone can have access to it.

So your approach versus my approach that’s not the only argument, the argument is how do we work together to achieve something greater than ourselves? And so it’s like, “Oh, my gosh, there’s this many different strategies? Fascinating. This many different aspects to art and culture and history, let’s embrace that and learn from each other.” Because I think it’s really easy to have one thing pitted against the other, or to think one approach is better. And frankly, I actually find the standards are actually really helpful, as a touchstone for this because I do feel strongly when folks want to be only skills-focused, I’m personally really challenged by that and I look to the standards that really talk about a more comprehensive picture because art touches- or art reflects history, time, culture, stories, people experiences. It is a medium to do that.

I want to refined my craft. This sounds silly as an example. I remember the first moment that I learned what I could really do with a colored pencil. When I understood the firmness, and the dedication to get that glassy colored pencil, it can almost get photographic, what an amazing skill to learn. But then, how do I put that into practice to something larger? I just think that until we’re all winning. We need to all work together because we really need each other.

Cindy: Yes, I totally agree because I see that- it’s a blessing. You get to be a job or you have so much greater freedom and you can do things as the way you want to do it. And it doesn’t mean that someone else is doing it wrong, but I like that point to the standards, I haven’t thought about it as a

Mario: back to them pretty frequently and the language is from you. It’s written from our peers so it makes sense. And then to the other part of your question, you know. I think- just a little bit earlier, but it’s like, my role is to support all of our art educator members and I really see my role to support the field. Everyone has their own unique journey, and I’m here to support everybody, taking steps forward on their journey. If ED&I feels a little itchy or uncomfortable to somebody, we always- my whole team, we invite everybody in the conversation. It’s like, “Okay, that doesn’t feel good or you’re challenged? Let’s have a conversation and talk about it.”

Cindy: And that step along the journey could be just seeing stuff you put out about it, seeing presentation at NAEA the things like that- those are going to slowly chip away…

Mario: I was thinking of a picture. You only see real change through discomfort and discomfort doesn’t have to be a horrible thing. It’s sort of like, you get to fasten your seatbelt and you have to experience it. But through discomfort, you can see real change and growth. If there’s a little bit of that discomfort we’ll weather it, we are a strong community so I know that we can weather it.

Cindy: Awesome. So, all of that said, it’s really exciting to see how NAEA is tackling all of these issues. Personally, what are you most excited about right now?

Mario: In terms of work?

Cindy: Yes or any

Mario: I’ll give you the work answer. Because I’m a strategic plan nerd, I get really excited like once it’s crafted you move into implementation. And so, where right now prioritizing your one’s action steps and a lot of those are around how do we reach out to and embrace every corner of art education as a field? How do we reach young learners that might be on a path for- on our society or pre-service? But also how do we really hold up and uplift and value our retired art educators? Where this thing about the whole paradigm, I get really excited thinking about, how do we get started in those conversations? That’s the thing. I’m looking forward to right now, and that’s great because we’re looking towards convention in March, and we have a plan for both live and virtual, and we have a way that we can keep those conversations going through that as well.

Cindy: Therefore, I hope this Delta variant calms down so I can be there because I always love when NAEA is in New York City. That’s my favorite place, so fun. I know you are a visual artist, I didn’t want to have this conversation without having you talk a little bit about some of your art. What role does art-making play in your life?

Mario: I feel really lucky. I’m one of those people that always has art-making in my life. I know sometimes it’s hard for folks to get into it or it goes away because you’re busy doing something else, but most readily, I always have a sketchbook. So my sketchbook is often my journal and my planner but it’s filled with images as well. In regular times when I’m travelling a lot for work, I’ll always have it and I’ll be sketching and making work. And then I take those ideas from the sketchbook and then I work on a larger format but most all of my work, I’m just a drawer at heart. Even if I’m making a painting or even if I’m doing a photograph, everything comes from drawing in my head. So I work on 2×4 like nice gritty toothy paper and I am very like multimedia, but I layer and layer and layer and layer with any- if you had any material you had out on a table, I would use.

I use images from comic books and old photographs. I like using text in my work and I layer it and take it too far. And then I played this hide and seek game, where like I start them or wash out or hide elements, or sections of it, or I’ll tear up old drawings. And I have a sticker machine, that’s the best thing I ever bought. Basically, just put adhesive on the back of whatever you roll through it. And so then I collage elements from old drawings on the new drawings. I feel lucky that I always have- I’m looking over to the side because my drawing walls over there, but I always have something I’m working on.

Cindy: I saw your drawing wall in a video. It’s an intro to the video and I saw that and I was obsessed with that. It was so cool. So you just have a wall on your house that you just draw on?

Mario: Yes, it was a dedicated wall, I have this great push pin board material and I put my inspiration images up and then I have a drawing. I like to live with my work so being able to walk past it, or look at it and think about it. I may not be actively drawing every day or making a mark, but I’m experiencing it and then all of a sudden I go. “Oh, yeah, I know what it needs.”

Cindy: Yes and that’s just kind of letting it speak to you.

Mario: Yes, a little bit.

Cindy: That’s awesome. I was thinking about setting one of those up for my children just like a space for them to draw on the wall, but then I got really scared by that too. It’s like, who knows? But that’s just a wall. You can always fix it. I love that. Okay, so I always ask one final question of all my podcast guests. And that is, which artwork changed your life?

Mario: Oh, I think I love my answer. But I also think it’s so funny because it feels like such a traditional painting but I am obsessed with Christina’s World by Andrew Wyeth. Every time I see it, I get teared up it just… I have always been. I like illustration and that kind of leans illustrative, but I am drawn to that painting. I just always have been from a young age and I also developed a really amazing unit for my second graders around it. If we have time.

When I taught second grade back in the day, it was the first time that Pokemon was popular and they talked about it all the time and I always ask them, “How did it work?” And they told me, you sort of start as like, one kind of creature, but you can increase your powers and your powers give you these abilities to do these other things. So, you know, like Charmander comes becomes Charizard I’m surprised I remember that. Anyways, I was like, how do I tap into this interest? And so I presented the Christina’s World painting, and I said, “Okay kids, what do we think is going on? Like, what’s going on in this?” They were like, “Why is that girl in the field?” And I was like, “I don’t know. What do you think?” And they’re like, “We think she’s stuck or she’s running away or maybe she’s thinking really hard.” All these stories. And so we started like develop this narrative about like, “Well, Christina, can’t get back to the barn or back to the house, how are we going to help her?” And they’re like, “You bet she doesn’t have some kind of superpowers.” And I was like, “Well, that’s what I’m thinking about.” I was like, “Can you figure out how to give Christina Pokémon like powers?”

So they created this like – they make these little Christina’s and they would add wings and a hundred legs and tentacle. They added all these things that helped her get back home. It was my favorite lesson that I ever did, but I’ve just always been obsessed with wondering what’s really going on because you don’t see her face. You just see her back. I’ve read it, I know who she is, and I know the history, but I think maybe it was the time in art that I realized that presenting a question was more interesting to me than presenting an answer.

Cindy: I love that. I’ve always resonated with that painting too. I had a journal when I was in college, and it was always to me, it was this sort of teen, early adulthood like feeling of not belonging, they’re separate and you’re seeing world happen, but you’re like, you don’t feel good enough, but that was always mine, but I think that’s a beautiful painting and an amazing lesson, that’s hilarious.

Mario: Oh, my God, we have so much Yes.

Cindy: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for sharing all of your insight and experience today. I was really inspired by your growth story, the whole direction of NAEA. And thank you so much for all the work that you’re doing for our teacher’s

Mario: Absolutely. Thank you so much for the invitation. I really enjoyed it.

Cindy: Awesome. Thank you.

Art Class Curator and Nasco have come together to create two incredible full art curriculums. World Mosaic for elementary and Perspectives for high school. These are so much more than just lesson plans. Your students will experience powerful social, emotional learning, that’s integrated with language art, social studies, history and more. And they are totally aligned with national arts standards.

World Mosaic will take your elementary students on a journey around the globe as each unit features an artwork from a different part of the world. With art projects that explore various media and activities that will strengthen their critical thinking skills and expand their worldview.

Perspectives is a high school course that explores how art connects us with ourselves and one another, through 10 idea-centered themes using diverse artworks, thought-provoking discussions and engaging activities.

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We are thrilled to be partnered with Nasco education. They’ve been working with districts for years and are huge advocates for educators everywhere. You can learn more about these exciting curricula at artclasscurator.com/nasco.

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.

• Beyond the Surface: Free Email Course
• Not Sorry Work
• Vanessa on Twitter and Instagram
• Praying with Jane Eyre: Reflections on Reading as a Sacred Practice
• Harry Potter and the Sacred Text
• Hot & Bothered

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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.

Hey everybody, it’s Cindy Ingram. I have an exciting guest for you today. It’s very exciting for me because as you may know, if you’re a longtime listener, you know that I love Harry Potter and the Sacred Text podcast. I feel that the co-host of that podcast, Vanessa Zoltan, has a lot of synergies with the work that I do here at Art Class Curator. In my connection with artwork, she views connecting with literature through that same lens of you can use works of art and works of fiction as tools to help you grapple with some of life’s many problems, and how to be a better person, how to do good in the world and things like that. You can use your interactions with text and with art in that way. I find that to be really exciting because that is how I look at art. I don’t look at art as it’s something for me to learn about. I look at art as there’s something I can learn about myself through interacting with this work of art. It’s a subtle difference but to me, it’s a very profound difference in my own personal life. I am happy to introduce you to Vanessa Zoltan. She’ll introduce herself in this episode but I hope that you consider purchasing her book, Praying with Jane Eyre. I have read it and I loved it. If you like what she has to say today, I’m sure you will also love her book, so go check that out. You can get a link to it in the show notes at artclasscurator.com. Here she is. Here is my interview with Vanessa Zoltan.

I’m so excited to welcome Vanessa Zoltan to the podcast. Welcome, Vanessa.

Vanessa Zoltan: Thank you so much for having me.

Cindy Ingram: I am so thrilled to talk to you today. I am having a little bit of a pinch me moment because I’ve just been a fan for a while. I’ve listened to your Harry Potter and the Sacred Text podcast. I’ve read your book. I’m just super thrilled to talk to you but before we get started, can you tell the listeners a little bit more about you, your background, and experiences and what led you to where you are today? 

Vanessa Zoltan: I am an Atheist chaplain. I worked in education for 12 years and decided that was not the right field for me, so at 30 years old, I went to divinity school. I went there as an Atheist, just believing that I wanted to be a hospital or a prison chaplain, which is why I went and I was just in distress about two things. I decided to go in 2009. It took me until 2012 to get there but after the financial crash of 2009, I was like, “Oh, I’m never going to be able to retire. I should probably just have a job that I’ll be happy to do until the day that I die.” Chaplaincy seemed like that because you’re reading, writing, and chatting. Those are my three favorite things to do.

Then the other thing is I just was very concerned about harm reduction. After working in education for 10 to 12 years, a lot of education nonprofits try to do good and end up doing more harm than good. I think that we as a country know how to fix our education system. We just are too racist to do it. I just wanted to make sure that I was doing work that I knew wasn’t going to make the world worse. I felt like sitting with people in distress and listening can’t possibly make the world worse. It might not make the world better but I just didn’t want to make the world worse. Chaplaincy really seemed like the right place to be and the fact that I wasn’t religious seemed beside the point, then I found myself at divinity school and I was like, “Oh, there’s something to this religion thing,” although I grew up Jewish and loving a lot about Judaism. I asked a professor, Stephanie Paulsell, to teach me how to pray but using my favorite book, Jane Eyre, instead of the Torah or the Bible. She’s a Christian minister. We did that. I’ve spent the last eight years praying with secular texts. It’s just been an endless gift in my life. That is what I do.

Cindy Ingram: I love that. Why Jane Eyre?

Vanessa Zoltan: Because it’s the best book in the world. Jane Eyre because it’s my favorite book. That’s really it. I think that being in a sacred relationship with anything is a lifetime commitment. It’s a marriage. You should marry your favorite person or one of your favorite people. You should try to build a sacred relationship if you’re going to do that with something that you love and I love Jane Eyre. Why I love Jane Eyre, I read it at 14, so I just read it at a very impressionable age. One of my favorite quotes and anything ever is in the sitcom Mad About You where Jamie, the wife, says to her husband, “Why do my parents push all my buttons?” He answers, “Oh well, because they installed them.” It might be the same with Jane Eyre, like Jane Eyre installed my buttons, so it can push all of them but I think some of those buttons were there.

I have had depression issues since I was five years old and mental health is at the center of Jane Eyre. I was an angry kid and there’s a lot of anger in Jane Eyre. I loved rom-coms and romance, and there’s a ton of romance in Jane Eyre. She’s a misunderstood kid and I obviously felt deeply misunderstood at 14. As I’ve gotten older, it’s just stayed so special to me I feel because it’s so sloppy. That’s probably too extreme a word. It’s a messy book. I love, love, love Jane Austen and Pride and Prejudice but it’s like she wrote that book with the scalpel. It is so precise. There isn’t a single word in there that she didn’t mean to be in there where Charlotte Brontë wrote the first part of Jane Eyre, almost in a fever. She wrote it in weeks. It’s messy and it contradicts itself. I love all of that. I love its messiness.

Cindy Ingram: Oh, it’s wonderful. I had never read it. I’m not a big classics reader. I did enjoy Jane Eyre when I was in high school. I think a lot of high school girls love some Jane Austen but I never read it until I started listening to your podcast and you would talk about it. I was like, “Oh, I’m going to check this out.” It blew me away how relevant it is to be a woman now and to read Jane Eyre. Even though it was over a hundred years ago, I found so much wisdom in it and so much joy. It was such a delicious book. I really love that.

Vanessa Zoltan: It is delicious. Somebody just tweeted something at me. Essentially, what’s going on in terms of our concerns for girls in Afghanistan and what’s going to happen to their education, that is what Jane was talking about with her education in the 1820s. Literally, 200 years ago and we’re still fighting these fights. So much has changed. I like to think about the fact that  Charlotte Brontë could never have imagined me. She never could have imagined a girl who got to go to divinity school. Let alone a Jewish Atheist who got to go to divinity school. I think it would just blow her mind, yet so much of this world would also be really recognizable to her in terms of its social problems.

Cindy Ingram: Wow, yeah, that’s great. Another thing that you’ve really helped me think about is viewing things as sacred. I think I always knew that my connection to art was really deep but I knew it’s my life’s work, it’s why I’m here but I never really added the word sacred to it. I never thought about that. But now that I have thought about that and when I go into a museum, I instantly feel comfortable, I instantly feel safe, then I have these really powerful experiences that now, I love to think about them in terms of sacred. Can you talk about what that means for something to be sacred?

Vanessa Zoltan: Yeah. There’s obviously a traditional definition of sacred, which is that it’s divinely inspired. Then in divinity school, one of the things that you study is the idea of historical critical theory that even the things that were divinely inspired or perceived as divinely inspired, groups of men—and it was almost always men—got together, rejected it, sewed it together, and made it what it is. Different denominations of Christianity considered different books Apocryphal or part of it. These things are so complicated. I think they are complicated and beautiful in important ways. Reformations make religions better. Vatican II completely rethought Catholicism. I think that there’s a lot of permission within traditional religion to play with it. We believe that the age of miracles ended. That’s it. Religion is set in stone. It can’t be messed with anymore. I don’t think any religion was ever meant to be that or any religion that was, I would argue, is not one that cares about taking care of people and evolving.

What we talk about in our work is that sacredness is an act, not a thing. That if you treat something as sacred, your relationship to it is sacred. If you treat it like a doorstop, it’s a doorstop or if you treat it with profanity, it’s profane. The point of treating texts as sacred is in order to learn to treat your neighbor as sacred. It’s just practicing. It’s Couch to 5K. It’s much easier to treat your favorite book as sacred than it is to treat your neighbor, not even a mean neighbor, like your neighbor who mows too early on Saturdays or during your nap time on Saturday. How are they supposed to know that you want to nap? But that’s hard, then it gets harder when your neighbor has a completely different political point of view or whatever it is. I want to practice loving with easy things so that I can build the muscle in order to do it with harder things.

Cindy Ingram: That’s beautiful. You told the story of how you didn’t want to do anything in your life that was going to make things worse, then you’re doing this treating text as sacred in order to love your neighbor. I think that world view is really unique, poignant, and beautiful. Where did that come from in you?

Vanessa Zoltan: First of all, I just want to say I make the world worse all the time. I drive my car, I’m not just that, not just in terms of my global footprint. I’m not always patient or kind. Far from it. I do not always love my neighbor. It is my goal that I aspire too. One of my podcasts treats Harry Potter as sacred and a lot of trans folks and queer folks were deeply hurt by J. K. Rowling and Harry Potter, which we can talk about why we continued the podcast another time, but it’s a value I have. It is not a value that I live up to. I came by my outlook quite honestly, which is that my four grandparents were all Auschwitz survivors and my parents were both born right after the war in different circumstances, and were refugees.

The Holocaust was famously something where it was allowed to happen because neighbors looked the other way. In The Great Show, a documentary, they go to Warsaw in the 1970s and ask people who used to live in these Jewish houses, where you can still see the outline of the mezuzah that used to be on the door and they’re like, “Oh, I don’t know.” There was just this complicity of silence and this agreement that everybody was going to go along with things. As Timothy Snyder would say, that is tyranny. I believe that dark times are always ahead. We live in dark times. We’ve always lived in dark times. There’s always oppression, Genocide, and now, a pandemic and global warming catastrophes. We just have to constantly be getting ourselves ready to not look the other way when they come for our neighbors. That doesn’t necessarily mean we have to get involved in every single thing but when it’s on your block, you have to do the thing. You have to be brave, stand up, and try. We’re going to have to learn to share water. We all over the last two years had to learn how to quarantine, even when we didn’t want to. The daycare center says you have to and you really don’t because you want your kid in daycare. We’ve all learned about these sacrifices more and more. I just think that is a capacity within us that we have to just keep fighting to grow.

Cindy Ingram: That reminds me in your book, I don’t remember which chapter it was but you talked about, “Who would take me in if there was another Holocaust?” That really has stuck with me since I read that chapter because it made me look around me and just a little bit differently, it made me look at who I talk to a little bit differently. It was like a check, just to see, “Would I?” 

Vanessa Zoltan: No, absolutely. I don’t know that I would. My now co-host of Harry Potter and the Sacred Text, Matt Potts, who is a brilliant theologian, Episcopal priest, and Harvard professor, the first time I went over to his family’s house, he lived about 150 miles away, so I spent the night. I don’t know how it came up, I was talking with him and his wife who’s one of my closest friends, and I said, “Oh yeah, I always think about whether or not people would hide me,” because they are Episcopalian. Matt, I think he’s also half Japanese, so he has this Japanese internment in nuclear war that I think complicated his relationship with that question. It really wore on him.

He kept texting and calling me about it over the next couple of weeks, and I was like, “You don’t understand. You have three small children.” They had a one-year-old at the time, a four-year-old, and a six-year-old. I was like, “I would not expect you guys to hide me.” He was like, “I keep going back and forth on that. It would have been so dangerous.” Then he was like, “But I think it would be because of my kids that I would have to hide you because I would have to show them that’s what you do.” It made me realize that I would not judge people who wouldn’t hide me and made me wonder if I would actually hide someone in that circumstance. It’s so dangerous. Yet I think Matt is right. We don’t even do it for ourselves. We have to do it to prove to ourselves that we would be the kind of people who did it.

Cindy Ingram: Yeah, it’s so complex and juicy. I can see how turning to something, like Jane Eyre to grapple with these questions is a really safe way to do it. Even with the work of art, just a way to process and a way to take that experience outside of just you, and your head and putting it in relationship to something else, it helps you see things a little more clearly.

Vanessa Zoltan: Absolutely. 

