This 40th episode will be the last one of 2020 and I’ll be sharing some of my favorite moments from the episodes released this year.

As I reflect on 2020 and plan for 2021, I oscillate between excited & hopeful and overwhelmed. It’s been a YEAR. Whew. Last December, I was just starting to submit my artwork to open calls. I was teaching 4 days per week at 2 elementary schools, getting into the swing of TAB and being on a cart at one school. I had shared the idea of a podcast as a way to force myself to make it a reality. I, like all of us, had NO IDEA how 2020 would change everything.

It has been a challenging year to say the least. Those of you who have suffered through illness and loss, my heart goes out to you. All of us have upended our lives to some extent - whether teaching online, on a cart, in a mask, or losing work… Some of you, like me, have also been helping your children through online school… while somehow continuing your own work… it’s a lot. Many of us have also begun to more directly confront racism. I hope this winter break has provided a bit of downtime to de-stress.

What was your life like a year ago? How has your art practice changed? What about your teaching practice?

While I have no delusions that things will dramatically change when we wake up on January 1st, there are reasons to be hopeful. Vaccines are coming, as is new leadership here in the U.S. which, at the very least, is far more competent and willing to listen to experts than the absolute mess we’ve had.

I find it helpful to look back and reflect on successes. What are you proud of?

I’ve pulled quotes from several episodes to share bits of all 39 of these conversations. I am so grateful to these artists and honored to share part of their stories. I’ve also been looking back and wanted to share some interesting commonalities I noticed. Many of the teaching artists I spoke to followed TAB or choice-based methodologies in their classrooms. Now, this may just reflect my bias, but I found it interesting in talking with them how many talked about needing to treat students as artists with autonomy as they themselves desired in their art-making. It felt like being active in the studio often goes hand in hand with empowering children to also be active in their classroom studio. We talked about systemic racism, dismantling white supremacy, creating equitable classrooms, and the power of stories. We talked about the struggles to balance time between teaching and art-making, (and often parenting). We talked about money and selling work or not selling work. I also learned that teaching artists love tacos! But really, who doesn’t?

Blog post for this episode (https://www.teachingartistpodcast.com/episode-40-reflecting-recapping-2020/)

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I loved hearing about the ideas behind Hannah Zimmerman's beautiful work. Lush greenery, the ephemera of an artist's life, and the occasional cat stare out from her paintings. Within the repetition of stripes, careful color choices, and chairs without bodies to hold are comments on feminism and space as Hannah contemplates her place in this world. She talked about how she uses collage as a way to experiment with ideas and aesthetics, a creative playground. Her use of found materials there is a departure from the intentionally personal materials in her still lifes, which she also uses for soft sculpture.

The connection between her drawing and painting practice and her work with textiles is so clear. She considers this work translations of objects. What a beautiful way to think about it! We talked about the significance that objects and places have and how they tell stories about people.

Hannah also shared some helpful teaching advice and encouragement, especially for those of us not yet back to teaching in person. It was heartening to hear about the safety protocols and the benefits she's experiencing being back to in-person teaching during this pandemic.

Hannah Zimmerman is an artist and educator based in Cincinnati, Ohio. She earned her MFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and a BFA and BS in Art Education from Miami University in Ohio. She is in her sixth year of teaching art at a public high school and is currently the artist-in-residence at Manifest Gallery in Cincinnati. Zimmerman’s interdisciplinary practice uses quiet interior spaces as a documentation of time and as a way to explore identity through introspection.

Blog post with images: https://www.teachingartistpodcast.com/episode-39-hannah-zimmerman/

www.hrzimmerman.com

@hrzimmermanart on instagram

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Lauren Merceron shared her struggles with dyslexia and how she’s learned to embrace her unique challenges and value her unique strengths. I loved how she talked about making art to feed her soul and thinking of showing and selling it as secondary. It’s easy to get bogged down in the business and admin side of art, so that was a good reminder. 

Lauren Merceron is an elementary art teacher and artist based outside Atlanta, Georgia. She celebrates her language processing disorders because this unique wiring helps her visualize information stronger than imaginable. Feeling with lines, touching with color, bring all the shapes together. Her art advocates for people who suffer from dyslexia. She says: “For so long I felt stupid, I tried to overcompensate, suppress my feelings, and pretending that I was ‘normal.’ Children that suffer from language processing disorders should never feel this way. Through my work I communicate the unique messages of the dyslexic brain. My work is a form of meditation that helps to quiet the noise in my mind. The constant push and pull between right and left brain. The battle between conforming and being free.”

