How to…Traditional Arts in Schools?
Posted on February 1st, 2008 by MAC staff
One of the best ways to make sure an adult appreciates the significance of traditional arts is to expose him or her to traditional arts as a young child. In doing so, the child not only becomes more apreciative and knowledgeable of the art itself, but of the culture that spawned the art, and that culture’s significance in his or her community. What do you think is the best way to bring traditoinal arts into Maine schools?
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This is a huge question in terms of the breadth of possibilities. It is also the kind of question that can potentially be more powerful in a public forum setting.
The basic response to the question has to do with the resources in any given area. Some towns have major museums. Others have art galleries. Others have active artists. Some have all of these resources. Very few places in Maine are completely free of all of them.
As a product of the Waterville public schools who turned to art as a passion and profession, I know what helped me to develop my love of art. It had more to do with exposure to art and the opportunity for looking than the art classes in which we were all expected to produce. We had murals in the schools, the museum at Colby, etc.
I think it’s important for kids to learn to look at art and develop their visual intelligence. I thinnk we suffer from the American post-war bias (it’s recent) of focusing on self-expression over learning to see art within a cultural context. It would be like if we did away with reading classes and replaced them all with writing classes.
Learning to look at art, getting experience looking at it, and trying to understand art is a wonderful thing: art has been so popular through the ages mostly from the broader cultural experience of it - not the making.
What’s nice about focusing more on learning to look than we have is that it is very easy to get the materials: images are everywhere and it’s a great way for kids to develop descriptive and creative language. In this day of the internet and television, graphic design is everywhere and we are deluged by visual information and culture. Visual education is more important than ever.
As well, we have an unusual number of incredible collections of visual art available to the Maine public, beginning with but not limited to, the Portland Museum of Art, the museums at UMO, Colby, Bates, Bowdoin & USM, the Farnsworth and many, many others.
Going out of our way to put pictures on the walls and talking to the kids about the work is a great way to increase their ability to understand and enjoyment of visual art. It’s also a great way to introduce them to the contents of our museums - it’s always more fun for kids to see works in musems that they have seen before.
I am in no way playing down the art making part of education in Maine, but it’s tougher, costs more, and has less of an everyday impact on how our schoolchildren interact with visual culture (I would say the opposite about how I was educated in language - we spent too much time reading and not enough time working on writing). It’s also easier for kids to make art when they have developed some visual intelligence. Otherwise, they are often merely learning some process to which they will only have access once or twice in that classroom.
Another critical element is to teach kids and their families about the public resources for visual art in Maine. Art galleries, for example, are free to the public to visit at any time - and, unlike museums, there is always someone there to answer questions and shows tend to change every month or so. There are free nights at the museums for the public. There are also art exhibitions in places like coffee shops - public spaces that are much more kid-friendly and less intimidating to guardians. There are also listing resources for where such shows and resources are. The gallery and studio guides are free and have many great pictures and articles. And they inform the public about what is going on.
Frankly, web sites and forums like this one could be the perfect way to kick start visual resources for educators in Maine: just starting with a list of museums and maybe some suggested works of art that would be good for kids to see and talk about.
Let me clarify and focus the discussion some , if I may. When I refer to “traditional arts,” I am speaking of “folk arts.” These are arts that are handed down in an informal fashion through day-to-day living. What is the best way to bring these arts into the classroom?
–Keith
You might want to further clarify the notion of “folk arts” since what I understand by that term is local, indigenous art that, by definition, is not taught in the schools.
In the Waterville public schools, especially through my French classes, we were exposed to French Canadian culture: especially poetry, music and food.
Can you give some specifics? Are you talking about broader world cultures such as from south east asia or africa?
I am retired but taught K-8 at All Saints Catholic in Bangor and private students and classes to ages 5-80 at Netcasters Studio for over 30 years. It is my opinion that the doing of art is what quickly gets the child or adult interested in art. Both the doing and seeing - discussing are important. One teaches the child that they can do art. The other teaches what has already been accomplished and the foundation to build on. Many of my students have accomplished much in art. They taught me the need for both.