Cindy Ingram: There was a quote from your book that I really liked and it said, “I was going to read and read, and read it until things that felt true emerged from it.” You talked about those things as being gifts that you receive from the text. Can you give us an example of a gift that you have received from a text?

Vanessa Zoltan: Yes, so many. From Jane Eyre, it always evolves, it depends on which section of the book I’m reading. But something that I’ve just been chewing on a lot lately is a line that is, “Friends forget those whom fortune forsakes.” Basically, friends don’t like being around people while they’re going through unlucky times. That is true for me. It’s hard to be around people as they’re going through hard times, especially if it’s fortune that’s forsaking them, if they’re being unlucky, if they got a cancer diagnosis, then fired from their job. You start to tell yourself a story that they’re doing something to warrant it. That there’s this Calvinist American Western notion that you find out someone has cancer and you’re like, “Oh, did they smoke? Oh, did they eat right?” You want to blame them for their bad luck. I just want to rebel against every part of that.

Jane has a lot of bad things happen to her. She is morally unimpeachable. She’s a complicated woman but she always tries to do good. I think that the book is making us question that instinct that we all have within ourselves, of forgetting our friends when fortune forsakes them. I really think in the United States, there’s just belief that people who are born poor deserve to be poor like, “Oh, they just didn’t save.” or whatever it is or that privileged people as people would say are born on third base yet think they hit a triple. It’s like, “No, let’s just acknowledge that we are attracted to people who are fortunate.” That is something that is a gift to me that whenever I hear of someone being unlucky, I notice that instinct within myself to blame them for it and be like, “No, no, no. Jane would tell me this is the moment to be a friend.” 

Cindy Ingram: Yeah. That can shake you out. It makes me think one of the chapters that stood out the most to me was the one On Destiny. For those of you, I gave an intro at the beginning but, do you want to describe the book, then I’ll talk about your chapter On Destiny?

Vanessa Zoltan: Yes, absolutely.

Cindy Ingram: But I’d never ever have you described the book, so let’s do that.

Vanessa Zoltan: The book is, at its heart, a collection of sermons using Jane Eyre as the lectionary instead of the Book of Common Prayer or the Torah as the lectionary. I picked quotes that sparkled up at me, that meant something to me and I preached sermons on them. As I say in the opening, I try to share the best news that I can find from each of the selections. I open with a spiritual autobiography because I think it’s really important to just own the specificity of my point of view and that my points of view are in no way universal, then I end the book with treating a couple of other books as sacred, just to show like, “Do this at home. It does not have to be Jane Eyre. There’s nothing special about Jane Eyre, Harry Potter, Great Gatsby, Caddie Woodlawn, Little Women, Toni Morrison’s books, anything, Parable of the Sower, like do it all.”

Cindy Ingram: I love it. One of the chapters that really shook me up was the one On Destiny. Basically, it was just calling me out at every line and I was like, “Oh, I do that. Oh, I do that.” It was just like one after another and I finished reading, I was like, “Oh, okay. I’m going to have to read that again. I’m going to need to spend some time with that.” Because yours is the kind of book that just jumbled up everything upstairs in my head but now, I have to figure out how it fits back together. That’s what I think is so brilliant about art and books in general. That’s what it does for you.

Vanessa Zoltan: Yeah, absolutely.

Cindy Ingram: Now, I don’t remember exactly what I was going to say about that chapter but it was related to what you were saying before.

Vanessa Zoltan: Yes, it is.

Cindy Ingram: This feeling that if you’re successful, that you did something to deserve it, then if you’re not, then you did something. It was a spiritual bypass. That’s what I was trying to think of. I really want to talk about the story of JK Rowling and the trans community because this comes up a lot in my fields. I don’t personally don’t often study the lives of artists because to me, the work of art is the thing that I’m connecting with. I am connected with the artist for sure but their upbringing and what they were thinking while they were making it, and all of that is not something that matters to me in that moment with the artwork. You talked about that in your book as well. Can you speak more to that?

Vanessa Zoltan: Yeah. John Green says this nowadays but I know that literary theorists have been saying this for a long time, that you can separate the art from the artist and you absolutely can. I just think that whether or not you are capable of separating the art from the artist is a very personal thing. I grew up loving Michael Jackson. Thriller came out when I was a kid and it was the first record that I owned. I would listen to it on repeat and it was just such a joy in my life. I cannot listen to him anymore. It’s just not joyful for me anymore. I don’t walk out of a store when it’s on in the background but it brings me no joy. It only brings me pain and makes me think of those victims, and the horrible things that Michael Jackson did. Why would I listen to that anymore?

JK Rowling intentionally shared misinformation about the trans community. I don’t think that she thinks it’s misinformation but she certainly shared uneducated information with every opportunity to be educated and hurt a lot of people. I have a podcast, 90% of the people who I work with are queer and my co-host at the time was a gay man. We gave a lot of thought when JK Rowling published her screed anti-transness as to whether or not we wanted to continue our podcast.  We see our podcast as chaplaincy based. We are preaching every week using Harry Potter as the lectionary instead of the Bible. We see ourselves at this point as serving a community that we’ve been serving for six years around 50,000 people. We asked them, we were like, “What do you want us to do? We are here for you.” Across the board, around 70% of people said that they wanted us to continue and that bore out exactly with our trans, and non-binary community as well.

Harry Potter, people have these images tattooed onto their bodies. They identify like, “I am a Slytherin. I am a Gryffindor.” They talk about what their patronus is. These ideas and images are in them and on them. For several people, for thousands of people, our community was a safe space where they could still love Harry Potter, knowing that we were going to be critical of that point of view. It was a place where they could still love the Harry Potter books , knowing that we wouldn’t financially support JK Rowling, that we are boycotting her on a capitalist level, and that we would do our very best to try to care for them.

Cindy Ingram: I love that. I think that I have the same thing. It’s minus Picasso. I always think of Picasso. His artworks have changed my life. I have made life decisions in front of them that I wouldn’t have made had I not had that experience but then I see more about who he was and I’m like, “Oh no, this is terrible.” But I think you’re right, it’s a line that you have to draw for yourself.

Vanessa Zoltan: There are definitely political ways to boycott and not financially support people who are bad. But I just think like Augustine would say that, is it getting you better at loving, the Bible would say, “You know it by its fruits.” I think we just have to experiment with these things and also trust that we’ll ebb and flow with them. There will be moments where we’re like, “I just can’t with that right now.” Then another moment where it’s going to call you and that’s fine.

Cindy Ingram: That’s good. Do you find that happening, when you’re in your work with Jane Eyre, do you see the problematic, especially I would imagine women’s stuff and how they treat children, how does that play out in your work with that?

Vanessa Zoltan: It’s a really weird book and it’s very problematic in a lot of ways. I’m re-reading the book right now. I’m doing a podcast called Hot & Bothered where this season is called On Eyre and we are doing nothing but focusing on Jane Eyre. It’s just super fun to have all this time and resources associated with rereading Jane Eyre. I am working on the podcast with a journalist, an investigative journalist, and an exceptional one at that, Lauren Sandler. We just have access to all these incredible professors to ask questions of. One of the things that Charlotte Brontë absolutely, without a doubt, believed in with her whole heart as did most people in the Victorian era was in physiognomy, which is the reading of people’s faces, which was a “science” that is entirely based on racism. It was created in order to oppress people of color. It comes to the conclusion that typically white features are more civilized and intelligent than typical Chinese features, Indian features, and African features. But Jane in Rochester constantly is using this language with each other, “Oh, I can see on your brow, you’re irate. I can see in your chin that you’re stubborn.” They deeply believe in this science.

Cindy Ingram: In air quotes, for the listeners.

Vanessa Zoltan: Yes, huge air quotes. We as a culture believed in this. It led directly to eugenics and we were sterilizing people in the United States through the 1950s but it’s so explicit in Jane Eyre. It calls into question a lot of racism, specifically around Bertha Mason Rochester, whether or not that character is actually mad or whether it’s possible that she’s half black, given that she’s from Jamaica. There’s a lot of money that’s made in this world on the backs of slavery. Colonialism is at the heart of it. You have a “good guy” who I find insufferable Sinjin at the end, leaving on a missionary trip. There’s so much really problematic stuff in the book. I think it’s important to grapple with those things, and what better place to grapple with it than in a 200 year old book or a 180 year old book where you can really look at it through a clear lens and condemn it, and argue with it. I just think it’s a wonderful place to be thinking about exactly these issues.

Cindy Ingram: I think that must feel freeing. To read the Bible as sacred, I don’t think you have as much freedom to see its flaws, that you’re talking about Jane Eyre and see the contradictions, and really get into those and grapple with them. That makes it tempting to pick something like that and see what happens.

Vanessa Zoltan: It’s why Matt Potts, this man does not have the time to co-host Harry Potter and the Sacred Text with me. He is the head priest at Harvard. He is a tenured professor there. He’s a father of three. He treats Harry Potter as sacred with me every week because he wants the same thing for Christianity. He’s like, “We should be asking exactly these questions, being creative.”

When we read the books we’re like, “Wow they’re really fat phobic.” “Wow, they’re really bad on race.” This is not critical enough of House-Elves and SPEW is actually really a critique of white lady savior complex but not intentional critique. Matt thinks about as how the New Testament should be read. He treats Harry Potter sacred because he wants to edge religion back toward that kind of conversation around it.

Cindy Ingram: Yeah. Instead of it being that the book gives you the knowledge and you take it and you use it but that you work with it to make yourself better, make everything around you better. I have been, since I finished your book, trying to figure out, “What is my sacred text?” I’ve been trying to figure it out. I think my sacred texts are artworks. That already is a thing. But I’ve started to figure it out. How do I find your own Jane Eyre? Do you have any advice for others who are trying to figure this out?

Vanessa Zoltan: Yes. What is something that you love and that you want to relook at a lot or read a lot again and again and again? I think it just has to be about your capacity to stay in relationship with it. The rule is that it has to be complicated and generative that you have to be able to be inspired to, as you were saying before we hit record, write a poem about it or talk to a friend about it or make other art about it. But I just don’t think humans really tend to love things that aren’t generative, not love them that much. I think that it should be trying to get you closer and closer to loving your neighbor. I would argue that hateful things should not be treated as sacred but I also really don’t think that they can be. But it’s all about “Is this going to make me better at loving and can I have a sustained relationship with it?” Will that relationship be able to survive the moments like you were talking about where you’re like, “God, Picasso was an abusive husband”? Is your love for it going to be able to sustain those betrayals? Because the betrayals are coming. These texts are created by humans and the betrayals are coming for you.

Cindy Ingram: Once we’ve picked our text, how do you recommend working with it? I know you have in the book a bunch of strategies and you use those on the podcast too, but can you help us with that?

Vanessa Zoltan: Yeah. I have a toolkit on sacred reading in the back of my book, and you can get it from your local library and xerox the pages, everyone. It breaks down into three steps, which is faith, rigor, and community. Faith is just the belief that the more time you spend with the thing, the more gifts it will give you. It is vaguely the faith that we all have in our children and our friends. Even if we don’t necessarily know why we’ve reached out to a friend, even if we’re not necessarily going to have fun, we just believe that spending time with them is a good thing. That is the kind of faith that I think you have to have in your text. The more time I spend with it, the better. You might have an unpleasant time with your friend but it was still a good thing just because being in its company is good.

Rigor can be manifested in any number of ways, again, as you would with a friend. It could be a monthly phone call, it can be that you text every day. I would say the same with the sacred relationship and just like a friendship, you will be closer to the text or the friend the more time you spend with it. You can have quite a rigorous relationship but I would just say make it clear, articulate it clearly to yourself what it is. Mary Gordon, one of my favorite writers, reads Proust for five minutes every day, that is her sacred text. I encourage people to do whatever it is that works for them. I know that a lot of listeners to Harry Potter and the sacred text have weekly calls with friends where they talk about that week’s chapter, and sometimes it’s really helpful if it’s someone who you’re not that close to but shares a love of the text with you because you can build a new relationship, but whatever it is, just have a routine with it. That is the thing that I think the back of my book is most helpful with is because I outlined some things that you can do during your time of these sacred reading practices that date back to the middle ages that are like four steps and really simple to do.

Then the third component, I started talking about it in the second, but is community. It’s better if you’re doing it with a buddy, they’re going to push you to think differently than your initial thoughts. Gym buddies are always better like you’re more likely to exercise if you’re meeting someone at the gym, or nowadays outside for a socially distant run. Community is important for all the reasons that we know. Community also ups the difficulty level. Community makes everything, everything, everything better but everything, everything, everything harder. Your community is going to make it harder for you but it’s just going to make it better. I’d say community is the one optional one. Some people really want this to be a solitary practice. It’s “I’m busy all day with a million people. I’m in Zoom all day. I want this to be my solitary practice.” I think that that’s perfectly fine. I think that that’s perfectly valid more than fine. But I do think a partner can often be helpful.

Cindy Ingram: Yeah. It makes me think, I work with teachers to introduce works of art in their classroom and I’ve known this to be true as a teacher, that I could take the same artwork and show it eight times during a day at every class that I’ve had, eight is a lot, but I’ve done seven in a day once so I guess it’s not, and every time there been kids who have said something different than the class before. There’s always something I’ve never heard before. There’s always something and so I think having a community just sounds like a really lovely way to get deeper.

Vanessa Zoltan: Jews have been reading the Torah since the Dead Sea Scrolls, whatever it is, 2500 years, and they end it and they open it again and like that’s it. The only thing that changes is who’s reading it. The book stays exactly the same. You read it at the same time of the day, at the same time of the year, on the same Lunar Calendar. The only thing that makes it interesting year to year is that the people change. We’re currently in the time of year where you flip over the Torah and start again and you scroll back the scroll and it’s just my favorite. I just love that you end it and you just start it right over.

Cindy Ingram: It makes me think too, when I have really powerful experiences with a work of art, well Hamilton is always my example. I’ve seen Hamilton three times in the theaters. Every time, I got something totally different from it. One time, there was a school shooting that had just happened. It was just devastating. It was an hour away and the school shooting happened. Then one time, I was in a really happy place and all the celebratory songs really got me. You changed too, so even if you aren’t doing it with a community in that time that you’ve read it and since you’ve read it, something that will have happened in your life is going to change how you read it.

Vanessa Zoltan: Oh, absolutely. We had a commitment, we started the Harry Potter and the Sacred Text podcast in May of 2016 in Obama’s America and we were just so confident that Hillary Clinton was going to win. We were like, “We don’t want this to be a political podcast, we want this to really be an across the isle podcast.” Casper, my co-host and I were very liberal. Ariana, our producer, is also very liberal but we were like, “Harry Potter can just stand on its own,” and then Donald Trump got elected we were like, “Nope, I have a microphone and a recorder. I have to be on the record that I stand against certain things,” and the podcast went from being apolitical to being super political. Now we’re rereading it in the time of the Coronavirus and that is a totally different way to read a book about whether or not it’s safe to send your kid to a school because an evil wizard is on the loose. The world changes, absolutely, and it changes the way we read.

Cindy Ingram: I do remember your episode after the election, that was powerful. Did you write something about Cedric Diggory?

Vanessa Zoltan: Yes, we did.

Cindy Ingram: I still remember it. It was a long time ago, but I think that’s what we needed. You gave that to a lot of people. I’m excited that I hope everyone here listening goes out and picks a sacred text or even does this with artworks and grabs that last chapter of your book, I think they should read the whole book, but that last chapter.

Vanessa Zoltan: Obviously, of course. They should all buy 10 copies and give them to all of their friends.

Cindy Ingram: Yeah. I really loved it. Before we wrap up, can you tell listeners how to connect with you online? We will, of course, link to your book and everything in the show notes, but for those of you that don’t go to the show notes, how can they find you?

Vanessa Zoltan: I’m on Twitter and Instagram at @vanessamzoltan. But really, you can just email me at vanessa@notsorryproductions.com. You can go to our website notsorryworks.com. That’s where all of our podcasts are hosted and we have literary pilgrimages that we run and all sorts of really fun virtual classes. I’m a long way from prison chaplaincy. I’m doing Harry Potter chaplaincy but we have a really beautiful community of people who you can connect with there.

Cindy Ingram: Wonderful. Me and my friend, Madalyn, who podcast listeners will know who she is, but we were on the verge of signing up for your next literary pilgrimage one in January but we were like, “Oh,” we didn’t know about COVID.

Vanessa Zoltan: I know.

Cindy Ingram: You will see us at some point because we’ve been watching it for a long time. Then we’re like, “What if we do art pilgrimages?” We have an idea as well. So, cool.

Vanessa Zoltan: Yay!

Cindy Ingram: Last question, and this is a question I ask all my guests and I think I know your answer, but maybe you have a different answer that might surprise me, which is which artwork changed your life?

Vanessa Zoltan: Ooh. Besides Jane Eyre, oh my god. I’m not going to undermine my own response. Grey’s Anatomy is one of my all-time favorite pieces of art. I love it so much. I have shed more tears over Grey’s Anatomy than I think I have over my own family and friends. Grey’s and I have been together for 20 years now. It’s gotten me through all of my 20s and 30s. It deals, obviously, with mortality, race, romantic love, friendship, and betrayal and it’s just absolutely incredible. There are seasons that are ridiculous and silly but it’s just always worth coming back.

Cindy Ingram: Excited to catch up. I love that answer because I think a lot of people can take these sorts of questions really seriously like it has to be something super obscure and profound. Honestly, that’s not what art is, art is who is for whoever needs it at the time. I’m a big Survivor fan. I always felt so guilty about it for a long time. But now I’m just like, “I love Survivor. It brings me such joy when I watch it.”

Vanessa Zoltan: Absolutely.

Cindy Ingram: I love that your answer was Grey’s Anatomy. I used to watch Grey’s. I am a delicate flower and can’t handle tension so I used to have to read the plot and then watch it because I needed to know that everything turned out okay.

Vanessa Zoltan: It doesn’t always on Grey’s.

Cindy Ingram: No, it doesn’t.

Vanessa Zoltan: I read romance novels a lot like one a week and that is my space where everything always turns out okay. I can hold the capacity for Grey’s to not end up okay but only because I have my safe space.

Cindy Ingram: Oh, I love that. I think you could do this exact same thing instead of praying with Jane Eyre, you pray with Grey’s Anatomy.

Vanessa Zoltan: Oh, 100%. I get teased with how many life lessons I pull from Grey’s Anatomy, not to mention that I essentially have a medical degree because I’ve watched 20 seasons of Grey’s Anatomy. It’s actually 17 seasons but my partner is a chemist and he’ll explain things to me and I’ll be like, “I know. I saw that episode of Grey’s. Please.” It’s very useful.

Cindy Ingram: I feel the same way about Dr. House. I’ve seen all of those multiple times. I’ve seen everything.

Vanessa Zoltan: I’m basically an MD and we’re both MDs, Cindy. It’s not funny actually, in a post-Trump era, credentials matter. Dr. Fauci is a doctor, I’m not. Get your vaccines everyone.

Cindy Ingram: As we were talking about that, I had that exact same thought, I was like, “Oh, no. This is not right.”

Vanessa Zoltan: No, no, no.

Cindy Ingram: It’s not a good joke.

Vanessa Zoltan: It was a good joke five years ago, not anymore.

Cindy Ingram: Yeah. We’ve seen the bad end of that joke.

Vanessa Zoltan: Yeah.

Cindy Ingram: Okay. Well, thank you so very much for talking with me today.

Vanessa Zoltan: Thank you. What a delight.