Blog post with more links and images

www.laurenmerceron.com

@laurenmerceronart on instagram

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Corbrae Smith is a middle school art teacher by day, dope afrofuturist illustrator by night. Based in Oakland, CA, he is active in the local art scene and has created and contributed to many murals in the Bay Area.

He spoke passionately about teaching and how he makes an impact with his students by continuing to push forward with his art career. We talked about critique, both in the classroom and with our own artwork, the struggles of juggling these two careers, and making your own opportunities while also defeating your ego.

I loved his idea of using expert groups in the classroom to encourage students to share work with each other, give more autonomy to students, and offer opportunities for advanced students to showcase and improve their knowledge while helping struggling students. There’s just so much to this method!

Corbrae also talked about how anti-racist teaching is different for Black teachers and how exhausting it has been to educate white colleagues and help us along. We NEED to step it up. Keep doing the work of confronting your biases and pushing the other white people in your life to do the same. Keep doing this work even when it’s uncomfortable - lean into your discomfort.

Blog post with links and images

@hellafutures on instagram

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Emma Freeman spoke about studying philosophy and art and how the two continue to mesh in her work. I loved the metaphor she shared about breaking down barriers - this image of softening walls and opening doors. I imagine a space where the walls bend and squish as we reshape a more equitable, welcoming, uplifting world. She talked about the possibilities she sees in art education and how encouraging free creation is such a healing process.

Emma also shared her experience with opening a shop, putting her creative work out into the world in many different formats, and leaning on her art practice to get through difficult times.

Emma Freeman is a queer mixed media artist and teaching artist. She is a highly sensitive, silly and soulful person. Emma is a tactile, experimental artist who uses many different mediums, tools and techniques in her work including textiles, fibers, collage, printmaking, drawing, stitching, and cyanotype. Art making is healing, meditative, and empowering for Emma and she loves sharing the gifts of the creative process through teaching art classes to kids and adults.

She also has a podcast called Reflections From My Art Table, so go listen! Her episodes are full of poetry and gentle wisdom.

Blog post with more links and images

www.emmafreemandesigns.com

@emmafreemandesigns on Instagram

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Featured Artist: Naomi Martinez

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Priyanka Parmanand shifted from seeing art as a hobby to creating both a teaching studio and her own professional art practice. I loved hearing about her background in business and how it does - and does NOT - inform her work. She spoke with such encouragement about resilience. Don’t give up, even when things are hard!

What an encouraging and inspiring conversation! Priyanka pushed through self-doubt and continues to do so in her art practice. I especially resonated with how she fits it all in like so many other parent/teacher/artists by painting at night. This resilience and drive also comes up in the content of her work - she spoke about flowers as a metaphor for growth and hope.

Priyanka is a self-taught artist and the founder of Crimson Canvas Arts, a company that mentors budding artists.

Blog post with images and links

priyankastudio.com

@crimsoncanvas on Instagram

www.crimsoncanvasarts.com

CrimsonCanvasArts on Facebook

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I’m so impressed with Alisha Mernick's ability to so concisely and eloquently share knowledge about anti-racist pedagogy and critical multiculturalism. If you’re not following her on instagram, follow her! She talks about how she’s not only been through an incredible graduate program combining social justice education, critical race theory, and contemporary art, but has also been in the classroom putting that education to practical use for 10 years. This semester, she’s freelancing while mothering her toddler and using her teaching skills to share her knowledge with other educators.

Alisha creates incredibly detailed miniature paintings inspired by ancient Persian miniatures and illuminated manuscripts. She spoke about her process and using a magnifying glass while painting and the precision required for this type of work. We also talked about sharing work with students and walking in their shoes. Alisha shared how being vulnerable in the classroom builds relationships and breaks down walls.

She gave some great author recommendations and an incredible resource list that are all linked in the blog post.

