It's Time to Get Over Our Realism Bias

Yayoi Kusama, Light of Life

In our contemporary art word, successful art can be made from anything from discarded bottle caps to brightly colored lights and mirrors. To prepare my students to understand it and maybe even join it,  I have to teach them contemporary art-making skills like combining images to make new meaning, identifying non-traditional materials with creative potential and developing a personal, symbolic language.  They need to be forward thinking, innovative and ready to break loose from limiting traditions. 

​
I teach these things, I really do, but it misses some and that's not good enough.

The issue, I'm realizing, is in the order. 

​

---

 Like many art teachers, I feel like I should teach a set of skills that haven't changed much since the Renaissance and I start with those. My thinking has been to "build a foundation to support choice". That foundation, I've slowly realized, doesn't support what I think it does. Instead, it reinforces outdated notions about what makes art worthwhile. Also, the skills I feel pressured to focus on  show a western art centered bias - one I'd like to think I don't have. 

El Anatsui, Lines that Link Humanity - literally made out of discarded bottle caps. 

---

This is art, I say on the first day. We play an awesome, creative, stimulating game. My class seems fun, they think - then they come in the second day and start with drawing or painting Bootcamp. These are well designed experiences, and most kids enjoy them, but they reinforce an understanding that's probably been building since they first walked into an art room (unless they got lucky and had a TAB teacher)  - that realistic art is good and their value as an artist is directly related to their ability to render. 

This message is the exact opposite from what they need to hear. 

What I need to show them, with what I teach as well as my actions and words, is that everyone can make successful art, that good art is as varied as the individual humans that make it and that they - each and every one - have something important to say. 

Just getting started:  working with wind, collage and exploring clay technique. 

---

​So, this year we aren't drawing until well into October. 

The class started with kinetic sculptures. then moved to collage and now clay. As a high school level beginning art teacher, I have to start with a media overview, and and these are all open-ended explorations that have multiple avenues to success. I'll teach a variety of drawing and painting processes this year in a similar format, but I'll do it later, when my kids have started to all see themselves as successful artists. 

As for any skill I feel like I "need" to teach, I'll reflect on these words, shared with me by Stacy: 

"If someone says to you, “You have to know the rules before you can break them.” Ask yourself, whose rule is that? And, how has that rule served to silence those who don’t fit the dominant paradigm?…Standards were developed by people. By sincere people reflecting their best understanding of the arts and culture at that time. Times change. It is our job as contemporary artist educators to teach the most useful, complex, artistically sophisticated version of art education that we can now imagine."
- Olivia Gude, Meaningful Making: Why We Need New School Art Styles

Here's to a year of amplifying student voices and making rules that best fit their needs.