Cindy Ingram: All right. Thanks again to Vanessa Zoltan for that insightful interview. It was such a pleasure for me to speak with her because our work just really does align in so many different ways. I hope this inspired you, not only to go find your own sacred text, artwork, show, or anything but to pick up her book and check it out. I just want to remind you that you have the ability to connect with art in all sorts of different ways. It’s not just about what you show your students, what you decide to put in your classroom, and what you decide to teach, but that art is here for you and it can help you in your own life. I would love to hear stories of your art connection. You can send me an email. If you go to artclasscurator.com/podcast, at the bottom of that page, there’s a form that you can fill out to share your art story. You can also send us a voicemail about your art story and you can do that by calling 202-996-7972. You can also send us a voice memo from your phone via email to support@artclasscurator.com and share some of these connections that you’re having with art. We would love to share them on the podcast. If you’re interested in having an art conversation with me on the podcast about a work of art that’s meaningful to you, you can also reach out to support@artclasscurator.com and maybe we can chat about it. All right, have a wonderful rest of your day and I will see you again next week.

What’s keeping you from showing more artwork to your students? Do you get stuck trying to choose a work of art or do you fear your students will ask a question that you don’t know the answer to? Have you tried to start a classroom art discussion but didn’t know what to say or how to get your students talking? Are you worried you’re going to spend a ton of time researching and planning a lesson that none of your students are interested in? That’s why we created Beyond the Surface, a free professional development email series all about how to teach works of art through memorable activities and thoughtful classroom discussions. With Beyond the Surface, you’ll discover how to choose artworks your students will connect with and learn exactly what to say and do to spark engagement and create a lasting impact. Plus, you’ll get everything you need to curate these powerful learning experiences without spending all of your time planning. Sign up to receive this free professional development email course at artclasscurator.com/surface.

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.

• National Art Education Association
• Nasco Educate
• Black Lives Matter An Open Letter to Art Educators on Constructing an Anti-Racist Agenda

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

Cindy: 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 delight 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.

Cindy Ingram: Hey everybody, it’s Cindy Ingram and I am so excited to welcome you to the Art Class Curator podcast. And I have a really awesome guest for you today. Today, we have the executive director of the National Art Education Association in NAEA, Mario Rossero, and he came onto NAEA in January of 2020 right before the pandemic, right before just the world exploded. But what I am so excited to share with you is his, you know, how he came to this role. His story is really exciting and encouraging and inspiring, but also to share with you the direction of NAEA and the priority is that it has right now. I really loved this conversation. I feel like I could have talked him into him for another three or four hours about all of the issues facing our field right now. So I hope you really enjoyed this conversation as much as I did. So, without further ado, welcome to the podcast, Mario Rossero.

Cindy: All right. I’m so excited to welcome Mario Rossero to the podcast. Welcome, Mario.

Mario Rossero: Hi, Cindy, thanks so much for the invite and for having me.

Cindy: So, I am so thrilled to talk to you because you are such an influential and important role in NAEA at this moment. And this has been a very historic time for all of us in the last couple of years, especially with your roles. I’m really excited to dive in and talk to you about that. But before we do, can you tell us a little bit more about you and your background and experiences and what led you to where you are today?

Mario: Sure, and I’ll do my best to keep this concise. I’ll hit the high points. But originally, I am from Southwestern Pennsylvania about 45 minutes, Southwest of Pittsburgh. And I grew up on my mom’s families’ farmland. So we weren’t farmers, but we grew up in a very, very, very rural environment and I attribute that partially to how I found my love and passion for art-making because that was sort of the only thing that I had available to me, where my sketchbooks or materials- like I made lots of puppets and things when I was a kid, so I was constantly making things from as early as I can remember.

And then, as I became more into my teenage years, I definitely fell in love with drawing. And I was obsessed with drawing and comic books and that passion just stayed with me and I wasn’t sure that I was going to go into art education, even though in college, or like planned so that I could. And I made my schedule. I didn’t have to make that decision till probably my junior year if I was going to pull the trigger and do student teaching and all that. It really wasn’t until my senior year when I was student teaching that I realized that I had just as much passion for education as I did for art and seeing those two things married together was- I mean, part of the greatest discovery of my life because it’s just been my path since that point in time.

I taught elementary visual art, in a district just outside of Pittsburgh, Shaler Area, school district. I taught elementary and middle school there. I was there for about 7-8 years before I noticed that I had some burgeoning leadership abilities and qualities. But so often, as in the case in an education setting, the art teacher might not be the first place that folks are looking to for that leadership. But it was coming out of the- it’s sort of like, large scale collaborations with the Andy Warhol Museum and the Mattress Factory Museum and bringing the community together to create these installations. And I was like, “Oh there’s something.”

I understand something about bringing people together and focusing them for the common good. So then I started looking to grad schools. And I thought that I was going to do an MFA and it just- it wasn’t the right… Sometimes my work might be a little bit like social practice. Like the way that I work with people, even though I make tangible two-dimensional drawings and paintings as well. But that wasn’t really something that was formulated yet in the public discourse or that kind of practice.

I wasn’t having luck finding the right program and I swear, this is a true story. My first NAEA convention was in New York City and my colleague, Alice, and I submitted a project we are working on this identity project that our fourth graders had done. At the end of that session, we walked to the back of the room and she greets her grad school professor from Bank Street College, and I talked to her colleague. I’m just being friendly and respectful to her colleague and she suddenly starts asking me, “Who are you? What’s your work? What are you interested in?” And I’m telling her, “I’m really looking for a grad school, I can’t find the right next step.” And she reaches into her bag and pulls out a flyer for this program that was supervision and administration in the visual arts.

It was built around a teacher schedule. So, you go in the summer to Bank Street and some of the Upper West Side school for education and then you do the first half of the week there, and the second half of the week, Parsons School of Design in the studio. So it was ideally built for our educator leadership and you got your principal license from it.

Cindy: I didn’t even know that sort of program existed. That’s awesome.

Mario: It was really that rare unicorn but it was the thing that validated some of my instincts around leadership and collaboration, but it also gave me tools to have difficult conversations. Think about a supervisory voice, right? What also keep the artistic creative part in there by the time I’m finished. I’m back in Pittsburgh and I thought, “Okay, I’m ready for a bigger challenge.” And my good friend from grad school is in Chicago and I told my district who was so lovely and flexible. I said, “Thank you so much for the opportunities, I’ve had such a great experience here, but it’s time for me to grow and spread my wings. And I’m going to head to Chicago.” They’re like, “Best of luck.”

I didn’t have a job yet. So I drove- everything was in my hatchback. I drove the eight hours. And Cindy, when I tell you that I went to the convention center for the Chicago Public Schools job fair, there were 700 tables. We had over 400 elementary and the rest were high schools. And they had two different giant convention rooms and they just had tables for every school. And then these little poles with velcro signs for the opening. Some said, ‘Visual Arts’, some said, ‘Fine Arts’, some said, ‘Art.’ I was in my blazer and tie and had my portfolio when I just stood in line and interviewed.

I found this great school called, ‘Harold Washington Elementary’ that was on the south side. Dr. Louis had a real passion for art, the entire school, every flow. It was three floors and was filled with murals. And Harold Washington was a former mayor of Chicago, and they had his Cadillac in the lobby, and a little museum dedicated to him. The school had not had a trained certified art educator before. They had been working with the community artists a little bit, but they just hadn’t had someone who had that background and training.

Even though I had taught for eight years prior, it was a brand new community to me. I was a brand-new individual to the school that I was walking into. And so, what I had to learn was more about how to recognize- I mean, it’s like I have the terminology now, but I probably didn’t have it then. But recognize my whiteness and my privilege and understand that I’m walking into a hundred percent African-American community.

I would like to think that both my kids and I, every day we’re committed to working on that relationship. I showed up every day and then they were like, “You’re showing up every day.” This isn’t always easy and we just kept building on it. I think they thought I was a little crazy because I would be talking about art elements and principles. They were just like, “What are you talking about?” It was like, “Oh, my gosh, art has all these components.” And so we really started to unpack that.

I remember I had 45 seventh graders in a room that had 35 chairs. I have such a soft spot for that. It was a really tremendous experience. But while I was there, I guess it was the end of that first year. I got called to the principal’s office and I thought, “Well, I never get in trouble, I don’t know what this is about.” So I get called to the principal’s office and somebody from the central office is visiting.

Now my good colleague and friend, Carol Ann, she manages The Fine Arts Magnet Cluster program. So it’s like neighborhood schools that have an arts program. She was working to build this program and spread it across the city and she’s telling me the design, if there’s lead arts teachers that have professional development around the arts, and the arts or the core of the community and of the building.

It’s just going on and on and I said, “I’m sorry, no disrespect. I have to interrupt you.” And she’s kind of set back and I said, “If we were one of these schools- I’m the only art teacher here, I would know if we were one of these schools. I think you need my help.” And she kind of laughed and she’s like, “Oh, really?” And sometimes, you know you’re at the right moment, and I said, “I just finished this program. I have really been building my leadership skills. I love my school and I’m really falling in love with Chicago, and I really want to make a difference.” And she’s like, “Okay, great. Nice to meet you.”

And then she leaves, then I go back to class and I finished the year. And that summer, I got a voicemail. The answering machine that was like at your house that you had to call in, you put it at home and she had left a message that they had got this federal grant and she was hiring for a role to coordinate that program at central office.

I was really lucky to go to central office and then work across 60 elementary schools that had arts focus that was across all art forms. It was a program where it was building curriculum community and leadership through the arts. And so we were offering training to art teachers. There were 120 of them across the entire city, which is two big city. Probably six to eight hours a month for at least three years for that grant.

And we started to saw a real change in practice because suddenly they were stepping into these teacher leader roles and they were building the arts into the school improvement plan. And they were assessing the gaps and opportunities at their school in providing professional development and partnerships through the arts.

And through that work suddenly, the principal was like leaning on them and asking them, they part of planning conversations a little bit more and the community was a little bit more invested. I’ll fast forward a little bit but basically, that moment of meeting Carol Ann was just serendipitous. I feel so lucky and I had her mentorship.

I moved my way up through the system over in Chicago about 12 years. I’m one of those rare arts people that have gone deep in the arts to broaden over multiple curricular areas. I was able to manage. I was the director at Magnet schools and programs. So we had a world language, and technology, and a math and science and all these clusters of programs across the city. So it’s interesting to take the art lessons to a broader scale.

And then I would go back and I would go deeper in the arts. When I drove from Pittsburgh and Chicago, I really wanted to lead the arts for the city of Chicago, but I didn’t know what the path would be to get there. When I was kind of feeling that itch, that leadership itch again. Chicago had gone through a big change of superintendent, etcetera and Pittsburgh Public Schools had just finished an arts plan and they were interviewing for a director of the arts. And I thought, “You know, there are some things I want to learn about this role that I might need before I can move up in Chicago.” Like I just… I think I need to go deeper.

And so I was able to spend this year in Pittsburgh where they had done the research, they had created a plan. They had a clear direction and I was able to implement a lot of that work. They probably had what? 60-70 schools in the district at the time. So still, it’s fairly large in an urban setting but a different size and type in terms of scope from Chicago. And so after that year, Chicago kept knocking at my door and said, “Come back, come back.” I went back and became the director of arts to the district which is like what I was really trying to do and I was able to take all those lessons and we had that rare moment where we had a superintendent president of the school board and a mayor, Rahm Emanuel, all of whom were arts supportive simultaneously and we had the cultural community. Lending people like or Rene Fleming to champion the arts.

We had a fire that was lit under us because the Wallace Foundation had done a report years prior. That said, “The arts and arts education in these various cities look like this in Chicago. It looks a little bit uncoordinated and folks just aren’t collaborating and working together.” So we had this energy to work together and show… At Chicago, we’re going to show everybody that we can do this. And so we spent about three months talking to a few thousand community members, parents, teachers, students, art partners and artists about what they wanted from the district for arts education, and we created the first-ever strategic plan for the arts. And we were able to look at graduation requirements, and minutes of instruction. And a number of art forms offered, budgets for the arts, and teacher schedules.

And essentially what we found was that most principles, these decision-makers didn’t have a clear set of goals for what they should be striving towards for the arts and what that looked like. So we basically articulated what the goals were, based on the sort of size of your population. This is what the investment in the arts should look like and we created an accountability system and created the art scorecard that was put on each school scorecard, have an Arts indicator.

And that was the game-changer. We added accountability. I am forever grateful- there’s one principal that suggested that idea and when we heard it and then we have the ability to make it happen. We worked really hard not to make it punitive but just make it accurate to say, “school, A.” You’re a sort of level for because of these great Investments. But this other school, just because you have a lower score, doesn’t mean that we’re saving you. What we’re going to do is actually use this as a gap analysis and then focus the funding community to help you address your needs.

So if you can only provide one art form, what can we do about that? If you’re struggling for professional development or you’re struggling for community engagement? Like how do we help bolster that? And it just changed the whole conversation. So when I tell you, I’m the arts nerd that’s a big fan of strategy. I think those are the two things that when you pair them together, it changes the game.

Cindy: I love that story that you talked about you’re discovering your love of teaching or level of leadership and I can see a lot of my own journey paralleled into that. It’s fun to listen to and that’s a really exciting project. Is there reports online I can read? Because I just want to

Mario: We partnered with my good colleagues. Ingenuity was created as an external partner to the district to be side-by-side. They have done all the data capture analysis so you can look up those reports and see the trend. And folks from the beginning thought, “Well, we all know who’s going to get the high score is going to be, these schools in these neighborhoods.” And some of that was absolutely true. What was also true was that schools across the entire city had historic and well-protected arts investments.

So you saw these great tales of arts champions in every corner, in every neighborhood. That was really special because it was a motivator for schools in nearby communities to think about how they might do that too. It wasn’t just the north side, I wasn’t just this particular neighborhood. It was happening in the south side and the west side, it was happening all over.

And folks are also saying, “Hey, we need help.” And finally, we had a well-articulated path forward. Where you work left to your own devices, we are actually providing options in a roadmap. I guess from there, I did that I went to all the subs- I was the Chief of Core Curriculum. I oversaw all the subject areas in the teaching and learning team before I left Chicago. I wanted to try something bigger and some national work. I was researching what national options and which partners I might chat with about growing this work.

I discover that the Kennedy Center was hiring for a new vice president for education and threw my hat in and was really thrilled to be there. So I moved from Chicago to DC and that was a wonderful experience to learn how to work at a national scale when you’re also a quasi- federal institution that is also a presidential memorial. And seeing a portfolio that’s in every state. It was fun to work in an institution that has that kind of reputation and to see the power it had on communities. They have a great program called,” Any Given Child” that goes into communities and does a community analysis of the arts and then helps them create strategy, which is very similar to the work that was one Chicago.

It’s nice to see that this is happening in cities all over. I was there for five years and I had that itch again, and I was like, it would be nice to be the lead person. It will be nice to be that ED role, that CEO role. I started looking around, and I was like, “Oh, NAEA is looking for their next leader.” And I thought it’s played such a critical role in my life. And I’m so grateful, but I also know art educators inside and out. I had worked at some museums early, I worked at the Andy Warhol Museum early in my career. I had that, I was in the classroom. I was in lots of different settings. I’ve taught at the college level, I worked in some central office, I understand a lot of these roles. These are my people, let’s see how this goes and the interview process was really wonderful.

I really mean this, I was so impressed with the board and the staff. This is a group of folks that are really committed and passionate about this work. What a space to walk into, right? And we’re going to be 75 years old in 22. And this is a well-run and well-cared institution that many folks have embraced for a lifelong relationship.

And the other thing is that NAEA had been really- I thought, was working, to be honest about equity, diversity, and inclusion work in a way, that I think many other institutions that baptize two or three years ago. They started that work. Three years ago I started that work and that was a little bit ahead of the curve. We’re having just honest dialogue to say, “Where are we lacking and how do we create the most inclusive association?” And that particularly attracted me because that’s been one of my passions, throughout my career.

Cindy: Wow. I feel like I can have 6,000 follow-up questions about every single part of that story.

Mario: Okay, rapid fire.

Cindy: I don’t want to go too much into that because that was a cool story and I love just everything that you’ve been a part of. I know you’ve been in all of these different roles and you’ve seen it from the teachers perspective, from the administrator perspective, from the nonprofit perspective, from… I don’t know, I guess they’re considered nonprofit, Kennedy Center. So, what do you feel is the biggest challenge for our field right now?

Mario: Well, there are definitely some competing answers here. But I would say, the thing that I confront the most is the challenge around the value proposition. And what that value proposition looks like to decision, makers. I always talk about this, the inherited narrative of arts education. When I meet somebody new at a function, “What do you do?” “I work in arts education.” Oh, my gosh. I’m so sorry. It’s the first thing to go.

 

We had this old narrative where we like… This is a little bit of the general public. I think it’s holding on to some of these old tropes around the arts and arts education. And so, what I always ask people, I like put this challenge out to the community to say when someone says that to you, you have to counter that with an arts positive story. So I say, “You know, the arts are- it’s a really uneven landscape across the country especially in schools, but let me tell you about this community that has doubled down and reinvested in the arts and it has really seen these kinds of outcomes.” Those are the stories that we need to lead with. Decision-makers are really swayed by these kinds of narratives. Whether you’re looking at the local principal, the superintendent, the state or regional folks, let alone get to the national. One of those biggest challenges is that narrative is still hanging on.

Even if we look at… We’re looking at career paths into arts education and we’re realizing that there’s not really a pathway set up for our younger learners through middle and high school to consider art education. I can’t imagine a parent wanting to turn their child away from a rich life that Mary’s creativity with a job that’s with it, in a community of folks where you can really make a difference like it’s just such a beautiful pairing. I feel so fortunate, I’m sure you do too, it’s served us so well. It’s actually a great career path. So I think from a 10,000 foot view that’s one of the biggest challenge. We can talk about funding and we can talk about policy and other data but I think that narrative around the value, that’s what I’m always trying to change.

Cindy: I’m glad you brought this up because this is something in the back of my head all the time. I hear that all the arts are the first thing to go thing. And always in the back of my head, I’m like, “Is it?” And I always want to look up the data because I don’t have any proof of that in my world. I don’t see that being true.

Mario: Like I said, I looked at this data both within communities. I mean, many, many cities and communities, but also like rural-urban suburban areas all over the country. Like for example, one of the great things that Kennedy Center would give a National School Board Association award to art support of school board. And there was a rubric that was very much like what I described for Chicago. What are these investments across the board? And so you’re seeing all these towns across the country of small and large size that had made these investments.

I want to make sure I respect our colleagues that are struggling, but there are many places that the arts are thriving, and they have a long-term investment. I think that it’s not Pollyanna-ish, it’s being positive around those stories, it can yield more other positive decisions and actions. The only model is that we think it’s the first to go, then that kind of seeps into the public consciousness a little bit. We can get rid of that.

Cindy: Yes, because I worked in Dallas ISD. And it was probably around the same time as your Wallace Foundation thing, but we had gone to Wallace Foundation grant and they paid for all the arts and music teachers and all those schools and all the elementary schools. And so there were teachers at the time that were getting laid off and furloughed. I forgot why. But as an art teacher, I was like, “Well, my job is safe, my job is covered.” Arts and music teachers knew we were safe. And so I guess maybe I’m coming from that paradigm too. But our district was putting resources and energy and attention into the arts at that time.

Mario: I always forget to tell this particular story about in Chicago, once we had our art strategy and because we spent a lot of time welcoming decision-makers, and leaders into the process that they felt like they had ownership, and they did. This is Mayor Emanuel calls the district and says, “I have 11 million dollars and a TIF money, tax increment financing that I’d like to dedicate to the arts.” He also had a plan for wellness. He’s like, “So, here’s 11 million dollars for arts and PE and Mario and Annie should make a plan for how you’re going to spend that.”

I mean, never in my life is that ever going to have. That’s never gonna happen. I know it’s not gonna happen for everybody but we really had a thorough strategy. Then we said, “How do we use this investment where it’s most needed?” And we needed teachers. And so we created- we could invest those dollars more so in the first year, but then the dollars got smaller over future years so that the school could pick up that commitment cause we’re like, “How do we stretch these out?” And even though you want those dollars to stay forever, isn’t it valuable for those students that maybe never had that arts instruction before to get it? And then you’re starting to whet the appetites of the families and of the principals, and the rest of the community and hopefully, you see some changes in decisions.