I am retired now but taught for 23 years at All Saints Catholic in Bangor. I also taught and owned Netcasters Studio where I taught age 5-80 private lessons or classes. They need both the chance to do art themselves and the chance to see art in Galleries and Museums etc. The latter teaches what has been accomplished in art over time and where they might see pieces of themselves as artists. The former teaches that they can do art and do it well. They become part of the art world when they do and observers when they see. Many of my students have succeeded in the Art World in some form.
One way to bring the Traditional arts into the schools is to teach them. I am currently searching for an art teaching position. One of the lesson plans I am have on my list to teach is the simple art of plant pressing, yes it is an art. The plants can also be used in artwork along with the students learning to appreciate the plants, they will learn about them. This lesson is a mix of art, and biology.
If Traditional art means “folk art” then why not call it folk art? I thought ceramics was a traditional art form, being that ceramics have been around since the dawn of civilization, but when I considered applying for a traditional arts grant, a few years ago, I was asked to justify that ceramics is a traditional art. I didn’t apply for the grant, mainly for unrelated reasons, but the fact that I would have to convince the jury that ceramics is a traditional art form left me less than inspired to expend my energies on such efforts.
The question is, if ceramics is not a traditional art. Then what is it? In a recent conversation, I was told that ceramic is a “commercial art”, which is different from the “business of art ” that was discussed in a workshop by the Maine Arts commission. The workshop focused on the high end art market, found in major cities, which is synomynous with what is referred to as “blue chip art”, which is art that sells for a great deal of money.
“Blue chip art” can be anything, including oversized reproductions of Jeff Koons and his former wife, an Italian (word censored by MAC) star, in sexual relations, which is a show that was shown at a major New York Gallery in the eighties. Blue chip art is “important art” .No one ever describes blue chip art as “commercial”, although it often draws upon and reflects commercial subject matter, usually in an oversize version, which is reproduced at considerable expense.
Personally I have never been able to accept the presumption that people with a lot of money have an intrinsically greater understanding of what art is than those who live by more modest means and aim for more modest goals.
To my point of view folk art is art that emerges from a culture, from the every day life of a culture, which usually involves activities that provide for one’s living, and by that can also be classified as “commercial”. Contemporary culture is not excluded from “folk art” as Jeff Koons knows well, having used contemporary culture as his art inspiration, and having draws upon the cultural expressions of consumerism.
In my case, my generation fits the measure of what is a “traditional art”, because my generation learned our craft from our parents. Our parents however do not fit the measure, especially my father who studied production ceramics under the world-renowned Eva Zeisel, in a pioneer course in the industrial design department at Pratt Institute during the 1940’s. It was one of the first, if not the first course to teach ceramics as a production craft.
Technically Eva Zeisel did “commercial art” as she designed ceramics for dinnerware companies, and what could be more commercial than a dinnerware company? - Unless of course, you are Jeff Koons and reproduce someone else’s design in oversize for an oversize expense and show it at the Leo Castelli Gallery in NYC to be sold to people with oversize wealth?.
Someday in the far future, the powers that be will look back at our times and define the products created from ordinary people making a living by crafting objects as “Folk Art”, and maybe even “Traditional Art” but we are not there yet, and so the art that is produced by ordinary people of modest means remains outside the loop.
Licensing rights to produce designs, handcrafted production, slip casting, mugs, functional, ceramic, stoneware. Organic, Made in America
I see I made a few errors. It would be nice if there were a preview function that alloes one to edit one’s post.
This to Mackenzie. I believe that art is not bound by media but the creative care that goes into it. Traditional Art seems to have different definitions. It can mean that which we think of traditionally as art such as painting, sculpting etc. or that art that comes down through generations as tradition such as basket making, pottery etc. The problem then is what art would, in broad definition, not be traditional art. Art and Creativity, it seems, defy rigid definition. Interesting that we can then recognize it when we SEE it.
