Why Art? (Reposting)

When I was in training, in university, my Art Education teacher Bill Thomas once said something to the effect that if we can connect the home, and world in that home of the student, to our projects in an art room-if we can glimpse who the student is-then our lesson design was doing something profound.

He was teaching how to design starting points for children's work as an art educator. Something we needed fieldwork to experience and understand but those days were in front of us. And indeed over my many years working as teacher and artist, art teacher,  I saw the bridge, but rarely.
He understood the elusive edge. To connect to who that child is, that was his point.

One time I glimpsed it I had set up an "Olympics" for a wild two classes- days and days of events that I ran with two 6th grade classes-Mrs. S abandoning her kids to me at the end of the year, and my having everything from ringtoss to how high can you reach, along with more traditional events I one by one ran for medals I made out of yarn and tag. How was this art?
We did manufacture the medals as I recall now, but at the cardboard covered pavement art came to exist. And not even at the chalkdrawing competition. A student, Kevin, came to the dance off, where it was 12 girls and a great breakdancer from my class who could easily go to LA and dance on the Santa Monica pier for money. Armed with his expensive and going to be ruined tap shoes, Kevin waded into some pretty determined kids. He was a student in S's room- student getting the A's but often teased by his class, sometimes unmercifully for certain things like his love of and collection of pewter. (which we shared btw as a passion). He came and bar none in my Life-in a dancing family-tapped with the greats-it was barrel rolls that topped my daughter's who stunned her studio. No one had ANY idea he was a competitive tapper, and almost no kid had ever seen tap dance. Great way to learn it exists. He brought his own player and I had to jerry-rig extension cords as I recall. I have never seen talent in a leotard to match that. Every child there had never seen a guy in a leotard in our barrio. And he took dance, the art that it is, and killed it.
No one looked at Kevin the same way, that I can tell you.

I saw this as the potentials, home lives, abilities we never tap in school, that art bridged.

My husband had a short little conversation maybe two years ago with a person in his district that was working in the library. We lost librarians before my career started. I suppose librarian clerks at minimal wages are forced to do what training and degrees might help, but she expressed a desire to do some art with kids, and he HEARD her. She began and he encouraged her setting up, or supporting her trying something in her library art connected.
He decided around this time after re-instituting full music programs, within his district, to pursue art as well as music teachers. He hired art teachers, with the support of Board and district,  and one new hire at the last second left, leaving him with a year starting and no art teacher. (Totally professional she had applied and taken one job while working out another.) That turned out to be the best thing that ever happened for children because the district team put into place that library clerk, she had some ed training, degree, and a hunger to teach art. Now her blog might say this better than I can, if you can scroll it.
createelrio.wordpress.com 
I go there and just literally laugh with the joy of it. (or here https://twitter.com/MrsGuzik)

If you look through her year so far, the images you will SEE play, invention, support of core standards, art ed principles, joy, delight, connection, bridges to culture, samples of  recurrent themes, her adjusting to student levels, you'll pretty much take a course in what an art teacher can do K-8.
If you can scroll with time you'll see how over time she is changing and her students are changing. In short, I'm looking somewhat at myself early in my career-if I had one heck of a cognitive boost and a camera.
AND I see her pulling her children through art movements, art history too with pieces like her recent POP art volcanoes, or the works studying Kandinsky. Since art is embedded in culture, since in the 20th century it drove us forward through massive wars, change, technological growth-you see her students glimpsing the enormity that is "man".

What is man? Who are we? What is the reason?
These things have lined the inner world of artist and humans since time began. I would venture that right this minute as folks around our world are deciding life is something to be blown apart, hurled, to crush the other-as these themes are reverberating we COULD look at what was spawned when a version of that paralyzed our grandparents in the 1950's. as nuclear war loomed and drills for potential nuclear disaster hit, even in schools, as folks dug and lead walled a room in the backyard, art sprang forward with the abstract expressionists.
My brother just the other day commented on Pollock. He still feels his approach as a laziness, a gesture. A cheat.
And I think, when life is meaningless and a man contemplates with his brotheren mass extinction, what image captures that inner awareness. So I know the students sitting before me in my little TK, given the bridge to the arts may well represent to their peer group one day the times we are in. And in doing so, help us once more to work on, who are we? Why are we here? To make visual and give meaning to the hidden.

These young art teachers who largely do not exist thanks to NCLB, thanks to the painter George Bush's policies, may well help us to examine our feet in a tub of hotwater as Bush has, help us to put our relationship to one another into portrait form. Help us move into reality and out of our head. Art is ultimately on the plain of doing. It is zen, it is movement, form, feeling, systems, structures, it is both language and meaning, metaphor embedded in actual physical reality. It serves a broader purpose so necessary to human life. It is a bridge to experience, planet, others, emotion, meaning.
When I was young we were satified saying "art is."

If I put a sign on my door tomorrow, at my school, with permission of course, or not, "art classes at two thirty" adults and children welcome- within a few days I would not be able to sit the crowd. As we made things together I'd have to have the Monday folks, the Tuesdays, the Wednesdays and so on. I doubt I could affort the supplies though I'd try. And I'd be carried along into something I'd do even if exhausted, sick, and not feel anything but the excitement. Of course I know this. And from engineer's child to the child of the mom with a second grade education the playing field would be level enough we could start and learn from one another.

One time I thought about rocks. I pictured rocks one could hold in your hand, worry stones. My husband that year asked me as he always does to suggest and teach his summer school art, for about two hundred kids. He sent out his head custodian to get me some stones, and he did. In came these gigantic, rounded many ton rocks. Hundreds. So we painted rocks with acrylic and sealant in exuberant  sessions on long, long tables covered with bright paper. I can imagine we spent a fortune on the paint, but we really took all my craft paint from years of saving it. And bought some too. Children produced amazing garden stones and after sealed and displayed I went back home enjoying summer, while they lined areas of the school garden, and rocks went home on buses in what I would call a rather questionable moment in his thinking. But I suppose my point is-within the happening adults to child, community was created. No one forgets it.Not worry at all. Not a bit.

Art is happening. 
Art is love, it is all you feel, it is a training, a passion, a compulsion, a precision, a methodology, a core of your humanity.

It would be amazingly great to see it returned to our children so they can gift us with a tomorrow that can consider itself.