Cindy: How do you think as a teacher? I think most of our listeners are probably in the classroom teaching, you mentioned, anytime someone comes at you, with sort of the negative… Or so, the first to cut, you come back with the positive, what are some of the things you think that teachers could do to further show that value proposition?

Mario: A hundred percent. So, A: Ensure that the arts are in your school improvement plan. Every school should have to do that annually, make sure the arts are one of the priorities- so accountability. Number one is, find the path to make your school accountable for the arts. So, school improvement plan is a great way to start. School scorecard is another great place that’s going to take a little bit more than just one person to get that done. But yet to start all the conversations early and often so that whenever you need to make those things happen, you’ve already kind of built up some support. So I’d say, accountability and school improvement plan is a good starting point.

I had that basement art room with the back door to the parking lot and I could close the door and make great art with my elementary kit. I remember that, like, we made great art. We were in our own little world like those days are over. The days where I can just close the door and ignore everybody outside of my art room or over. I really encourage our arts educators to step out of their classrooms and be on the school leadership team, or grade level planning team, or work closely with the school counselor.

When you’re planning any kind of arts event, form a parent advisory board or committee or community. It’s about building this coalition of folks that believe in the art so that you can tap into them. It’s like reach beyond your four walls. I know how great it is to be in the studio and just focus on the art but we also have to step outside. And so, I think my next thing would be around teacher leadership. And like I said, early in my story when I first moved in the central office, we spent three years dedicating time to teacher leadership. We saw results.

That is a single biggest thing that I’ve seen results in a variety of settings is really investing that professional development in art educators as leaders because we are unique problem solvers that no one else can make a dime, it feels like $100 right here. It’s like we’re always resource-constrained, material constrained, and space constrained but we’re still delivering high-quality programs. If you put that into a leadership setting and suddenly, you’re the problem solver of the group. You’re coming up with solutions to things that no one thought of.

Cindy: Yes, I love that. I’ve been in that. My first job, I was inaffordable I did not see anyone, I saw them as they waved their glass to me, but that was it and it’s such a challenge. Do you have any advice for how resources or programs that if someone is interested in beefing up their leadership abilities, is there a good resource that we can send teachers to?

Mario: That is a really excellent question. I’m trying not to do too much self-promotion. But art school for art leaders at NAEA is a really beautiful model and I think talking to any of those alumni would be a great first step for someone who’s thinking about dipping their toes into those leadership roles. The folks that I met from Sal are all considering. I’m ready for the next step in my journey but I need a community of support to help make this happen and they’re really bringing problems of practice that are very true to what school looks and feels like. They’re coming from different roles, museums and community spaces too, but that program does a lot of… Looking at the self first and then building out towards community in action. And I think it’s got a really nice phase to it. That’s the one that comes to mind. That’s the top of mind right now.

Cindy: I have some of my colleagues that have gone through that program and I’ve seen them on Facebook, just commenting back and forth to each other about things and they’ll see an issue and they’re like, “We should bring this up to someone.” And I’m like, “Y’all are just teachers, not random people.” But that was doing your job and you’re feeling empowered to make a difference. As I could see the impact of that program just from the sidelines and it’s exciting. I see.

Mario: Absolutely.

Cindy: I love that. So, you mentioned, you had competing biggest challenges for our field right now. Is there another one that kind of pops in your head before I talk about some of the other topics today?

Mario: Well, from the values challenge, it’s probably neck-and-neck policy and budget or probably it’s all interrelated. I did a high-level analysis of arts education policy nationally over the past. It was like sixty to a hundred years. I’m just kind of go like a big frame of it. And what we’ve seen is that we’ve gotten more and more language around arts education. All the art forms included in education legislation. So, it’s in No Child Left Behind. It’s in Essa. It comes out in different forms and then that trickles down to the States. So, when you look at that, I always say, “Is that a win?”

Well, it’s definitely a positive. The challenge is where’s the accountability and funding to make that happen? I think our work is around… It’s the storytelling, it’s the advocacy, it’s the narrative. But I also think that there’s a real opportunity how do arts folks, move into more positions of power. And is that a job? Or is that counsel? Or is that an advisory group? I would love to see more art educators from every division think about how do they move into some of those roles because we need to be affecting and influencing some of those decisions. But the power of policy can be real if you understand what’s most effective.

In my time in Chicago, we realized that graduation requirements that local policy for the district was the strongest thing we had because it articulated everything from the earliest grades. You had to do a backwards design thing. So we’re saying, “Oh, well, we had two credits, but you can only get them in visual art and music. You couldn’t get the Fine Arts credits and dance and drama.” So, I had a board president who had a daughter in a theater class that couldn’t get an arts credit. And so we looked at that and we were like, CPS is one credit more than the state of Illinois, so the two credits were good.

But the Fine Arts being limited, only two disciplines was challenging. So we’re able to broaden it to four disciplines. But we also protected a variety by saying, the credits had to be one in each of two different art forms so that we were ensuring that the school would have at least two, but it allowed for dance and drama to start to thrive alongside the others. And in a district like Chicago, we had the sort of space and ability to do that. We’re working with policy and tinkering with it is really exciting because that had a trickle-down effect that really opened up avenues for elementary and middle schools that weren’t there before.

Cindy: Okay, awesome. So, you started at NAEA in early January 2020. I’m sure you had this exciting vision of what you were going to do and where the direction of the NAEA was headed. And then the world fell to pieces and we had the pandemic. We had the Black Lives Matter uprising after the death of George Floyd. How did your original vision pivot once all of those things came into the landscape?

Mario: It was certainly unexpected. When I came into the role, as I said, I was really excited about the organization’s focus around equity, diversity, and inclusion. I have always worked to make sure that every young person in my classroom felt seen and heard and understood and I try to understand their stories. I think that to be excluded is the worst feeling in the world. I always try to make sure that folks feel that they’re part of what’s happening. And that really resonated with me. I had already anticipated that would be a big part of the work ahead and I could never have foreseen that. Alongside that was really the work of saving and securing the association for the future.

Because when the pandemic hit, I know we all remember, everything was moving both so fast and so slow. I was working behind the scenes with the board on a daily basis to assess what was going on with COVID, but also how that was going to impact our convention which was, later in March We all know that everything shut down March 13th, but the thing is, the story that I never got to tell is that we had to delay our decision to protect the association so that we could ensure that- Minneapolis was calling it and that our insurance would be able to kick in and protect us from the loss of cancellation so that the association could be in good financial shape for the future. There was a lot of mechanic.

That was the most important work we could do. Because we were very wealthy in terms of our people and our members that doesn’t mean were wealthy in terms of dollars. It’s a different thing. And so we spend every dollar so frugally and that’s really served us well, but the convention is the main revenue generator so that was the first and foremost was… Okay. Let’s take care of the convention, let’s make sure the association is financially sound and safe and thank goodness for PPP loans. And of course, we had to do some furloughs and some things that affected staff but we made were able to maintain the whole team that we really looked carefully at every avenue of what we could- where we could have some cost savings to ensure that we could keep providing member benefits which immediately was- how do we help and support folks in new virtual instruction and hybrid instruction? And we were barely able to think about it carefully in purpose and instruction because we have so many questions in early 2020.

And so, we were working with a lot of members and board members and teachers on the ground to create guides and tip sheets and resources. That’s when we launched the town halls because I just felt like we needed to have- I needed to have a real conversation with real people. I love a PDF tool but a PDF is only going to go so far. So, how do we make this real? I really believe in listening, spending a lot of time listening to people and hearing where they are, and making sure we’re serving their needs.

From January 2020 when I started it was like, media and I work strategic vision because it’s time to renew that and then it became very much about survival and sustainability. And then when the Black Lives Matter movement really spiked that summer, and with George Floyd’s death, it was a really hard conversely- not hard in terms of like, we weren’t able to have it, but hard because we felt so emotional about it, it was a hard conversation to have. The leadership of NAEA, because typically, we’re not responding to all the things that are happening in the world. And this here, we’re in a completely different moment in time. We are kind of moving in a new direction and we really care about people and how do we have a people-first approach?

And so, I asked James Rowling our president elected the time and he was the inaugural chair that and I commissioned to, I said, “Could you share as an individual from your perspective? Could you write a response to what we’re living through?” And that’s another conversation that’s invisible behind the scenes. I could ask James could we have a lot of trust between each other, we both invest in that relationship and I said, “I know I’m asking a lot, but I don’t know that the association has a voice yet in this, but I know you as an individual will have something important to say, and I know that’s a big lift. Can you handle it? Can you do that?” And he thought about it and came back and he’s like, “I can do it.” And so, that was one of our first steps, sometimes we need to speak with the voice of an individual to help unpack things.

What we always try to do is just… We know members are facing, we know our educators are facing so many different and new challenges and maybe even some old ones that are reinvented. Not everything is an easy conversation, but we’re trying to say, “Hey, we know this is a burning issue. This is a topic that you’re hearing about. We’re not saying at the take one side or the other, but we do want to provide you with some perspective and some direction to help you navigate.” Because it’s a lot. I just can’t even list all the things that we’ve lived through them. It’s now what, 19 months?

Cindy: Yes, the document that Dr. Rowling came out with that summer was so good. I remember, I read it, I shared, it was so good. And I recently saw him speak in a panel discussion a couple of weeks ago. He mentioned when he was talking that ED&I for NAEA is not just another thing you’re doing. It’s not like, here’s a committee and you’re doing the committee work, but he said it’s now something that is going to inform everything. It’s an anchor for all of the committees and I really loved to hear him talk about it that way. Can you kind of expand on that and tell me what that means?

Mario: So you and our listeners probably know, we went through a big strategic visioning process. Also during that pandemic here, which actually, you’d never know that was ideal time, but it was actually a wonderful container because we could ask folks, “What do you care about? What are you concerned about in terms of visual art, design, media arts education, like what are those things?” And so, the strategic planning process was a listening tour. We heard from every corner of the association and we heard from non-members, we heard from peer organizations.

And we sat down with the board with the ED&I commission, the research commission, some of our editors, different regions and divisions across the country. And basically any time I was in front of a group, I was asking them questions about this and without fail, the number one priority from every group was equity, diversity, and inclusion. And that was the number one topic that they wanted to focus on. And so when we get to the final strategic vision, equity diversity, and inclusion is what we call, ‘super pillar.’ So it’s both a standalone and it’s embedded across the others.

So, of course, learning is the core of what we do. It’s like a course learning is the second pillar and advocacy and policy, research and knowledge, community, vibrancy is core of our work. They’re all interconnected anyways, but especially the ED&I piece because you have to ask yourself questions, “Are my policies the most inclusive policies?” When we’re focused on learning and professional development and instructional design, I think sometimes I always worry, when an individual hears anything- how do we use the letters? Some people say, DEI- whenever you hear equity, diversity, inclusion, do you think one thing? Or do you think like I think where I’m like, Oh, well, okay. Part of that means I have to do some work myself to know who I am, know myself in context, know my privilege and power. That’s not easy.

And then I have to do some work with others. So you and I have to talk and wait to figure out where our trust is and our boundaries and how that works. I’m still the individual and then I have to go, “Okay. I’m going into a classroom, how do I create the safest, most inclusive space for all learners where everyone feels accepted and heard?”

And you’re not even really into the instruction yet, and then you can get into some instructional design. And then my instructional design it’s like, are my teacher moves, the way I set up my class, the way I call them students, the order that I do this, am I being thoughtful and inclusive to all? Let alone, the content and the artistic examples.

There’s so many layers to it, that I really hope that everyone can find their first steps into this because there is an entry point for sure. And it’s not a one size fits all. So when we talk about this work, that’s why it’s embedded across because it’s a little bit of everything. I don’t know that we’ve had the language or the understanding or the platform to talk about it so much before, but we certainly do now.

Cindy: Not bad- where you just said about the self, the others, the classroom, the curriculum, what a great framework. Is that an actual framework you have developed? That’s good.

Mario: Admittedly, it’s how I think about it. But we did an ED&I toolkit last year and it outlines some of that framing. It’s like how to get started with ED&I but we also drew on a lot of resources. There’s so many resources now, but many of them will have those layers and they usually start with the ‘I’ and the work outwards. But I should say, what we found is, it’s certainly not a linear journey. It is cyclical. I’m not going to know the way to be the most inclusive teacher and I’m done, right? My instructional strategies are not done. I’m gonna revisit that over time. I’m going to keep learning and improving. So, that’s I think another thing that I was trying to reiterate, it’s a cyclical journey that where you revisit and we keep learning.

For us, in some ways that works well because we’re committed to continuous improvement and continuous learning because we’re a learning institution.

Cindy: One thing I noticed last summer of 2020, was that so many people that I know. In my personal life, in my professional life, that everybody seemed to- First, they went and worked you know, it was really beautiful to see because I think so many people will look at things like this and they’ll get mad about it and they’ll shout about it and they’ll post about it. But so many people and more than I’ve ever seen stopped and it was like, “What is my role here? How am I complicit in this culture?” And it was so encouraging to watch and people who thought, “I’ve got this covered.” We’re like, no, I don’t, there are still things I need to do and the conversations I was having, it was really powerful. So I love that working on yourself first component and then spreading it from there because I think a lot of teachers can go straight to, “Okay. Well, I’ll just do this lesson plan that is more diverse or whatever.” But they don’t really think about the internalization of the things that are there.

Mario: There are so many layers to it, and I think, I’m spending a lot of time thinking about… I don’t think I know, I think I’m constantly learning, like, I don’t know at all- I’m always open receptive. The first year and a half, I went to every ED&I commission meeting that I could, I spend lots of time with the commissioners to learn about the work and to think about how we were taking up the task force recommendations, but from a leadership perspective, I try to double down on listening, on making space, on inviting in, on stepping aside. Because I think we really need to make space. Many of our diverse colleagues that have not felt welcomed or included or even seen themselves in the association, let alone the field. I’m doing everything I can to make space and to welcome folks. And so, I always encourage everybody. It’s like an open heart and an invitation goes a long way. That’s not going to do all the work but it’s a good starting point.

Cindy: Yes, and one thing I have to noticed about, it’s kind of related but not at the same time is how different all our teachers are. It’s not like Math teachers- well, they might have different teaching styles or whatever. They’re still teaching x+y=b or what mx+y=b or whatever. It’s very straightforward. The curriculum is very straightforward, that teaching is pretty straightforward. But when it comes to art teachers, we have such division in terms of… There’s tad teachers- everybody has their way, they want to do it and everybody thinks their way is the right way. I see a lot of fighting within our teachers about that. I’m wondering if you’re seeing that from your perspective? And also are you seeing that as a side note to that. Are you seeing any sort of push back on any of the ED&I work that you’re doing because of that?

Mario: I’m a big reframer, so I hear what you’re saying and the way I like to look at it is, “Oh, my gosh, don’t we have a tremendous amount of strength?” Because we have so many approaches that we can take. And also, given that arts education is truly a battle. We all need each other. It’s not that I don’t see some of the divisions, but I don’t think that they are important enough in terms of we need each other. We need to be a community and a field that is working together for the betterment of arts education so that everyone can have access to it.

So your approach versus my approach that’s not the only argument, the argument is how do we work together to achieve something greater than ourselves? And so it’s like, “Oh, my gosh, there’s this many different strategies? Fascinating. This many different aspects to art and culture and history, let’s embrace that and learn from each other.” Because I think it’s really easy to have one thing pitted against the other, or to think one approach is better. And frankly, I actually find the standards are actually really helpful, as a touchstone for this because I do feel strongly when folks want to be only skills-focused, I’m personally really challenged by that and I look to the standards that really talk about a more comprehensive picture because art touches- or art reflects history, time, culture, stories, people experiences. It is a medium to do that.

I want to refined my craft. This sounds silly as an example. I remember the first moment that I learned what I could really do with a colored pencil. When I understood the firmness, and the dedication to get that glassy colored pencil, it can almost get photographic, what an amazing skill to learn. But then, how do I put that into practice to something larger? I just think that until we’re all winning. We need to all work together because we really need each other.

Cindy: Yes, I totally agree because I see that- it’s a blessing. You get to be a job or you have so much greater freedom and you can do things as the way you want to do it. And it doesn’t mean that someone else is doing it wrong, but I like that point to the standards, I haven’t thought about it as a

Mario: back to them pretty frequently and the language is from you. It’s written from our peers so it makes sense. And then to the other part of your question, you know. I think- just a little bit earlier, but it’s like, my role is to support all of our art educator members and I really see my role to support the field. Everyone has their own unique journey, and I’m here to support everybody, taking steps forward on their journey. If ED&I feels a little itchy or uncomfortable to somebody, we always- my whole team, we invite everybody in the conversation. It’s like, “Okay, that doesn’t feel good or you’re challenged? Let’s have a conversation and talk about it.”

Cindy: And that step along the journey could be just seeing stuff you put out about it, seeing presentation at NAEA the things like that- those are going to slowly chip away…

Mario: I was thinking of a picture. You only see real change through discomfort and discomfort doesn’t have to be a horrible thing. It’s sort of like, you get to fasten your seatbelt and you have to experience it. But through discomfort, you can see real change and growth. If there’s a little bit of that discomfort we’ll weather it, we are a strong community so I know that we can weather it.

Cindy: Awesome. So, all of that said, it’s really exciting to see how NAEA is tackling all of these issues. Personally, what are you most excited about right now?

Mario: In terms of work?

Cindy: Yes or any

Mario: I’ll give you the work answer. Because I’m a strategic plan nerd, I get really excited like once it’s crafted you move into implementation. And so, where right now prioritizing your one’s action steps and a lot of those are around how do we reach out to and embrace every corner of art education as a field? How do we reach young learners that might be on a path for- on our society or pre-service? But also how do we really hold up and uplift and value our retired art educators? Where this thing about the whole paradigm, I get really excited thinking about, how do we get started in those conversations? That’s the thing. I’m looking forward to right now, and that’s great because we’re looking towards convention in March, and we have a plan for both live and virtual, and we have a way that we can keep those conversations going through that as well.

Cindy: Therefore, I hope this Delta variant calms down so I can be there because I always love when NAEA is in New York City. That’s my favorite place, so fun. I know you are a visual artist, I didn’t want to have this conversation without having you talk a little bit about some of your art. What role does art-making play in your life?

Mario: I feel really lucky. I’m one of those people that always has art-making in my life. I know sometimes it’s hard for folks to get into it or it goes away because you’re busy doing something else, but most readily, I always have a sketchbook. So my sketchbook is often my journal and my planner but it’s filled with images as well. In regular times when I’m travelling a lot for work, I’ll always have it and I’ll be sketching and making work. And then I take those ideas from the sketchbook and then I work on a larger format but most all of my work, I’m just a drawer at heart. Even if I’m making a painting or even if I’m doing a photograph, everything comes from drawing in my head. So I work on 2×4 like nice gritty toothy paper and I am very like multimedia, but I layer and layer and layer and layer with any- if you had any material you had out on a table, I would use.

I use images from comic books and old photographs. I like using text in my work and I layer it and take it too far. And then I played this hide and seek game, where like I start them or wash out or hide elements, or sections of it, or I’ll tear up old drawings. And I have a sticker machine, that’s the best thing I ever bought. Basically, just put adhesive on the back of whatever you roll through it. And so then I collage elements from old drawings on the new drawings. I feel lucky that I always have- I’m looking over to the side because my drawing walls over there, but I always have something I’m working on.

Cindy: I saw your drawing wall in a video. It’s an intro to the video and I saw that and I was obsessed with that. It was so cool. So you just have a wall on your house that you just draw on?

Mario: Yes, it was a dedicated wall, I have this great push pin board material and I put my inspiration images up and then I have a drawing. I like to live with my work so being able to walk past it, or look at it and think about it. I may not be actively drawing every day or making a mark, but I’m experiencing it and then all of a sudden I go. “Oh, yeah, I know what it needs.”