I agree with you that art defies rigid boundaries, but government programs such as the Maine Art Commission, and the money that is appropriated through government programs, have very rigid boundaries. I concur that painting is a very traditional art form but I would not define all painting as “folk art”, which is how “traditional art’s is defined by Keith Ludden in the second post of this blog. Keith Ludden is the contact person for the Maine Arts Commission Traditional Grants, and likely is the person who responded to a question I presented about the traditional grants by saying that I would have to submit a statement justifying that ceramics is a traditional art.
As our business is an ongoing concern, we have never had a lot of time to invest in grants and the established protocol for developing recognition as a “collectible”. Nonetheless we became a collectible art because people, of all walks of life, collected our work since our beginnings in the 1950’s. Obviously I do not mind defending ceramics as a “traditional art form “ within the present context, as I enjoy interactive conversations as a recreational activity, an activity that also intersects with business and social concerns. However, when it comes to choosing how to invest time that is qualified as a business related activity, - and applying for a grant for apprenticeships program qualifies as such, the idea that I have to justify ceramics, in general, as a traditional art takes a very low priority when the priorities measurement is anticipated return on investment of time and energy.
I have found that the current Maine government administration ignores production crafts and small for-profit arts businesses unless those businesses are specifically geared to attracting the wealthy. When the “creative economy” first became a buzz word for Maine’s economic initiative, I mistakenly took it to mean “thinking creatively about the economy of Maine” and as such inclusive of all levels of the economy of all the people of Maine, who are the constituents who elected the administration. The previously-mentioned recent conversation, in which ceramics was categorized as “commercial”, took place with a representative of The Maine Arts Commission. The term “commercial” seemed to conotate that it is not “art”, and was an explanation for why one needs to justify to the Maine Arts Commission that ceramics is a “traditional” art form.
An apprenticeship program is a grant for on- the-job-training, which is an ongoing educational service that small for-profit businesses provide, while at the same time paying the employee, and paying into the workers compensation system. Many non-profit businesses charge the student for the educational services provided and then sell the students work to generate further funds. Since the central idea behind the creative economy initiative is to attract people with money to the state (Richard Florida), one has to wonder if the non-profits have so much access to the government’s favor because non-profits are set up to procure money through tax-deductible contributions. Most ceramic businesses are small for-profit businesses, and have to make money through what they actually produce and market and as such can be qualified as “commercial”
But if the Creative Economy is a government economic initiative, why is “commercial” a dis-qualifying characterization?
To: MacKenzie–
Oh, my, no!. I certainly would not define all painting as folk art. I use the term “traditional art” rather interchageably with “folk art,” because the word “folk” gets rather abused and misunderstood. When I use the word “traditional, I do not mean “conventional.” I often tell groups to whom I am speaking that folklore scholars have been arguing over the definition of folk culture and folk art, and “the folk” for more than 150 years, and we probably aren’t going to settle the question today. But I do have some operational definitions of folklore and folk art that I use. Folk arts are arts that are passed down in the process of day to day living. They are learned in an informal process. They are an expression of the community’s experience and aesthetic. Folk arts are practices that are passed down within communities defined by ethnicity, tribe, occupation family, or common history.
With regard to ceramics, ceramics certainly can be a traditional art. To a great extent, the key element is context–is the art being done in the context of the conditions listed above, or is it being done as a result of, or in the setting of a formal education?
Thanks for keeping the discussion going.
–Keith
Noting that the topic subject is “traditional art in schools” and so technically I am off topic in commenting on apprenticeship programs that might be available for small for profit business to assist in on the job training which is highly educational, but not in the context of what is traditionally identified as a “school”. The fact of the matter is that on the job training is expensive for small businesses since we pay the employee as the employee is learning, and as we pay into the employee compensation system that makes American labor so uncompetitive on the global market. We often lose money during the training process. However we do provide a specific education that results in marketable skills for the employee and so we perform the same function, as do many schools.