Cindy: Yes and that’s just kind of letting it speak to you.

Mario: Yes, a little bit.

Cindy: That’s awesome. I was thinking about setting one of those up for my children just like a space for them to draw on the wall, but then I got really scared by that too. It’s like, who knows? But that’s just a wall. You can always fix it. I love that. Okay, so I always ask one final question of all my podcast guests. And that is, which artwork changed your life?

Mario: Oh, I think I love my answer. But I also think it’s so funny because it feels like such a traditional painting but I am obsessed with Christina’s World by Andrew Wyeth. Every time I see it, I get teared up it just… I have always been. I like illustration and that kind of leans illustrative, but I am drawn to that painting. I just always have been from a young age and I also developed a really amazing unit for my second graders around it. If we have time.

When I taught second grade back in the day, it was the first time that Pokemon was popular and they talked about it all the time and I always ask them, “How did it work?” And they told me, you sort of start as like, one kind of creature, but you can increase your powers and your powers give you these abilities to do these other things. So, you know, like Charmander comes becomes Charizard I’m surprised I remember that. Anyways, I was like, how do I tap into this interest? And so I presented the Christina’s World painting, and I said, “Okay kids, what do we think is going on? Like, what’s going on in this?” They were like, “Why is that girl in the field?” And I was like, “I don’t know. What do you think?” And they’re like, “We think she’s stuck or she’s running away or maybe she’s thinking really hard.” All these stories. And so we started like develop this narrative about like, “Well, Christina, can’t get back to the barn or back to the house, how are we going to help her?” And they’re like, “You bet she doesn’t have some kind of superpowers.” And I was like, “Well, that’s what I’m thinking about.” I was like, “Can you figure out how to give Christina Pokémon like powers?”

So they created this like – they make these little Christina’s and they would add wings and a hundred legs and tentacle. They added all these things that helped her get back home. It was my favorite lesson that I ever did, but I’ve just always been obsessed with wondering what’s really going on because you don’t see her face. You just see her back. I’ve read it, I know who she is, and I know the history, but I think maybe it was the time in art that I realized that presenting a question was more interesting to me than presenting an answer.

Cindy: I love that. I’ve always resonated with that painting too. I had a journal when I was in college, and it was always to me, it was this sort of teen, early adulthood like feeling of not belonging, they’re separate and you’re seeing world happen, but you’re like, you don’t feel good enough, but that was always mine, but I think that’s a beautiful painting and an amazing lesson, that’s hilarious.

Mario: Oh, my God, we have so much Yes.

Cindy: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for sharing all of your insight and experience today. I was really inspired by your growth story, the whole direction of NAEA. And thank you so much for all the work that you’re doing for our teacher’s

Mario: Absolutely. Thank you so much for the invitation. I really enjoyed it.

Cindy: Awesome. Thank you.

Art Class Curator and Nasco have come together to create two incredible full art curriculums. World Mosaic for elementary and Perspectives for high school. These are so much more than just lesson plans. Your students will experience powerful social, emotional learning, that’s integrated with language art, social studies, history and more. And they are totally aligned with national arts standards.

World Mosaic will take your elementary students on a journey around the globe as each unit features an artwork from a different part of the world. With art projects that explore various media and activities that will strengthen their critical thinking skills and expand their worldview.

Perspectives is a high school course that explores how art connects us with ourselves and one another, through 10 idea-centered themes using diverse artworks, thought-provoking discussions and engaging activities.

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We are thrilled to be partnered with Nasco education. They’ve been working with districts for years and are huge advocates for educators everywhere. You can learn more about these exciting curricula at artclasscurator.com/nasco.

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.

• Oh Happy Dani
• Sphere of Influence Print
• Anti-Asian Hate – Pill Bottle art
• This Book Is Anti-Racist by Tiffany Jewell
• So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo
• “Our Deepest Fear” Wall Art Print by Marianne Williamson
• 82 Questions About Art

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.

Hey everybody. It’s Cindy Ingram from Art Class Curator Podcast and I am so excited about this interview today with Dani Coke from Oh Happy Dani. She has an incredible story about how she used her art to make a difference and how her art went viral overnight and really changed her life. But the way she explains her artistic process and the power of her art just gave me chills as she was talking about it. There’s so much possibility here for you in your classroom so I cannot wait to share with you this interview, so let’s go for it.

All right. I’m so excited to welcome Dani Coke to The Art Class Curator Podcast. Welcome, Dani.

Dani Coke: Yes, I’m so excited to be here. Thank you for having me.

Cindy Ingram: I have been binging your Instagram channel and all of your content online and we are so excited to share your story with our listeners because you have done some pretty amazing inspirational things over the last couple of years. Can you tell us a little bit more about you, your background, and your experiences?

Dani Coke: Yes. Absolutely. I’m Dani. I am 26 currently and I live in Atlanta, Georgia. I was born in Brooklyn, New York but I claimed that I was raised in the suburbs of Georgia because that’s where I moved when I was around six and that’s where I grew up outside the city. Last year, I actually moved into the city for the first time, which is super exciting and so that’s currently where I live. I have been into creativity and art and creating things for a really long time. I’ve always been into creativity and art, making things in my hands. When I was younger, I would put together gift baskets and I would paint terracotta pots. I even designed business cards to do lawn care for my neighbors but I was not into lawn care, I just wanted to design the business card. I’ve always been into creativity and things like that.

I majored in business in college with a hospitality administration because I wanted to get into event planning. I thought that was going to be my career and my life and I got a job at an event planning agency right when I graduated. I quickly realized that event planning was not going to be my career and it was not going to be my life but my way in the door was graphic design. I just fell more and more in love with it. While I was at that job, I also had a lot of experiences related to race, being a black woman in a predominantly white space, and I had moments where I would bring up to my boss like, “Hey, I would love if we could start conversations around diversity and equity and inclusion, maybe bring in a speaker,” and he told me, “That’s not something I’m interested in or will ever be interested in.” That moment illustrated to me, no pun intended, that it wasn’t the environment that I felt like I could truly thrive in. Late 2019, I quit my job, started my graphic design business and continued to do that through 2019 and picked up illustration as a hobby, Christmas of 2020. I’ve been illustrating ever since.

Cindy Ingram: Wow. That’s a pretty fast go from starting your own business to being as successful as you are. How many followers do you have?

Dani Coke: I think right now I’m at around 484,000. It was absolutely so fast-tracked. As someone who worked in marketing, graphic design, and social media, never have I ever in my life seen anything like what happened last year. It has definitely been a wild ride.

Cindy Ingram: Yeah. We’ll talk about that in just a minute but did you make the painting on the wall behind you?

Dani Coke: Yes, I did.

Cindy Ingram: Oh, I’m obsessed. It’s so good.

Dani Coke: Yes, there’s a period last year where I was just super burnt out with always wanting to make everything so methodical because my illustrations, as you know, are infographics, very detailed. I was like, “I just want to get back to the creativity of it,” so I freehanded this mural.

Cindy Ingram: It’s so pretty. Can I screenshot you, can you smile?

Dani Coke: Sure.

Cindy Ingram: It’s just so cute and you did the paintings too that matched it?

Dani Coke: No, I got those from Target.

Cindy Ingram: Nice. So good.

Dani Coke: My phone case inspired my mural. We are just off topic but I’m sorry.

Cindy Ingram: No, that’s okay. I love to see creative people and what they do. I think it’s fun to see those threads. I love too, in your story, you were talking about the business cards and stuff. I know a creative entrepreneur type of person always has those stories. Mine was that I sold presidential campaign posters to my neighbors. I was like eight. We all have those little stories. It was for a candidate I would not have supported today but that’s okay. You all can probably guess what side that is but I won’t bother.

We’ll go back on topic. Let’s go into what happened when you gained all those followers at one time last year? Can you explain what happened?

Dani Coke: Definitely, while always being creative and loving to create things, I’ve also always had this passion for justice, racial reconciliation, what that looks like now and my role in that story. When I started out my agency, the name of the agency was called So Happy Social—which might sound very familiar because my Instagram name is Oh Happy Dani—but So Happy Social actually came first and I only changed my personal handle for branding purposes. But the whole point behind So Happy Social was to equip positive mission-based brands, to use social media for maximum impact. I wanted to get behind the non-profit leaders, the on-the-ground people doing the work and say, “You don’t have time to worry about social media so I will do it for you.” I was like, “Yeah, that’ll be my place, my unique contribution while still doing what I love and I’m passionate about.” If that’s all I ever ended up doing with my life, I would have been content.

But fast forwarding a little bit to January of 2021, I had gotten my iPad for Christmas the previous year and I was drawing all these random things and Martin Luther King Jr. Day came and I was like, “Huh, I want to make an illustration about how it irks me that people take his legacy and really paint it as this passive peacekeeping legacy when in all actuality, he was quite radical, he was a disrupter, he challenged the status quo, encouraged civil disobedience. This man was not liked.” I wanted to make an illustration to shine a light on that perspective for my 700 friends on Instagram. I drew that and posted it. It was the first illustration that was just as related, but also the first one that was shared outside of my friend group. I was like, “People are sharing this to their story.” That is so bizarre to me and so I said, “Huh, I wonder Black History Month is coming up. If I stay in the vein of creating illustrations related to justice, I wonder if more people would be inclined to participate in those kinds of conversations if the art was pretty, aesthetically pleasing, simple but yet not sacrificing the depth of information.”

I did that all of February 2020. I just started talking about all different topics related to black lives, black flourishing and justice for the black community. I talked about everything from why it’s important to see color and not say that you don’t see color, to why you shouldn’t put your hands in a black woman’s hair without her permission. You just got to cover all the bases. You never know who you’re speaking to. I went on a rampage doing that and I had a lot of fun. By the end of February, I had about 10,000 people following me. I was like, “That is bizarre.”

Cindy Ingram: It’s making art and people are liking it.

Dani Coke: They’re liking it and they’re showing up. I was like, “Okay, I’ll keep going.” Then summer approached and then Black Lives Matter took center stage in a major way all over the world and then we witnessed the tragic deaths of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd. I began to use art to speak to those situations as well. My first viral piece of art happened following Ahmaud Arbery’s murder when I made a post from a Kamala Harris quote that basically said, “Exercising while black should not be a death sentence.” I illustrated that and it was my first piece to go way viral.

Overnight, it seemed that things really just went on fast track. I, in one week, gained, like you said, about 300,000 followers and I started having all these incredible opportunities to speak places and go on daytime shows and work with incredible brands. It all felt very unexpected. But I was pleased to know that my unique contribution, however small I thought it was when I first started out, ended up being used in a wild way, especially since people don’t always see art as a viable tool for activism, at least they didn’t, that’s changed now but yeah, people would pit it against each other. Art is meant to invoke emotion, activism is meant to encourage action. But when you put the two together, you have a powerful tool. You’re encouraging action by invoking emotion. I think that was very powerful and still is.

Cindy Ingram: Yeah. I really love that you pointed out that your art is pretty because I noticed that too. I was like, “She’s talking about really important deep things.” The things in your art, if it gets in the right hands, it is going to make change just by the content. It’s in such an accessible format that it’s so easily shared. You put something so pretty, people are just more likely to share it. It’s like this sneak attack almost.

Dani Coke: Oh, definitely. It was definitely a tool, a strategy for me for the longest time and still is. Even with the images themselves, I’ll use it to draw people in and then in the caption, I might slice you up with some of the stuff I’m saying, but it’s all part of the process of hopefully helping people to see things that they might not have otherwise looked at in that way.

Cindy Ingram: Yeah. Side note, but not a side note, to the listeners that are listening, I think that showing some of your art to the students would be a really powerful conversation because not only do you get to have the conversations about the stuff that you’re illustrating about, but then the art teacher can talk about, “Well, what did this artist do to make the message come across? What strategies did she use?” I think that’s another really powerful conversation too. I hope, from listening to this, we have some teachers that go out and do that. If you do, listeners, please tell us how it went because we want to hear about it.

Dani Coke: Yeah. That’s really cool.

Cindy Ingram: What did that feel like to have things explode for you like that? It’s like a really awful but empowering time but also you’re having this amazing personal success at the same time? How did that duality feel?

Dani Coke: I definitely had moments when I didn’t balance it well, burnout definitely happened. Part of what happened with getting that huge platform so quickly is that I took on the personal responsibility of thinking that I had to speak to every single tragic thing happening in the country or in the world and had to have some profound statement. Then when I was at a loss for words like, “Well, that’s just unacceptable because there’s half a million people waiting on you to say something,” I really internalized that pressure in a way that was not healthy or practical. That was a huge, huge and really difficult part of it because even with my process—which we can probably get into later with the creation process of the art—but I think for me, a lot of people see it and it’s like, “Oh, simple, cute,” but I also do think that people also understand the fact that it’s a very difficult process. Taking in what’s happening globally or in our nation, narrowing it down to a couple of points, conceptualizing it into an illustration that people can connect with, and then disseminating that information in a way that doesn’t sacrifice the integrity of the subject matter, listen, it is not an easy process.

Cindy Ingram: I am just stressed out hearing the process.

Dani Coke: Yeah. Because of the platform and the weight of it, I would much rather not make a graphic about a topic than to disseminate harmful information. It’s just something that I’ve had to wrestle with and I said you cannot be the answer to every problem, you can’t think an infographic will change the whole world all the time. That came along with it but it also brought such a beautiful community. People would probably be surprised, I received a lot of hate when I first started but after that ever since, the majority of what I get, 97% of the time is love, which is shocking considering how polarizing it is what I’m talking about.

But I think what is so cool about the audience is whether you agree with me all the way or not, you can’t deny that what I’m saying is oftentimes something that needs to be discussed and is an important thing. It’s not me trying to convince you of anything, it’s me presenting information to you that you can go and do with what needs to be done. Also releasing the pressure to convince people to believe what I believe has made this a lot easier as well.

Cindy Ingram: How did you get through all of that struggle at the beginning and the pressure that you were feeling, what strategies helped you through that?

Dani Coke: I think feeling the weight of that immense pressure, often enough, made me not want to feel it anymore. You can only bear it for so long for like, “All right, get off of me.” That’s what that was for me. I just had to keep realizing like, “Oh, I hate this feeling. I hate this feeling,” to prioritize not feeling that way. When it first all happened, I was like the energizer bunny, like making a bunch of graphics and then launching things and new products in a store, and now I have a whole second business. It was just going really fast. But then I would take chunks of time away from social media and not tell anybody I was leaving and come back and be able to speak to the next moment because I took the time away to recharge and energize myself without feeling as though I owe anyone an explanation for anything.

Cindy Ingram: Yeah. My coach always says rest is a business strategy. I think that’s true for teachers too that are listening, because most of you are not running businesses, but that time that you’re spending resting, the time you’re spending turning off the lesson plans, stop integrating, that is going to make you a better teacher because you’ve given yourself that. I think that’s a really important message there.

I don’t necessarily have a question about this so I’m going to try to figure this out, you describe that process of taking it and disseminating your process for creating something. You ran through that so fast–

Dani Coke: Sorry.

Cindy Ingram: Yeah, no, I’m just like, “Wow,” and I hadn’t even thought about that as a thing to ask but now I’m just like, “We’ve got to talk about that because that is really just a creative process in such a beautiful way.” Can we just dive into that more? I don’t know exactly what the question is but how do you start?

Dani Coke: Yeah, definitely. Here’s what normally happens, there will be a trending topic, breaking news, headline, and it’ll lead to a lot of discussions online. I always encourage myself to not feel the need to be a breaking news source or consistently talk about all that’s trending all the time, it’s just not feasible. In those moments, I like to remember, “Okay, your job is to speak to the heart of the matter. What is that piece of truth that you can pull out of all the chaos? What is that one simple thing that someone can cling to?” That’s what I’ll start with and it’ll take me in a certain direction. I can actually give you an example of a piece and walk you through that as I talk about this.

Cindy Ingram: That’d be great.

Dani Coke: Earlier this year, the topic of anti-Asian racism and hate was top of mind. A lot of conversations were happening about that and the year before actually, not this year but last year when COVID was starting to spike, we were seeing a very similar thing. People weren’t talking about it as much because Black Lives Matter was so loud in that moment rightfully so. But I remember that it was still very much a problem, anti-Asian hate. One thing that I was hearing a lot of rhetoric from government officials and people around us was that it was an Asian virus. They were tying COVID-19 to an entire group of people in a very harmful way. I was like, “Okay, I see what’s going on here.What are some points that I need to pull out of this that I can communicate to the audience in a simple way that it’s really important that we take control of this narrative and not perpetuate harmful stereotypes?” That was the first thing I did.

Then the next thing I was doing, I also grouped that in with listening, I call it listening, I like to say that I have my ears to the ground, especially when these things are happening, I listen to what’s happening in the community at large but I also listen to what’s happening in my own community. What questions are people asking? What dialogue are they having amongst themselves? That also helps to inform what I want to say because often, what we’re talking about amongst each other is where we’re trying to figure out the heart of things, how can I apply it and internalize what’s happening in my own life. That’s where I like to live.

That happened and then I narrowed down to maybe five points, four steps, three ways, or one simple quote or thought. In this instance, I wanted to pull three points out. I got that list and then I moved on to conceptualizing. I take the content. In this instance, I wanted to do an illustration that talked about what I called three pills you need to swallow about the Coronavirus, because I’m very literal, so I conceptualized a pill bottle and three literal pills. Under pill number one, I said, “Diseases can make anyone sick from any ethnicity.” Point number two, “People of Asian descent are not more likely to contract the virus.” Point number three, “Fear of getting sick is not a valid excuse for xenophobia or racism.” Those were three points I wanted to drive home. It seems obvious now looking back but man, oh man, during the height of the hysteria, people were wild.

I said, “Okay, I think the concept of a pill bottle and a bunch of pills will make a lot of sense in this conversation of COVID, let me illustrate that, those will be my points.” Then research, especially to get to that point is huge for me as well, making sure I have credible sources that I’m citing, that all the information is accurate, things like that. At the end, I have an illustration that is hopefully simple and digestible and you’ve got takeaways but the process of getting there is a lot of listening, a lot of planning, writing out things, illustrating. I would say illustration is probably 15% of the process. I didn’t spend too long doing that.

Cindy Ingram: I think that all the teachers listening need to have your students listen to everything you just said because it just was so good. I noticed that in the world of fighting these injustices and things, there are a lot of people who are just ready to immediately nitpick anything you say. Even if you’re on the side that they’re on, they’re like, “Oh, but what about this? Oh, you said this wrong. You used this word and you really should have used this word,” do you get a lot of that?

Dani Coke: I love this question because the answer is no, because I am so careful. I write something, I read it a million times, I write it a bunch of different ways. I can even give you an example. A lot of talk is happening right now around language that we can use to be more inclusive to people in disabled communities, words that we might throw around often that actually would be more helpful if we didn’t. I think that’s a really good example of the fact that language is ever-changing and evolving but it’s important while we don’t get tied to language because of the fact that it’s like a living thing, I still believe that as often as we’re able to make sure we’re adopting inclusive language for the purpose of not causing any confusion or distraction as we try to convey our information.

For example, I do not often use the word crazy in my vocabulary. I’ve said wild a lot of times and I opt for wild just for the purpose of not wanting to distract from what I’m saying by using a term that someone else might see as, “Ah.” You can’t do that with everything, but as often as I’m able, I will make those swaps for the sake of one, inclusion, and to lessen distraction because I don’t want you to give me any excuse as to why you weren’t able to hear the point that I’m trying to make, but also I don’t want to cause harm while trying to convey that information either. That goes for things as simple as language changes or as important as conveying this huge subject like the school-to-prison pipeline, for example, is something I made an illustration about last year. I was very particular even with the way I illustrated students in that illustration. It’s like, “Make sure whatever community you’re talking about, say that community, don’t just lump everybody into this giant category. Who is most affected by this?” It’s just very important to be as clear as possible. I always lead with that which is why research is such a huge chunk of my process. Very, very rarely, if ever, do I have pushback over semantics or the way I use my words.

Cindy Ingram: That’s really good. That shows that you’re very thoughtful. Do you run your copy and stuff by different communities and stuff before you do the illustration or do you just keep it with yourself?

Dani Coke: Mostly, I keep it with myself. It helps that I’m a part of an underrepresented community because I have proximity, but also, if I’m talking about another community, chances are that I’m learning from people who are members of that community and so I connect with them with my illustrations or my verbiage and I’ll say, “What do you think would be best to include here?” But I think more than anything, I’ve started to send my illustrations for second eyes over my captions and words because of spelling. I’m spelling things wrong. Teachers are the most supportive members of my community. There’s so much support but teachers really show up for me. With that, they show up in the comments and say, “You were supposed to use the possessive form of ‘its’, that one has an apostrophe,” and I’m like, “You got me, you’re absolutely correct. You’re correct.” I’ve been trying to prevent that as much as I can. They let me know.

Cindy Ingram: They let me know too. It’s like, “On page 46 of this document,” and I’m like, “Oh, yeah. Thank you for catching that.”

Dani Coke: Right. I’d be really grateful, for real.

Cindy Ingram: Yeah, because it’s a lot to keep up with. It’s so interesting because I think I’m lost in the possibility of showing your art to students and I’m having a hard time getting away from it because I keep going off in my imagination, but I think it’s such a powerful lesson. Speaking of teaching, did you have an influential teacher that helped you along your path?

Dani Coke: Yes. I did. It’s funny because I have influential teachers that have affected me in both positive and negative ways very specifically. I’m going to tell you the negative influence first because you’ll find that it is actually quite relevant to the subject matter of your own podcast.

Cindy Ingram: Okay, let’s do it.

Dani Coke: Let’s do it. I told you all throughout my childhood, I was very creative, always making things. I got to middle school and an art elective was an opportunity. I was like, “Absolutely, this is my time.” I really enjoyed that class, we did a whole lot of different things. But we had one activity every Friday that was a free drawing activity. Basically, Friday is when it was due but you would get a piece of paper at the top of the week, take it home, draw something, bring it back on Friday for a grade. I loved that. We got this long paper too, it was really cool. I would take that home and I would draw Disney characters because I really love Disney. I had all these small VHS covers and I would put the VHS, I would stand it up and then I would sit with my paper and I would draw the character big. I loved doing it and I impressed myself with how close it would look to the thing so it made me really excited.

I’d bring it in on Fridays. I remember the very first time I brought mine—and I drew Ariel from the Little Mermaid on that big rock, she was on the cover—and I turned it in for a grade and the teacher gave it back to me and she was like, “Please make sure to not be tracing. B-,” and she wrote that on the paper. I was like, “First of all, you could have asked me if I was tracing,” but it felt to me that she assumed that I traced and marked it down because of that. She never asked me, we never had a conversation about it, but every single time I turned in a freehand drawing of a Disney character every Friday, I would never get an A. It would always be like, “Please be sure to not trace.” C+ or B- with no reason. It’s very odd to me. I would love to know to this day how she decided to find those grades to my art but it was discouraging for me definitely because it felt to me as though that could have been an opportunity for you to affirm a natural gift but you decided to assume that it wasn’t.

Cindy Ingram: That makes sense if you’ve been teaching this kid for three months and you’ve seen all of their art that they make and you’ve seen their drawing ability and then they turn in this beautifully perfect thing. I think every art teacher has experienced that and you’re like, “No, there’s a dispute here.” But you just met this teacher, she didn’t know who you were, and she didn’t even talk to you about it.

Dani Coke: Yeah, throughout the entire time, I would make other art in class, my guard would get good grades. It was a consistent thing. I wish I could even have the opportunity to draw in class and be like, “Look, if you want me, I could sit my VHS tape right here and I could take my big piece of paper and draw it so you can see.” I know that’s not always feasible but I really feel as though that assumption, although it makes sense she’s looking at it, it’s like, “That’s pretty,” it would have really been more encouraging for me if she would have asked.

Cindy Ingram: Yeah. Just have a conversation about it.

Dani Coke: Yeah. Throughout the entire time, she would mark me down. I just was like, “Well, let me not even bother that,” and didn’t consider pursuing art as a career option. I just took it off the list.

Cindy Ingram: It was like it was enough to completely discourage you altogether.

Dani Coke: Yeah, throughout the entire class, you’re going to keep marking me down and accusing me of doing something I’m not doing. Then me, again, a predominantly white space, my teacher is white, I’m a student of color, if you’ve already been treating me this way, I don’t feel safe to come to you and be like, “Hey, I’d like to talk about this,” that’s not something I would want to initiate. I don’t know. I’ll just take it and just forget about it. It was very easy for me to do. I continued to draw here and there in my own time but I just did not think of it as a goal.

Cindy Ingram: Wow. That’s quite a lesson, it really is. Because I’m sure that teacher, I don’t even know, I was going to make assumptions about her but then I could have been wrong. Who knows what she’s all about.

Dani Coke: The thing that would have made it better for me would have been a conversation.

Cindy Ingram: Yeah, for her to be curious about it rather than just to assume that you’re tracing.

Dani Coke: Exactly. That definitely influenced me in the opposite direction. But I did have another really amazing teacher, she was my chorus teacher. She just consistently encouraged me. I felt she really believed in me and my creative ability on that front of music. So much so that she made me feel like I had the ability to try out for a lead in the musical my senior year. Then I got it, it was Les Mis.

Cindy Ingram: Oh.

Dani Coke: Yeah. We did Les Mis and I don’t know why we thought we could do Les Mis. I tried out to be Fantine. It was just a really fun experience that really changed my life because I was like, “I can do really hard things and I can do them well.” I consistently came back to that whole experience in my mind throughout my life like, “If I could do that, I could do this.”

Cindy Ingram: I love that.

Dani Coke: Yeah. Being pushed, it was the exact opposite experience. She saw the talent in me. Instead of writing it off, she invested in it and encouraged me to see it through.

Cindy Ingram: That’s beautiful. I love it. My daughter just tried out for her first musical yesterday. I cannot handle the wait, I know she can’t either but I’m like, “I need to know it’s okay.”

Dani Coke: Oh, that wait and then they upload that cast list.

Cindy Ingram: I know, 10 AM on Friday, I’ll know. I’m going to be constantly refreshing the browser. I think it’ll be on the web.

Dani Coke: Oh, it’s going to be a really good time in her life too.

Cindy Ingram: Yeah, awesome. Did you grow up in a family that fostered this activism mindset or is that something that you think more came from with you and on your own?

Dani Coke: Yes. I feel as though being a member of an underrepresented community was a really huge driver and also being a first generation American. I’m a daughter of immigrants, my parents are Jamaican. I saw how hard they worked to get here and to build a really comfortable life for us here and that really motivated me to do what I could to make sure that other members of my community have similar opportunities. That was always inspiring for me growing up and even into college thinking about ways that I could contribute to that or at least being an example or saying like, “I’m making my parents proud by doing this.” That was always an internal driver for me. It changed in different ways how I lived that out today but I can trace that all throughout my childhood and growing up, that desire to want to do good for them.

Cindy Ingram: That’s beautiful. Speaking to teachers about, they’re still teaching it in my head as I talk to you, but I know that a lot of teachers have a really hard time talking about really hard things in their classroom. They’re hesitant to bring up, especially now with all this critical race theory BS that’s happening, they already were scared to have those conversations about gender or about race or about privilege, do you have any advice for teachers who want to have these conversations but are scared to?

Dani Coke: That is hard. I can only speak from experience in the fact that talking about it doesn’t necessarily get easier. But I think the way you prepare yourself and set up and execute the conversation as far as “What is this environment that I’m creating? What are the visuals that I’m using? Am I making this feel safe or is this conversation being framed in a way where my students will be able to easily sense my fear and apprehension and feel a little nervous about it?” For me even, that’s why I was so adamant about spending, this past month, creating resources specifically for teachers like posters and printables and bookmark stuff. I’m like, “I want to make it as easy as I can for you in a society where it’s becoming increasingly difficult to do so to have those conversations and ease your way into those conversations.”

If I were a teacher, but god bless y’all because my lord, I think that I would attempt it by taking a current event and tying it to a historical event that is very, very similar. It gives you, not necessarily a crutch, I don’t know what the word is, but it gives you like a parallel that you can run alongside without feeling like you’re completely out in the deep end with this topic that’s so hard to wrap your mind around just to show that history, yes, it repeats itself but it also evolves. The way, for example, with racism that we’re seeing it now, same struggles years ago but it just looks different. I think if the underlying message is wrong then, wrong now, I think you can’t go wrong with that. Things that are wrong will always be wrong and so you don’t have to be like, “I’m scared to say something controversial.” If it’s wrong, it’s wrong. I think your students especially who are wrestling with all these different things and hearing so many things in their own communities and environments, I think that’s doing them a service to be like, “Yeah, I’m going to maintain the integrity of this message and the fact that wrong is wrong and right is right and just as just.”

Also, the tool of pretty, I would definitely say to use that to your advantage too, I think either pretty or like something illustrative that can tie what you’re talking to a real life object or thing that they can connect it to is such an invaluable technique because they’re like, “Oh, yeah, that makes so much sense because I’ve seen that, I know what that looks like.” I think tying it to real world objects or things. Object lessons, I love them.

Cindy Ingram: Yeah. That’s what we’re all about at Art Class Curator, the object is a work of art. I like what you said because I say this all the time that if you have a conversation about a work of art, it makes it easier to talk about the hard things because you’re talking about that artwork. You’re not going, “Hey, kids, let’s talk about race today.” You’re like, “Let’s look at this artwork and talk about this artwork and we’re going to talk about race through this conversation about this artwork,” and it just makes it just a little bit easier to talk about and it makes it a little bit less like personal and more about something else. I like what you said about the history because you’re talking about the history but then you’re talking about all this through the history so it just makes it a little bit easier.

Dani Coke: Yeah. I’d also say one other thing, I think when you mention history, it reminded me of the fact that, of course, not every teacher teaches history and so a lot of people, especially teachers often wonder like, “Okay, how can I even tie these hard conversations into what I teach because I don’t even teach anything like that?” But I think a super cool opportunity would be to seek out the professionals, the leaders, or the historical figures that you might often reference in your work that started or originated a certain theory or concept or technique and look for underrepresented communities who also contributed to those things because highlighting them also gives you an opportunity to highlight their lives, their struggles, and race and justice can often play a huge part in that and that’s another way to ease into those conversations as well. I think that’s also an added tip. Search for key leaders who may not be white and use that as an opportunity to amplify but also educate in a different light as well.

Cindy Ingram: Yeah. I think that’s really important. Just as an art teacher, for example, if you’re teaching a lesson about line and you want to use an artwork about line, just choose a black artist that has an artwork about line instead of choosing your typical van Gogh or whatever. van Gogh’s awesome but you can easily make those substitutions and it’s a great value to your students.

Another thing that you said when you were giving advice was about creating a safe space for the students. I think that so much of teaching is what’s not said, it’s in your attitude, it’s in your passion, it’s in the way you set up your classroom, it’s in the way that you greet your students. I love that you brought that up as creating today’s space and I think hanging your posters up on the walls, it’s going to trigger to assume when they see that on the wall, they’ll say, “Oh, okay, this is a place that I know I can feel this teacher is on my side.” It’s just little messages like that mixed with interactions, mixed with everything else, that students will feel more and more safe.

Dani Coke: Yeah. Definitely.

Cindy Ingram: We will link to, because you mentioned you’re creating stuff for teachers, so we’ll link to that in the show notes so that teachers can get their hands on those things for their classroom.

Dani Coke: Definitely. If anyone ever has ideas of what they would want to see, I always want to hear that too because I am just wanting to help and this is just my line that I feel like I can run in with confidence and I would love to help in any way, so yeah, hit me up.

Cindy Ingram: Yeah. That’s actually a good segue to my next question because someone on my team mentioned, she saw this quote from you and was really moved by it, I’m going to read the quote and then I would love for you to share your thoughts on it but it says, “I believe that you have the power to make a difference in your direct sphere of influence and bring about real change for causes that matter to you most.” I think that the direct sphere of influence part is really important. Can you talk about that a little bit more for us?

Dani Coke: Yeah. Definitely. Last year, I drew a graphic about this topic, the sphere of influence, because I found myself always saying it and I have this picture in my mind of what I was thinking of when I said it but I realized, it probably would be helpful to translate that. I drew this infographic where at the center, it says “Your sphere of influence” I’m talking about the sphere of influence, at the center, it’s you, and then there are pathways to different buildings as if I drew a city or something. But the buildings would be named like your house, your job, your place of worship, your businesses that you support, the school your students attend, the local government. All these ways that you’re connected to your community very tangibly, I would say these are areas within your own sphere of influence, these are areas that through direct or indirect action, through really big or really small ways, you can make a difference in causes and areas that you care about.

For example, even talking about the home, the goal is to have to have an actively anti-racist family, you want to raise children who care about inclusion, diversity, justice, and as well as you and your whole family, prioritizing things that matter to you no matter what that cause is. I think that there are steps that you can take to get there and I wrote those steps along the path and I would say things like having those hard conversations, dedicating yourself to ongoing learning and growth. I really believe that when you think about your own personal contribution in the world, it’s easy to think of people who are doing really huge things and say, “Well, I can’t do that so I can’t really do much,” and that’s so false because the biggest and most important thing about your sphere of influence is that nobody else has it.

There are people that you have influence over or have contact with that I will never meet, never influence, they will probably never even see my art. That, while a beautiful opportunity, is also a big responsibility because it means that none of us are off the hook with talking about what matters, especially what we’re passionate about because that gives us that personal connection and each of us has that story. You have what it takes to make a difference in your sphere of influence because it’s something that you have that no one else has access to.

Cindy Ingram: Oh, I love that. I think that it’s a really important message because I know a lot of people, myself included many times, I’ll get really worked up about something and I would be really passionate about something but I feel completely helpless like, “What can I actually do?” Then I’m not only upset about the thing that’s happening but then I’m also feeling guilty that I’m not doing enough. It’s just this cycle of negative emotions that are not helping anything that helps you realize what you can actually do and what will actually make a difference and then release the pressure of this other stuff that I can’t do and focus on, “Hey, I can help my kids better understand the people that I’m around on a day-to-day basis.”

Dani Coke: Yeah, you have to trust and believe that this is a team effort and it relies on everybody doing their individual part. I think remembering that is encouraging.

Cindy Ingram: It made me think of your boss at your old job who wasn’t receptive to you in the sphere of influence, like he needs some lessons, maybe he’s gotten a substitute. That’s wonderful, we will put a link to that in the show notes as well for the listeners to check out. Do you have any artists or artworks that have influenced you?

Dani Coke: It’s interesting because it took me a while to even refer to myself as an artist because what I currently do, I feel like, is so, so simple but I now know the power that’s in that. I find my inspiration mostly not from artists but from other forms of artwork like literature, poetry, and writings, speeches and things like that. I really, really love Maya Angelou. I have her full collection of work and I’m really inspired by her poetry and how she ties and infuses justice and her experience with race and her experience as a woman and how that influenced her work in a way that made it super powerful. I found a lot of inspiration from her. I found a lot of inspiration from MLK, truthfully, not even in the cliche way, his work is incredible in so many different ways. I have a collection of his works too and I’ve been reading that all the time. I just draw inspiration from people who used every part of their human experience to influence the work that they put out there because that’s what made it so unique and so powerful. I think everyone can take a lesson from that.

Cindy Ingram: Oh. I want to write that quote down, thankfully it’s recorded. What did you just say, using the full aspects of humanity, basically, to create, oh, that was good. I have to go back and listen to that again. I love that. I would challenge you on calling your artwork simple. It is simple but it’s simple and the most calculated and precise, very calculated, slices through.

Dani Coke: I love that.

Cindy Ingram: That’s harder to do than something not simple.

Dani Coke: Yeah. That’s a really good point.

Cindy Ingram: It’s powerful and it just gets you immediately and that’s why it’s exploding the way it is because it just gets right to the heart of it. I keep making this hand gesture, listeners can’t see it but I’m just like, “This is what it does.” That’s awesome.

We are wrapping up. I know you have some book recommendations out there in the world, do you have any book recommendations for art teachers who want to dive into this work?

Dani Coke: Oh, sure, yes. There is actually a really great book by Tiffany Jewell called This Book Is Anti-Racist. It’s aimed towards young adults but it’s filled with beautiful illustrations. She partnered with a woman of color illustrator and it’s just so beginner-friendly, it’s so beautiful to look at and it tackles so many different aspects of anti-racism in a way that is digestible. I love, love, love that book. It’s beautiful and so fun.

I also think a very good introduction to this work would be So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo, really great book, again, really great introduction to the work in a way that is digestible. But she does not mince words so just be prepared for it to be direct but still very helpful and fruitful for you. Those are two books that I would highly recommend. Those are two good ones to start with.

Cindy Ingram: That’s good. This Book Is Anti-Racist one sounds perfect because I think a lot of people need a more beginner book like that.

Dani Coke: Yes, so fun. I love it.

Cindy Ingram: I love it. That’s good. We’ll put links to those in the show notes as well. We will also link to your website and your social channels. Can you tell listeners how they can connect with you online?

Dani Coke: Yeah, sure. You can find me everywhere at Oh Happy Dani and my website is ohhappydani.com.

Cindy Ingram: Okay. Last question, I ask this to every podcast guest and that is which artwork changed your life? It doesn’t have to be a visual artwork, I know you are talking about theater and different things too, so it can be anything.

Dani Coke: Yeah. Something came to mind immediately. The poem Our Deepest Fear by Marianne Williamson. Completely. From a child, I was in a girls empowerment group at the boys and girls club when I was growing up and they gave each of us that poem in a frame and I would read it every day. It really helped to this day, every single word is powerful and helpful. The lines that stick out to me the most even to this day is “There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that others don’t feel insecure around you.” There are so many times where I try to make myself small because I didn’t want to make other people uncomfortable and I see now how much of myself I was holding back from the world because of that. Now, in the season where I feel like people appreciate those things about me, it is just so liberating because I can freely pour out. I feel like anyone in any stage of life can relate to that as well, not shrinking for anyone.

Cindy Ingram: Yes. I have that actually a poster or two.

Dani Coke: Oh, my gosh, that’s so empowering.

Cindy Ingram: It’s so good. It does because I think that we’re taught, especially as girls, that you don’t want to stand out, you don’t want to be too much, you don’t want inconvenience at everybody with your strong opinions and strong feelings so you just have to keep them down and it just doesn’t work before, it’s just not the way we should be. It’s not the way change is made in the world and that’s not how you’re happy and that’s not how the people around you are fulfilled. That’s beautiful. I’ll find a link to that poem too and put that in the show notes as well because it is so good.

That was an amazing conversation. I am very inspired. I wish I had a class to teach right now to bring your art to, but I know that the people listening right now will do that and that would be so good. Thank you so much.

Dani Coke: Yeah. It’s been a pleasure. Thank you for having me and you’re awesome.

Cindy Ingram: Thank you.

If your art appreciation classes were anything like mine, they happen in dark rooms with endless slides and boring lectures. Art in the dark. But art appreciation doesn’t have to turn into nap time for your students. Start connecting your students to art with powerful class discussions. It can be intimidating to start talking about art with students, so teachers always want to know what they should say. The real question is what you should ask. You can get 82 questions to ask about almost any work of art for free on the Art Class Curator Blog. The free download includes the list of questions plus cards that you can cut out and laminate to use, again and again. These versatile questions can be used in everything from bell ringers to group activities to critiques. Just go to artclasscurator.com/questions to get your free copy today.

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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.