I do not believe that exposure to a formal education negates the other defining characteristics that you have described. My father grew up on a farm and once described farmers as being very scientific. Around the time my father came of age, family farms were being replaced by industrial farming. Dad graduated from Pratt Institute in the industrial design program, and as formerly mentioned, he studied production ceramics under Eva Zeisel, which is where he learned the mold making process. I am not sure that he learned the science of glazing from Eva, since Eva was not a hands-on ceramic designer, but rather created designs to be produced by ceramic dinnerware companies. Since dad has never said otherwise, I believe he must have taught himself the art and science of ceramic glazes by studying books.
Although Eva taught production ceramics, she did not practice it. She must have considered knowledge of the production practice as valuable for informing the ceramic designers process. When my father told Eva that he was starting his own ceramic production studio, she remarked on how difficult it would be.
The farmer’s art and science of working with the earth has been passed on as the art and science of transforming the earth into hand-made objects. The ceramic production shop is attached to the home in a similar lifestyle as a family farm. Less is known about my mother’s side of the family since she was more secretive. However before she died she told me that I come from a long line of crafts people.
The traditions survive but they are transformed by the context of social change. In working in ceramics one knows that one is participating in a tradition that has been ongoing since the dawn of civilization. The activity can only be part of one’s every day life if it is also one’s means of income or if one is independently wealthy or retired and practices ceramics as an avocation.
Since my father established Andersen Design on the Boothbay Peninsula many other ceramic productions have followed. One could argue that some produce more “commercial” products than others, but the art and science remain the same and teaching those skills and passing them on has become a by-product of the ceramic productions that proliferate around the Boothbay Region. Generally speaking, artisans are trained on the job. Since there are a number of ceramic productions in the Boothbay region, there is a pool of workers who have developed skills in making ceramics.
Let’s see if we can pull this discussion back to the original question–How can we best work with the schools to bring traditional arts into the classroom?
–Keith Ludden
Suddenly, we’re back to the same miscues and misfires that started this whole conversation. If I am to take this question verbatim, then I think of what has traditionally been defined as “art.”
That does not mean “craft” or “design” (unless it’s architecture) or folk arts.
To be clear, I have published essays in which I describe an important quality of contemporary art as appropriately seeking to reduce itself to the level of craft. I don’t see craft and art as different things. A more useful distinction for us now is the difference between art and kitsch (most paintings, for example are kitsch: velvet Elvis’s and weekend watercolors).
But telling stuff like that to our children is confusing and misleading. When we look at a Monet, we should think about what was going on at the time - forgetting the historical context doesn’t help kids learn anything but “anything goes.” While anything might “go”, that has not always been the case. To teach kids about traditional art means to teach them the context of traditionalism.
For example, abstract painting in Western culture did not exist 100 years ago. That’s a worthy thing to tell kids.
I am focused here on visual arts, but much of the same could be said of music or dance and so on.
To let our kids think that postmodernism and photomechanical appropriation has always been the way of the world is wrong.
We should forget what we think about art right now and talk to them about what art meant when a given piece was produced.
More importantly, we should introduce Maine students to as much art as possible. One of the best classes I ever attended was a slide show in which the class saw 500 slides in an hour. The commentary was about 100 names and words.
At the moment, I am working to develop a plan for a curriculum titled “Vis Ed” to present at the September 11 meeting of the Education Committee of the Maine Arts Commission. The idea is to present a visual curriculum that focuses on, but is not limited to, visual art. The classes would address issues from perspective to reading schematics and maps. It would range from photography to painting, printmaking, graphic design, scanning a newspaper or a computer screen or a roadway as you drive.
The goal is to provide a curriculum that could be accessed from an online source at no cost to the schools. When we teach literature, we don’t hand kids a notebook and a pencil and say “Here, Joey, write a novel.” I don’t think we should do that with art.