Hi everybody, it’s Cindy Ingram from Art Class Curator. Welcome back to the podcast. Today, for you, I have a session that I recorded for Call to Art. Call to Art was our conference that we created in the wake of the pandemic. We did Call To Art 1 in March 2020. We did Call to Art 2 in November of 2020. It was an amazing experience, bringing together a lot of educators from across the country. I think between the two of them, we had over 80 or 90 presenters. Tons of amazing presentations. The presentation that I am going to be sharing with you today on the podcast is called Rediscovering the Emotional Power of Art. In the video, I actually do show some artwork. You’ll hear me talk about the artwork. Maybe I’ll mention something on the screen. You’re able to get the content without the images. But if you would like to access this recording, as well as the other 90 plus presenters, you can still purchase the recordings for Call to Art. If you head over to artclasscurator.com/cta, you can still get access to those amazing, amazing sessions. Check that out. Without further ado, here is my presentation from the Call to Art 2 called Rediscovering the Emotional Power of Art.

Hello everybody, this is Cindy Ingram from Art Class Curator. As you probably know, I am obsessed with creating connections between works of art with people. Between your students and art, you and the art, between you and your students, and the art. All of that is so incredibly important to me. That is why I created Art Class Curator so that we could expand those connections across the world. Today, what I want to do is tell you a little bit about why you should show more works of art here to your students and also some of the connections that can happen, what we learned from looking at art, and how we learn from looking at art. I’m going to do that through some real world examples, of myself as an example. Hopefully, you can see the importance of showing art to your students. Then we are also going to cover some ways to increase these personal connections with works of art in our classroom. I’m excited to share that with you.

The title of my presentation is Rediscovering the Emotional Power of Art. I think that we can get lost, when we’re teaching, to focus on the making. The teaching of the elements and principles, the teaching of the skills, the teaching of the techniques, all of that is super important. All of those things we have to do. But there is a deeper emotional power to art. There is a personal connection, especially with looking at works of art. There are things that we can learn about ourselves, about other people through looking at and experiencing art that is so wonderfully amazing.

I have always felt a deep connection to art. I loved art class. I wanted to be a Disney animator. When I grew up, I was obsessed with Disney movies, especially The Lion King, which I’ll talk a little bit more about later. But it wasn’t until I was in junior high school where I actually saw art for the first time, like real art. I only have a memory of one artist that I learned about in art class and that was Matisse. We actually did the same project twice because I had the same art teacher in middle school and high school. She got a new job at the high school and did the exact same lesson plan. Anyway, I did the same project twice, learning about Matisse. But that was really the only artist that I had been really introduced to.

In high school, we had a teacher who took students to Europe every summer. It was a month long. You got college credit for it. He was really into art history. We visited all the museums. We learned about them before we went. We did all sorts of things. Then when I got to Europe that summer, I saw art for the first time. I was completely blown away because it really was at that time that I realized it wasn’t art that I wanted to make. It was art that I wanted to experience. It was those feelings of connecting with something that someone else made, that’s where my heart was. It wasn’t in the creation of the art. When I was there, I got to see these museums, I would see the tour guides, security guards were there and I was just like, “They get to be here every day. Their job is to stand by that art or their job is to teach about that art to the kids that come here.” I was so amazed by that. I got home. The same teacher who teaches the Europe trip did a humanities class for seniors that was an AP or history class and that’s where I really learned about all the art. I was just totally enamored with art history at that moment.

When I went to college, I got my degree in art history, then I started with the goal of working in art museums. That’s what I want to do. I wanted to be a museum educator because I always knew I was good at teaching and I found this love of art, so I thought this would be a perfect combination. I have this slide of all of my art history degree memes because art history majors know that you guys, we’re the laughingstock of the internet. Everyone’s like, “Oh, your history degree is worthless. You’re a barista.” All of that stuff. I got my history degree, started working in museums, then I was in the process of applying to get my PhD in art history because that’s what you do next. You get the degree in art history, you get the PhD. I was skipping my masters somehow. I think I was applying to programs where you could just get your masters and PhD at the same time.

Anyway, I was applying for that until I came across the artwork that really moved me for the first time. This was in 2004. All of the MoMa artworks were taken down because the MoMa was doing renovations. They sent all the artwork from MoMa to Houston, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. They had the Starry Night, they had all the Kandinsky’s, and the Dalí’s Persistence of Memory. All of that stuff was just a few hours from me because I was in Dallas. It was New Year’s day, we drove down in the morning, went to the exhibit, drove back at night because we were super broke. Me and my husband, we were super broke. We couldn’t afford a hotel room. We just did it in one day, just to go to this exhibit. When I get there, it’s really exciting. I got to see van Gogh’s, all this stuff, then I go in and I turn the corner, and I remember it so well, like exactly what this gallery looked like. There’s a doorway I turned in and to the right of me, I saw Picasso’s Girl Before A Mirror. It was like a punch in the stomach. All of the wind just left my body. It was just like this big heave. I saw it and it overtook me. It’s not like I had this deep love for this painting. I probably was peripherally aware that it existed but it wasn’t like this one that I was really excited about looking at. I like Picasso. I saw a Picasso exhibit at the Kimbell Art Museum a few years before. I liked his work, whatever I knew about it. This was like the star. I was really excited to see it.

I turned the corner, totally got the wind knocked out of me. I went to this painting and I could not leave it. I couldn’t step away from this painting. I cried. I stared. I analyzed every single inch of this painting. I was scared of it but I was just in awe of it. I was feeling all of the feelings that one person could possibly feel. I was just feeling them all. My husband was with me. He went through the entire rest of the exhibit, came back through, and I was still in front of this one painting. I couldn’t leave it. No one else was really looking at it either. They probably were wondering what the heck I was doing. There were a lot of people with the audio guides. Thankfully, this one wasn’t on the audio guide. They weren’t interested in it, how that goes.

When I’m walking through this artwork, when I left on the way home, I wrote a four page essay—I still have it somewhere—about my experience in front of this work of art. Not only did I have a lot of personal connections to it. I’ll talk about those a little bit later but what I ultimately left that experience with was that I realized that art was magic. Looking at art gave me the ability to feel my feelings in a way that I didn’t really understand because I’ve always been a very emotional person but I didn’t have a lot of emotional awareness or fluency to really know. I was always scared of my emotions. Growing up, it’s one of those things where you’re supposed to stuff down your emotions. You’re not supposed to talk about your emotions. Emotions are inconvenient to people. I’ve had a lot of years coming to terms with how to deal with emotions but at the time, I’m feeling everything.

Then I also realized what would happen if I get my PhD in art history, which is what I was applying to do? Would I lose that emotional impact that art had if I would spend a year studying this? Say I chose to write a thesis or dissertation on Picasso’s Girl Before a Mirror, would it still have the magic? Would it still have an emotional impact? If I knew too much, would I lose that feeling that I get when I look at a work of art? Would I lose that experiential moment of gasp? I left that. I completely scrapped my PhD plans in art history and decided to do art education instead because I want everyone else to have that experience too. I want everyone else to experience that magic that art has. Completely changed course because of this one experience.

I leave. I go about my life. I got my masters in art education rather than art history, then eventually landed in the classroom. Years in museums, started teaching college first, then I started teaching elementary, then I ended up teaching other things. I love talking and I taught online. I did all sorts of other teaching. This is my slide of faces from a photo shoot I did. I think it adequately represents teaching. The amount of emotions you feel in five minutes as a teacher is in all of this. I started to teach. I had this deep love of art. I wanted to give that to my students. I wanted to teach art history in a way that wasn’t boring, that wasn’t a lecture, that wasn’t just memorizing dates. I wanted my students to understand the capacity for greatness and magic, love, and emotional impact that you can feel with a work of Art. How a work of art can completely change the whole course of your life, I wanted my students to feel that.

I would take to the internet, creative ways to teach the renaissance or activities to do in front of a work of art, whatever it was, every time I would Google something, nothing came up. It was just constantly me Googling, nothing to find, creating it myself, me Googling, nothing to find, creating it myself until finally, I realized, “Hey, what I can do is I can create the thing that I want myself. I can make it.” That’s when I started Art Class Curator in 2014. I just started writing blog posts about all the things that I wanted to know about. I knew in my art history education and in all of that, I really was good to Western focus, so I started to research and learn about artworks from around the world, started to put that up on the blog, and started to take all these lessons I developed as a museum educator, as a teacher. I started to put those up on the blog, then I eventually created The Curated Connections Library, where I put all of that stuff in, then the SPARK Hybrid Learning Curriculum, which we created for this lovely pandemic situation that we’re in right now, then also SPARK Art, which is a homeschool course.

I took all of these things that I developed myself to create that emotional power. I put it into the Art Class Curator. That’s a little bit how I began. But what I want you to think about as you’re listening to this is in 20 years, what role do you want art to play in your students’ lives? Think about that question for a minute. Think about what your answer is. Settle in on that. I want you to realize that every single time I’ve asked this question of groups of teachers, and I’ve asked this question of groups of teachers countless times, nobody ever says, “I want them to understand a zigzag line. I want them to understand how to shade a sphere perfectly to make it look like that’s a shadow.” Those are some things that are fun to teach and learn. They’re necessary to some degree, but that’s not the end goal of your art curriculum. The answers I get to this are wide-ranging. You want them to embrace their creativity, you want them to have self-expression, you want them to understand they have an outlet, you want them to understand they’re not alone in the world and that art can be a peace and value in their life. There are so many other things that we want for our students. None of it, anytime I’ve ever asked this, is “I want them to be an artist.” Actually, that’s not even really ever brought up.

If they become an artist, that is awesome. That’s so cool. It can be like an artist, that’s their profession or it could be they make art on the side. We want that to be a part of their lives. But really in the end, art as a connection, art as a refuge, art as an expression, art as a piece of your life that has value, that is something we want all of our students to have as they live their lives. We know that art makes better people. We know that art will create more joyful people, more connected people, more empathetic people. That’s what we’re looking for in the art in our art education. As you’re creating lessons and as you’re thinking about this, really think like, “Is this going to reach the end goal?” We want to create memorable connective experiences. I could go on a rant but ultimately, what I realized in that moment with Picasso’s Girl Before a Mirror is that art is magic. That art has the ability to transcend and pierce into the soul of a person.

When we look at a work of art made by someone else, there is a lot that we’re learning. It’s more than just making something. It is understanding life and the human spirit. It is feeling emotions, expressing emotions, understanding emotions that other people have, then it is connecting to the past. It is connecting to other cultures. It is learning to look closely to be more aware, to be more observant. It’s helping our students solve problems and think critically. It’s helping them know themselves better. Because every time I look at a work of art and I have a powerful experience with it, there’s something about me that I learn. I think the ultimate goal of being a person is to grow into who you are, be who you are, and find yourself through your life. That’s what we’re all striving for. Art gives us a place to do that, to understand that. Art gives us focus, awareness, observation. I think so many of us are used to flashes and images. We quickly look and we move away. But when we slow down and we look at art, and we learn from art, it allows us to really focus our observation skills.

Think about our world that we live in now, Instagram, TikTok, all the things that’s like constant images going through our lives, non-stop all day long. Slowing down and looking at art, our students learn how to really understand how images are manipulating them. Understanding how images are used to accomplish a goal. This is something we really can teach our students to be aware of. Art also gives us higher level thinking skills. It allows us to have conversations about hard topics that we aren’t necessarily comfortable speaking about just outright. But using art as a tool to have those hard conversations makes it a little bit easier for us to embrace that as teachers and as people in general.

For example, on this slide here, we have Caravaggio’s Judith Beheading Holofernes and also, Gentileschi’s Judith Slaying Holofernes. I asked my students, “Which one was done by a man? Which one was done by a woman and why?” Then we have this discussion, then we end up having a vote. It’s usually always 50/50, 50% are right, 50% are wrong. They can have a discussion about gender bias. Why is a man more likely to depict a woman as more dainty, whereas, a woman is showing a woman more strong? What are all of these things that we’re thinking of and we’re making assumptions? All of this is happening and scrolling around in our head. We’re not not really aware of it. Having this conversation allows us to really think through that and process that in more powerful ways.

Looking at art creates empathy and helps you see through the lens of another person. You can’t really fully see the perspective of another person. Your lens, like what Brené Brown says, is your perspective. Your lenses are plastered onto your face. There’s no way you can take yours off and put somebody else’s on. But art allows us to glimpse into the life of another person and see how they’re living, see how they’re feeling, see how they process the world, what they’re thinking. Art says what can’t be said. You feel that when you’re looking at it. When we look at art, we’re learning empathy, connection, and respect. When you see artwork done by someone else across the world, you’re feeling their feelings, seeing how they feel, and you see ultimately, they’re just people like you are. That I think is really powerful for our students. Some of them live in such bubbles. They don’t leave their houses, where they’re at in their communities, to see that there are people outside that are just like them, living lives just like them, feeling feelings just like them.

Another thing that’s really powerful about work of art is embracing uncertainty. If you think about right now, in art history, we always have the answer to every question. I can just take this phone and I can get the answer to anything except for right now, I’m living in uncertainty because I’m in the middle of recording this during the presidential election. The votes have been cast but they haven’t been counted. There’s uncertainty there. But the same thing is no one can stand living in this uncertainty right now. But looking at a work of art and interpreting it, we have our own answer. When we look at artwork, our interpretation of that artwork is just as valid as whatever the artist said or the art historian or the person at the museum or the label, the art teacher, the other student who’s also looking at it. Everybody’s interpretation is just as valid and just as right because once the artwork leaves the artist’s hands, it becomes their own. We can’t just Google it because the answer is inside of us.

I think in so many situations in life, the answer is inside of us. It’s always inside of us. There isn’t an answer that we just go to. I think people right now, I say it all the time on Facebook where someone’s like, “Oh, I can’t decide what to do. What do I do?” They’ll post it on Facebook and they’ll get all the answers. They just need someone to give them the answer. I think by experiencing works of art, we can help our students understand that they’ve got the answers inside them. They don’t need to go looking for them.

Also, in this slide is curiosity and wonder. When we look at things that are interesting, new, and different, it just creates a sense of curiosity for the world and what else it has to offer us. Then my favorite one is understanding self. When you look at an artwork, like I already said, you learn bits of yourself that you didn’t know. It helps you reflect on your life in different ways. Let me show you some examples of that here in a little bit. All of this to say that students learn so much from looking at art. But right now, more than ever, because I’m filming this during the pandemic, we really need to support our students and their social emotional skills, social emotional learning, that understanding emotion, understanding what emotion is, articulating what emotions you’re feeling, being able to recognize it, all of that are such important skills in our life. When we connect with works of art, we can start to do that. We can start to name feelings. We can look at something that someone is experiencing in a work of art. We can start putting names to those feelings. We can say, “Well, when was the time when you felt that way?” Make that connection to the artwork yourself.

I’m a big Brené Brown fan. She has some research that she’s doing. I think there’s going to be a book about it but it hasn’t come out yet. She’s talked about it. This research is ongoing. I can’t wait till that book comes out. I was listening to Dare to Lead, that’s the most recent one I was reading. She said that there was research that they did. That most people can only recognize three emotions, anger, sadness, and joy or happiness. That was the average person’s emotional fluency, those three. But really, to be an emotionally literate person, to really exist in this world effectively, you need to be able to recognize 30 different emotions. This just blows my mind because you have 3 in 30. It makes me really empowered to think of how we can experience these emotions, how we can talk about them with our students.

Ultimately, I don’t know about you but from my personal experience, when I was a child, I was a very high achieving child. I was a straight-A student. I always wanted to do the very best. If I got a 93, I would be very disappointed in myself. Then I told you earlier that I was in a situation where emotions, we don’t talk about them. Those are not things we talk about. We stuffed them in. It took me 10, 15 years out of high school to start to untangle the effect of that, of not recognizing my emotions, stuffing all my emotions down, overachieving where I didn’t need to overachieve, and really come to terms with who I am, how I feel, what I am as per what is my purpose. I would have loved someone to tell me, “You’re feeling embarrassed. You’re feeling overwhelmed.” Teaching me that and to teach me that it’s okay to feel that would have saved me some emotional turmoil over those 15 years.

Anyway, we created, recently, a Feelings Wheel. We found all sorts of versions of this Feelings Wheel. The original one came from Dr. Gloria Willcox. We took the idea and created a new one for use with works of art. You can take this Feelings Wheel, you show it to your students, help them identify emotions and artworks. You can use it to help them identify emotions in themselves. If you want this download, artclasscurator.com/feelings, you’ll find that Feeling Wheel there so that you can download it and use it in your classroom.

Social emotional skills, super, super important right now. I say all of this, what art teaches you, the empathy, the connection, the respect, all of those things, it’s very abstract. I can say that and you go like, “Oh yeah, okay, I get it. Sure.” All those things help but I’m now going to show you some actual examples of things that I learned in front of works of art. A few years ago, I was teaching a lesson on German expressionism. That was the overall topic for the day. In the first activity for the lesson, we were looking at Franz Marc’s The Fate of the Animals. I was leading a discussion about it. We were talking about the typical visual thinking strategies, asking questions, sharing thoughts, talking about the lines and the colors, all those sorts of things. Then one of my students—this was an online teaching, I used to teach online for a period of time—she put in the chat, she said, “What are we learning here? How does this relate to art?” If you’ve just seen me, I was like, “Oh well, this is art. That is a work of art. You were in art class. We were looking at it and we were talking about it. That’s it.”

But ultimately, the students don’t necessarily know this is happening. I started to think about that too, I was like, “Without concrete examples, you too might really not see the power that artwork can have on a person.” I’m going to share with you some of my examples of artworks that have had powerful connections with me personally, then what do we do with that? How do we create the environment in our classrooms to create that experience for our students so that when they’re my age or when they’re 24 or when they’re whatever age they’re at, they’re primed to have these experiences and really you’ve built the groundwork for them to have art be that power in their lives.

Before I tell you some of my stories, I want you to really think about what your art story is. I always ask in the podcast, “What artwork changed your life?” I love the answers to this question because they are so wide-ranging. I’ve been doing a lot of research, doing some interviews of different people, asking them this question, having them share with me a powerful art experience, then I have been taking notes, I have been making some conclusions. I’m doing a lot more on that. This is really early in the process. I can’t wait to share with you. Down the line, there will be some more things that come out relating to that research that I’m doing. But what I want you to do is think about your art story. Think about how it felt in your body when you saw the artwork the first time. What thoughts did you have and what feelings did you have? You had the physical sensations, you had the emotions, you had the thoughts of all of that. All of those things are tied together. Thoughts reflect your feelings. Feelings reflect your thoughts. Your body responds to all of it. That’s all embedded together. Think about what that is, then how did it impact you after it was over? What did you think about it? Then a week later, a year later, five years later, what impact did that art experience have on your life?

I want you to really think about that. If you’re here with me, I’ll have you close your eyes. We would all close our eyes and think about it together. If you want to stop and pause, maybe journal this, maybe you can reach out to me and schedule an interview with me, and tell me about it because I would love to hear about your powerful art experience because that’s my jam. Please do that if you have a story to tell. Think about that art story. I have had many of these art experiences. Honestly, you never know what it’s going to be. I have gone to museums. I’m open to having a really amazing experience today. I don’t know what it’s going to be. You might think, “Oh, I’m really going to see this one work of art, that’s really why I’m here.” Then the one next to it grabs me and knocks me over. You never know what it’s going to be.

I’m going to share you some personal art experiences that I’ve had. Often, my art experience is not the real interpretation of the artwork. An example here, we have Henry Koerner, My Parents II. I saw this in Minneapolis, at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. I saw it. It was beautiful. The colors immediately grabbed me, the golden of it. It made me think of my own grandparents. All my grandparents had passed by this point. I saw the two paths, it made me think of Robert Frost’s poem of the two roads that diverged in the yellow wood and I took the one less traveled by. When I was a child, I was obsessed with poetry. I love all things, art, music, dance, theater, all of it but I love that poem. I had that poem memorized. I don’t know why. No one asked me to. I just did it. But I don’t have it memorized anymore. “I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.” That’s probably all I know from this point. But anyway, I saw that poem in there because that’s a poem for my past. Then when you look at an artwork, depending on where you are in your life, you’re going to experience a different thing, depending on what’s going on in your life. I have an example of that in a minute.

All that said, that was my connection with this artwork. The label had no information. It said Henry Koerner, My Parents II, 1946. That’s all it is. I go home and I like to just share art experiences on the Art Class Curator website and on social media or in email. I remember at the time, I would do Artwork of the Week features and I would just share an artwork, and write about it. I wrote about this one. I looked it up, did some research. I learned the real interpretation, what it’s actually about, then I shared my own interpretation, the feelings I had when I looked at it. Sure enough, people on the internet, they love to do this, someone emailed me back and was just like, “How dare you talk about that other stuff, about this artwork when it really was about this?” What it is about is Henry Koerner lost his parents in the Holocaust. They were separated and they both died in concentration camps. But that whole interpretation, that whole meaning that artist had is not mine. I didn’t have my parents die in the Holocaust. When I saw this painting, I experienced a love for my grandparents. It just connected me with them. It made me think of them. It made me think of that poem. I’m not saying that’s the right interpretation, but that was the one I had and that was the connection I had.

My interpretation is just as right as anybody else’s. Just remember that. You don’t know what the connection’s going to be, you don’t know that’s what you’re going to feel when you see the artwork, you don’t know what’s going to make you feel. It could be just that particular color of gold reminds you of something random that you just weren’t expecting. You have to open yourself up to that and then you have to not be judgmental about that. You can’t judge me for having an interpretation of this painting because that’s what art is, it’s interpretation. That’s what life is, is interpretation. That’s a whole nother thing.

Same thing with van Gogh I have on this slide, a lot of people have a lot of fond emotions towards this painting. They have a lot of connection to it or it’s like the painting they really love, it brings them a lot of joy. But then we know that van Gogh was feeling really anxious when he made it, he was in a mental hospital when he created this. This was his view through the window. We really have to keep that in check that there’s no pretentious right here, there’s no “I know more about art than you because I read about this one, I read the label, I listened to whatever it is about that artwork.” The connection is between me or you, or your student, or whoever’s looking at that artwork and the artwork. That is the relationship so there’s no way that relationship can be wrong. Keep that in mind.

If I say something that you’re like, “Well, that’s not what it’s about,” check yourself because that’s not what art’s about and I think that is so important that we translate that to our students that they realize they have the ability, they have everything they need to experience the art in whatever way they want to experience it. You’re going to help them to develop the tools to look at it more deeply, you’re going to teach them how to look for the line and the color and how that impacts the meaning. You’re going to teach them about symbolism and how to look for symbolism and all that, but ultimately in the end, their experience is their experience no matter what. My experience is my experience no matter what. You can’t change that.

I feel like I’m going on a lot of soapboxes here but here we go, I’m going to share with you just a few of the artworks that have had a really strong emotional connection with me. I say the first powerful art experience was Picasso’s Girl before a Mirror but that’s really the first artwork, like I’m at a museum and there’s painting experience. But really, the first aesthetic experience I had was with The Lion King. I was in eighth grade when Lion King came out and I lived in Amarillo, Texas. At that time, there was a dollar theater right around the corner from my house. I don’t think it’s there anymore, actually I haven’t been back to Amarillo in many years but anyway, I would walk to the dollar theater every weekend, all the time, and we would see whatever was there. But Lion King, I saw 12 times at the theater because I was obsessed with Lion King. I knew all the animators, which characters they did, and all the different Disney Movies, Aladdin, and all the ones that came before Lion King. But every time I saw Lion King, I would cry when the giraffes would bow in the Circle of Life. Every time. It still gets me.

Then I look back and at the time, I thought it was just because I loved animation and I loved Disney. I wanted to be an animator and I wanted to write music too. I was just like, “Oh, I’ll animate and I’ll write the score,” that’s the overachiever I was. But anyway, I would have this emotional reaction every time and I realize that now looking back, I was having an art experience, I was connecting emotionally with what someone else made and then I was seeing that giraffe bow and it was so awkward and wonderful and I just felt so awkward in eighth grade. I was just a mess of a person in middle school and seeing I just felt part of something. I could see that in the art and so I learned that I was part of something when I was watching The Lion King.

Then of course, I already told you about this one and how it changed the trajectory of my career, but this one also had a very strong impact on me personally, because like that giraffe that was awkwardly bowing, I’ve always felt other, like different. Not so much anymore but there was this feeling that I was an outsider and really, that’s another Brené Brown thing is that belonging is a really core thing that humans need to feel to feel safe. I just always felt like I didn’t belong.

I also felt that I was trying to control everything in my life and trying to feel put together, trying to be ambitious, trying to show and prove, and all this stuff, but the inside of myself was just this swirling emotional, dramatic thing. I would look at one of the things I thought about. When I looked at this painting, when I looked in the mirror, who I felt like I was on the inside isn’t who I am trying to portray on the outside and that there are two people, there is the facade, there is who I’m portraying myself to be and then there’s who I actually am. I felt when I looked at this, that’s this battle that I was experiencing.

That was in 2004. I went back and got to see this painting again for the second time 10 years later in 2014 and I had a very similar experience. I was very excited to see it again because it was the first time I ever traveled to New York. I was really excited to be there and I saw the painting again and I had more emotions about it. This is actually me tortured to take a picture next to it. I felt like I had to. But I had another similar experience. I had done a lot of self-development. I’d come so far in understanding who I was. I felt more whole inside of myself than I ever had. That year was the year I started Art Class Curator just two months after I started this website, but I’m looking at this painting again and it’s a similar experience of who I am on the inside, it’s not honing in on the outside. I’m going to start crying. Looking in the mirror and seeing something not what you’re expecting to see, not what you feel inside, I felt that way about this artwork again. It’s just that experience of every time you see something, it changes.

That time was a very pivotal moment in my life. You can see I look a little bit different than I did back then, like I said, I started this business, lost a bunch of weight, and I’m slowly getting to the point where who I am on the inside and who I am on the outside, ultimately, it doesn’t matter but I feel more whole I guess, than I ever did. Anyway, that artwork really allowed me to look into who I am, see myself, and learn about myself in different ways.

Then another artwork, this was actually the last artwork, one of the last museum visits I made before the pandemic started and it’s November and I haven’t been in a museum since and this is February, isn’t that devastating? But anyway, this one, I looked at and she was larger than life. I wish I knew the measurements but she was probably a good four feet taller than I am. She’s huge and she’s awesome.She’s such a badass. She’s strong, magical, powerful, and fierce but she’s hunched over and looking down. I’m looking at that, I’m like, “Stand up. Show your power. Show who you are.” Then I was like, “Oh, wait a minute, what is this telling me about me? Am I not showing my power?” I’m looking at this and it helps me see something in me. This was actually at the end of a weekend that I was emotionally vulnerable, I was spending some time with some of my business mastermind group and there was a lot of vulnerability and different things.

I was feeling really raw when I saw this. I could really feel into this experience with this artwork. It taught me a little bit about me. I have a lot of examples. I’m going to click through some of them, like just this last one. I realized this artwork gave me a lot of anxiety. It made me realize that I like things to be orderly and in control. It was really hard for me to look at this. This was when I learned that life can and art can be fun. It doesn’t have to be so serious. You can just go and have a good time. I laughed my head off this entire exhibit, Nina Katchadourian was so funny.

But the last one I’m really going to share with you—I could talk about art experiences all day so that’s why I say email me, tell me about yours because I’d love to talk about art experiences—but one of my great loves is Hamilton. You can see I have a Hamilton Playbill over there signed. I’ve seen Hamilton three times live. Every time I’ve seen it, where I was in my life made me feel differently about Hamilton and I responded to different parts of the story each time I saw it. The first time I saw it, it was at a moment—in 2016, 2017, I don’t remember—it was a moment of my life, I was working full time as a teacher and I was running the website full-time. It was enough work now, the website took full-time work creating the content, the emails, all the things and I was teaching and I was feeling like I had been putting my heart and soul into my website but I wasn’t really seeing any success from it, I’m still working two jobs, I’m still really stressed out and so I really emotionally responded to Aaron Burr’s character. Every time he sang, I would just weep and weep every time he sang. You could see his emotions grow through it and wait for it. All this stuff, he was just patient, waiting and waiting for his time.

I’m looking back, I don’t think I realized at the time, that’s probably what I was responding to because that’s how I was feeling in my life at the time, because I was feeling like when is it going to be my turn? When is this going to work? Because it wasn’t really working just yet. But then, the first time I saw it in Chicago, then I saw it in Houston and it was one within a week of a school shooting that had happened outside of Houston. It was in a small town outside of Galveston, which is right there, where it just happened. I am watching the scene of Hamilton—spoiler alert, if you haven’t watched it, it’s history so hopefully it’s not going to impact you too much, you can pause it if you don’t want to hear this, anyway—it was the time when Hamilton’s son was shot in the duel and there’s this scene and it’s spinning around and Philip is dying on the table, Eliza is over him and they’re crying and they’re singing and I realized at that same time that less than an hour from where I was physically, mothers were crying over their children who had died by gunfire.

This is the second time I’m tearing up in this presentation, but I don’t allow myself to follow the news too carefully, I don’t watch a lot of news or listen to a lot of news. I just read the headlines, I get the basic information that’s going on in the world. I have to emotionally protect myself from that. I hadn’t really allowed myself to really feel the pain of all the school shootings. At that moment, art gave me that vehicle as a way to feel what I was feeling about it. I kept trying full on, until like 30 minutes after it was over, I couldn’t stop, but it gave me that place and it gave me that outlet. It felt safe to feel that. It felt more in control to feel it but I still got to feel it.

Then the third time I saw it was a really more happy time in my life and it was really joyful and all the Schuyler sister songs I loved. That was what brought me the most joy was the Lucky to be Alive song, all of those songs. Really, art changes and we change. It is always evolving. You could see something one day, it doesn’t strike you at all. You can see something a week later or a year later, and then it could be completely different for you. That’s what’s so powerful about art.

Now I can go on, I’ve got more, but I’m not going to do it. Oh, but this one, this is another one. I saw it and then at the same time, in Syria, there were a bunch of refugees. There was a bombing in Aleppo. On social media, there were all these videos of people fleeing and people holding their children and crying and wailing and they were covered in ash. That had just been going on in the news and then I saw Guernica, it’s all I could see. I was like, “This is real life. This is the pain of real life in art.” That’s really what Picasso was coming at. He was taking his pain from real life. It’s the only political work of art he ever did. Everything was mothers and children, and Still Life, and stuff like that. Then he creates this as just a way to process and also take a stand politically. But man, this one wrecked me.

Anyway, I’m not going to show you all of the examples but I hope you can see and I hope you’re thinking through hearing these experiences, that it is such a personal thing. What I’m trying to accomplish here is that you think about how you are personally connecting to art, where are you using art, and how are you connecting to art and what are you learning about through art. I want you to really sit and think about that. If you aren’t, think about how you can add that into your life because one, I think everybody needs that and two, if we are not ready to experience art like that for ourselves, how are we going to get our students to do that? I really want you to think, I challenge you to find those connections through art and make it happen for yourself.

All that said is then how do we then take this, how do we prime our students to have these life-giving personal connections to works of art? What do we do to make that happen? Like I said, I am doing a bunch of research on this and I’ve come up with a few different avenues that we can try and that can help or that could potentially lead to this and that is in four different environments: in the student themselves, in the classroom environment, in your pedagogy—how you’re doing your teaching—and in the actual curriculum itself. We’re going to go through each of those really quickly and talk about how we can prime our students to have these powerful personal connections to works of art.

In my research that I’ve been doing, I’ve been reading some articles, interviewing people, still in progress like I said, what the student needs to have—and I got this based on, like I said, the interviews and things I’ve been doing—but the student should have more self-awareness, be able to see themselves and see who they are, how they feel, what they want, really be connected with who they are. I think that is the ultimate goal, like I said, of a person. Self-awareness is huge. Emotional literacy, we already talked about that too, being able to recognize and acknowledge the different feelings that they are experiencing and how to name them, being able to recognize them to other people, how to name them. Visual literacy, being able to look at and name things and observe things. This stuff we can work on in art, we can look at more artwork. The more they look at it, the more they’re going to develop those visual literacy skills.

Curiosity is a really important thing. The more you know, the more you want to know. Being curious about the world will allow you to make those connections. If you see something and you just want to know more, you want to think about it more, that’s a really important skill even, I would say, that the students would need. They need courage. You need to have that bravery to step forward and be like, “Yes, I can talk about these things. I can think about these things. I can allow myself to feel these things.”

That’s in the student. There’s not a whole lot we can do about a lot of the stuff but there are things we can do. Then in the classroom, we need a passionate, enthusiastic, and connected teacher. I’m not telling you to go, pretend to be enthusiastic when you’re not actually. You need to be authentically you. But you can be authentically you and passionate about what you’re teaching, connected to the art, connected to the topic, enthusiastic about what you’re teaching. That will rub off on your students. If you pick a super boring work of art to teach about, they’ll know that you’re not interested, they’ll know that you don’t see this really as valuable, if you’re just doing it because you have to. Find that passion, find that connection to your why, find that connection to your art and why you’re doing this in the first place.

Also in the classroom, we need a safe and connected space. We need students to know that all people are accepted, all ideas are accepted, that we can be wrong, we can take risks, we can make mistakes, all of that stuff. You want to model passion, joy, delight, and curiosity when someone in your classroom says something about an artwork that is interesting. You are amazed by, delighted by, you want to show them that what they have to say is valuable, what they have to say is important and interesting to you. Then we want a classroom where it is okay, I think I already said this one, is embracing uncertainty with the permission to be wrong, that there is, like I said, when interpreting art, no wrong if you feel that. Who’s to say it’s wrong? We can’t do that.

Then in our pedagogy, in the way we teach, we need to do connection and conversation over lecture and information, memorizing dates, boring biographies of artists, where they went to school. Yes, knowledge is good and interesting, but we have to strike that balance of why are we teaching what we’re teaching? Is time better spent connecting and having conversations than just the giving of information? We need our pedagogy to be open-minded, open-ended, and then have engaging connected activities. You’re writing creative writing about artworks. You’re moving your bodies. You’re listening to music and connecting it to art. You’re doing all of the things that are interesting and engaging with an artwork.

Then last in your curriculum. I come to terms with this over the last few years, as a person who sells curriculum to teachers, curriculum isn’t everything. A good lesson plan is not everything, you need to have the other stuff. You need to have the passion, the enthusiasm, the connection, the relationships, the emotional availability, the vulnerability, all of those things. But also you need to have a curriculum that reflects all of that too. There’s a balance.

Exposure to diverse art. We don’t want to just show. It’s funny I put on this slide, there’s a really traditional renaissance painting, that’s funny, I was just putting pictures of people looking at art, diversity of art from across time and across cultures. We need to expose our students to wide-ranging facets of human creation, of what humans are and what they’ve created and who they are. Then above and beyond that, not just showing diverse artwork and artists, but also representing the students that you are teaching. Students need to see themselves in the art. They’re going to be more likely to make a connection to an artwork if they see themselves in it. Imagine that it was Picasso’s Boy Before Mirror, would I have had the same emotional power or connection to it if it was a boy? Because I’m not a boy. Think about that, you need to think about representing the students in your classroom. If you have a classroom that is 95% black students, most of the art you show should be black artists, and should have black people in it. It should be connected to who they are. You do want diversity, you want to show it all, but they need to see themselves in the artwork. That is very important.

One of the interesting things that came out of my interviews that I’ve done is that a lot of people had more strong emotional connections to artworks that they knew about, that they knew about the artist, they knew about the painting, something that they knew about. I didn’t like this, I didn’t want this on here to be completely honest, but it was there, it’s showing up, again this is not super scientific research I’m doing right now, but I think that just like I said with curiosity, the more you know, the more you want to know, that is really the key here. It’s not necessarily giving them knowledge for the sake of having knowledge but that it is exposing them to the wider array of knowledge, of what knowledge is, and how all these histories that then opens you up to be curious to know more and to be more ready to accept that emotional connection to it. That’s in there.

In the curriculum, we want social emotional learning. Like I said, it’s not, “Oh, I have to be a rigor, academic, learning things to put to the test. We can find those social emotional connections. Some districts and states actually have social emotional standards now, which I think is really cool and I’m looking forward to that becoming more widespread. Then visual literacy, which I had on another slide as well. It was there twice, it was on the student one too, but I guess the curriculum should have that and then that’s taught to the student. It’s in both.

I hope it really sinks in that art is power and art is magic. Art is emotion, art is feeling. It’s something somebody made. Someone touched and created it so that someone else could look at it and enjoy it. A lot of art was made purely personal from the artist but even then, once it leaves them, it becomes a piece of this world and a piece of the people who look at it. That connects us with other people and that is so powerful. I want you to think about this, as you’re planning your curriculum, as you’re thinking about what you’re going to do in your classroom, let’s imagine one child, they have three art teachers, elementary, middle, and high, that are dedicated to looking at art, talking about it and showing art to their students. Imagine that every month, as an elementary student, once a month, it’s doable, they look at one artwork per month, kinder through fifth grade. Then that student goes on to middle school, say they only take two semesters of art in middle school, some take less, some take more, but let’s say they do two semesters. They do one hour per week since they’re seeing them every day. It’s doable, one artwork per week. We love artwork of the week over at Art Class Curator, and then they go to high school, do one artwork for one year.

Say they do all of that, one artwork per month, kinder through five, one artwork per week for a year for middle, one artwork for one year for high school. That student has looked at 120 artworks. They have done creative writing around it, they have done movement activities, they have discussions, they’ve had the hard conversations, they’ve done personal reflections, they’ve done all of that with these 120 works of art. Then imagine that student going through their lives having all of that in them. They’re not going to remember every single one of those artworks but they’re going to go into their world, they’re going to be like old friends in their head, and they’re going to see something at a museum that will connect them something they learned and that is going to prime them for a lifetime of connection to art.

Really, I hope that you embrace this mission of showing more art to your students, showing more diverse art to your students, having more connected experiences with works of art where the student is doing the connecting, the thinking, not the teacher doing the telling, what a powerful experience that could be in this world. Because that famous quote from John Butler, “Art changes people, people change the world.” I 100%, wholeheartedly agree with that, that art can make a difference in this world. You as an art teacher know that and we can continue this life-changing mission to expose our students to more works of art so they can have these moments that I’ve articulated here today.

Thank you so much for making it through this presentation and for joining me on this mission. Please, again, reach out to me if you want to share your art story with me because I would absolutely love to hear it. Wonderful. Thank you so much. Have a great day. Bye

All right. That is my episode for you today. Again, that was my presentation for Call to Art 2 which was rediscovering the emotional power of art. If you’re interested in checking out the recordings for Call to Art, again, you can head on over to artclasscurator.com/cta, and that will give you the ability to watch all of those amazing presentations. We have things on making sketchbooks, on diversity, on classroom management, on all sorts of topics. Not just related to distance learning but to the wide array of things that our teachers care about. Again, artclasscreator.com/cta.

What’s keeping you from showing more artwork to your students? Do you get stuck trying to choose a work of art or do you fear your students will ask a question that you don’t know the answer to? Have you tried to start a classroom art discussion but didn’t know what to say or how to get your students talking? Are you worried you’re going to spend a ton of time researching and planning a lesson that none of your students are interested in? That’s why we created Beyond the Surface, a free professional development email series all about how to teach works of art through memorable activities and thoughtful classroom discussions. With Beyond the Surface, you’ll discover how to choose artworks your students will connect with, and learn exactly what to say and do to spark engagement and create a lasting impact. Plus, you’ll get everything you need to curate these powerful learning experiences without spending all of your time planning. Sign up to receive this free professional development email course at artclasscurator.com/surface.

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