Students need to develop their sensibilities by looking and learning about looking at art. How do you look at a painting? How do you learn to enjoy going to a museum or gallery exhibition? What’s going on in pictures and how do we help students feel comfortable and enjoy looking at art? How does learning to parse graphic designs, maps, diagrams and so on relate to looking at art?
My default would be starting with “traditional” Maine artists: NC Wyeth, John Marin, George Bellows, Louise Nevelson, the Zorachs, Fairfield Porter, Eric Hopkins, William Wegman, Alex Katz, Marsden Hartley, Andrew Wyeth and so on and so forth.
We’re working on this now - if anyone wants to share thoughts: send me an email.
I thought that one of the defining characteristics of traditional arts is that it is not based in a formal education.
But if you want to discuss education, are you intending art appreciation or instructional classes relating to the techniques of traditional arts?
Are you talking early education or higher education?
It seems to me that the non-profit organizations such as the MCI offer a lot of educational classes. Maybe the MCI could bring those classes into the traditional classroom.
I do not see any real relationship between the “creative economy” and the economy of the people of Maine.
Hi Daniel Kany, Just made the connection with who you are. I am wondering if in identifying myself I caused Keith Ludden to change the subject/definition of traditional arts to something that is acquired through formal education. Maybe my reputation precedes me? I thought I was connecting to concepts that he had introduced regarding the definition of traditional art- i.e., not a product of formal education, a process that is connected to every day life, tradition, family, community. I thought I was discussing those concepts and then Keith Ludden said we should get back to discussing how we are going to teach traditional arts in schools, which seems pretty formal to me.
As I was previously reading Keith Laden’s description, I took “Traditional Arts” or “Folk Arts” to be of the nature of “intuitive art”. Intuitive art cannot be taught. It resides in the soul. Such an artist can acquire a formal education, but such an education only provides the technical skills, the “craft”, if you will, to express the intuitive expression.
On the other hand, this is not the same as what I formerly believed Keith was saying because I am talking about a level of artistry that is separate from the craft of art. There is such a thing as an artist of refined craftsmanship who does not possess the intuitive artistic sensibility.
In terms of traditional arts, I want to relate it to country music, which is based in the story telling of everyday life. There is a category in contemporary country music, which is identified as “traditional” because the influences pre-date the influences of contemporary country music, which includes all influences existent within the living contemporary moment, and yet there, still, there is an indefinable quality that makes country music “country”.
I enjoy watching Nashville Star and Can You Duet” because the judges struggle to define exactly what this quality is. I think it is that same intuitive natural quality that comes directly from the soul, of which I am speaking in regards to traditional art. This quality transcends formal education and is undaunted by commercial considerations. It finds its expression in any form, regardless of the labeling.
“intuitive”?
I don’t believe that art comes in an unmediated form from your soul or anything else. It’s culture, whether you learn about it consciously or unconsciously.
For example, abstract painting has been a part of western culture for less than 100 years. It would have been invisible before that. Easel painting has been part of the culture for 200 years. And yet, my son was less than 2 years old when his first sentence was “that’s a painting” - and he pointed at a big abstract painting. That’s not his soul, that’s growing up with paintings and having daddy talk about paintings.
The part that matters to me isn’t so much the self-expression part as the culture part. Kids don’t need school as the place to tell them to make up their own stuff as much as a place to learn about what we share and how we can relate to each other.
If you are talking about learning about folk art: just introducing kids to it is enough. Let them hear the fiddle and Hank Williams, Sr.: if they can’t resist it, then we can help them get a violin or an old beaten up guitar and a broken heart.
I agree that our cultural environment influences our concepts of art and maybe this is where the emphasis on the “unschooled” comes in as categorizations such as “outsider art” and “academic art”. Obviously academic means art that is highly influenced by academic training while “outsider art” is often defined by a lack of academic training.
Although you can culturalize concepts of art , there are also aspects of art that cannot be culturalized, even as the art can be an expression of the culture in which the artist is immersed, whether that culture be highly focused in the wilds of nature or the complexities of the civilized world. I can speak for my self that I used to work in a situation in which I was constantly in the environment of the New York art world. However when I was alone with my own painting I could not convince myself to produce art that related to the NYC market. I wanted to follow the painting instead, I worked with my own spontaneous brushstrokes with only one intent, which was to create a painting that was never the same. I wanted to paint something that would be different each time I looked at it and different when someone else looked at it. I worked abstractly with my own natural “markings”, which came about through impulses, often spontaneously and unpredictably. I was intrigued by the process and followed it, which was counter-culture to the world of art that I observed during my activities with the outside world. I think I was working to have a conversation with other layers of consciousness. Later, when I became interested in reading quantum physics, I recognized a similarity between Bohr’s statements about the system under observation being inseparable from the observer, and the approach that I took toward painting.
In my work with ceramics and with other artisans that work on the ceramics, our process is also dependent upon the individual markings of the artist, that one must work with and not against. I have tried to repeat some of the designs that my mother created as “reproducible designs”, but although they appear simple, it is very difficult to duplicate the artistry of her work that relied upon her individual markings. I realized I have to work with my own markings and when working with other artisans to work with their markings.
I am currently trying to place a body of work by David Dupree who used to show at a gallery in Portland that recently closed. I was going to identify the work as outsider work but then it was pointed out that David did attend school and so I could not use that term. Instead I called them the “painterly paintings of David Dupree”. Although David went to school , his work is strongly intuitive. You can see influences, most strongly Van Gough, who is an artist whose work I would also describe as intuitive. The subject matter of David’s work are scenes from everyday life and I would describe his work as reflecting the culture of his own experiences. Because the subject matter is resonate with the subject matter of country music, I am thinking that I would like to contact CMA, the country music television station, not that I know how to do such a thing, but that is a culture that shares a sensibility with the paintings of David Dupree
Noting that the reason I posted in this topic is because it is the only topic in the traditional arts forum and that there is no option on this “blog” to start one’s own topic, as there would be in an open discussion forum.
Keith Luden, is the head of the Traditional Arts grant program and also apparently the moderator of this blog, with the sole authority to create topics of discussion, on this blog, which is sponsored by the Maine Arts Commission, which has a government web address and so has the function of representing and serving the people of Maine.
And so Mr. Luden, if you wish to maintain the focus of the discussion on how to teach traditional arts in schools, then why not start another topic where we have freedom to discuss the meaning of “traditional arts”, about which you stated in post 2 “Let me clarify and focus the discussion some, if I may. When I refer to “traditional arts,” I am speaking of “folk arts.” These are arts that are handed down in an informal fashion through day-to-day living. What is the best way to bring these arts into the classroom? ”
I have been researching “naive art” on the internet and found that “naive art” is closely associated with “folk art” and “outsider art” and “visionary art”, all of which are generally associated with unschooled art.
The following link demonstrates these associations: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art
One of the upcoming events listed on the above site is
Off the Grid: Outsider Art in Maine
September 14 -November 4, 2006
University of Southern Maine Art Gallery
Gorham, ME
http://www.usm.maine.edu/gallery/
So there is implicitly an answer to your question. If one wishes to bring unschooled art into the classroom, then perhaps the only way to do so is to exhibit it, and recognize it as art, but by it’s very nature it cannot be taught, it can only be encouraged.
On the other hand, although Folk Art is grouped throughout the internet with naive, outsider, and visionary art, the latter three arts emerge from the individual and do not conform with the further definition given by Mr Luden of Folk Art-Traditional Art as arts that are passed down in the process of day to day living. They are learned in an informal process. They are an expression of the community’s experience and aesthetic. Folk arts are practices that are passed down within communities defined by ethnicity, tribe, occupation family, or common history”.