Alisha Mernick is a Visual Art and Social Justice Educator based in Los Angeles, CA. She holds her MA in Art Education from NYU, and has been implementing liberatory, critical arts pedagogy in the k-12 classroom for over a decade. Mernick is a queer, muslim, mixed race woman who’s commitment to equity work is both personal, and political.

She says "I believe in art making as an intellectual activity - which reflects, as well as shapes, our world. I specialize in using contemporary art and inquiry based instruction to teach students about identity, social justice, anti-racism, and civic engagement. I believe strongly in cultural pluralism and liberatory pedagogies, and am committed to de-centering whiteness in visual art education."

Blog post with links and images

@msmernickart on Instagram

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Natasha Rivett-Carnac is a curator and writer with a focus on arts & culture, and education. She runs a blog that supports writers and other creatives to find practical and artistic resources about motherhood. She is a home educator. Until COVID, her family split their school year between Costa Rica and the UK. Her family also participated in The Greenhouse, an outdoor education project The Daily Mail called “Britain’s most hipster school”.

I loved how Natasha talked about how words and pictures split for her and for most people, but how she’s bringing them back together. She thinks of drawing as language and uses words as drawing, combining them in her visual artwork and bouncing between visual art-making and writing as creative pursuits.

Her focus on personalized education as a primary reason for homeschooling really resonated. We talked about the overlap in theory of TAB (Teaching for Artistic Behavior) and this method of letting children initiate their own questions as a way of learning. She articulated so well the idea of curating the learning experience - creating the environment for learning to happen and occasionally adding new and exciting materials or ideas into it. I’m excited to see how the workshops she’s thinking about and nurturing come into being.

She is published in The International Journal of the Arts in Society, Edinburgh University’s Dangerous Woman Project, Resurgence magazine, and elsewhere.

Her project Doing Nothing, a collaboration with London-based photographer Grace Gelder, documents Natasha’s experience of early motherhood in Bonn, Germany. It was presented at Carlyle University’s Visualising the Home conference, and is archived at Goldsmith University’s Women’s Library.

Natasha supported Chief Curator Jane Trowell at Platform London on the exhibition C Words: Climate, Capital, Culture at Arnolfini in Bristol (UK), one of the leading contemporary art centres in Europe. The exhibition also included a programme of over 80 events and workshops.

She has an MA in Arts & Cultural Management from Dartington College of Arts in the UK, and a BA in Interdisciplinary Art: Violin Performance, Visual Art, and Creative Writing from the University of Minnesota.

Natasha is originally from Minneapolis and currently lives in Somerset in the UK with her husband and two children.

Blog post with images and links

www.natasharivettcarnac.com

@natasharivettcarnac on Instagram

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Featured Artist: @lauraanncolussi

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It was so wonderful connecting with Megan Driving Hawk. We spoke about teaching and art-making, being white mothers of Indigenous and Latinx kids, and early motherhood.

I find her work so beautiful and deeply meaningful. The way she talked about her interest in the meeting place of science and faith, how truth lives in the overlap between seemingly contradicting things felt so connected to her series of double exposures.

Megan Driving Hawk is an Artist/Mother & Educator living in Phoenix, Arizona. She is in her 8th year of teaching and 3rd year of teaching Traditional Darkroom Photography which includes Beginning, Advanced, Commercial, and Advanced Placement 2D Photography. She has taught pre-kindergarten through adult classes in drawing & painting, sculpture, film studies, digital photography and art journaling. Driving Hawk also serves as the campus Indigenous Student Advisor. She received her BFA in Fine Art Photography and M.Ed in Secondary Education with a K-12 art certification from Arizona State University. She also earned her MFA in Interdisciplinary Studies from the University of Hartford.

Driving Hawk asks questions and seeks connections to the Divine, her ancestors, her husband’s ancestors, her family, her communities, and her environments through the practices of photography, poetry, and various forms of traditional needlework. She challenges historical, cultural, familial, and personal expectations of herself as she continuously navigates her journey as a white wife and mother to Lakȟóta men. Additionally, she contemplates the delicate weavings of life, death, decay, hope and what gets left behind in the transition into motherhood and postpartum. Driving Hawk is curious about how one person's expression of life and self-discovery connect to another and how different basic human life experiences are from one another. After spending a childhood of blocking out life, she now wants to be present to feel and savor where she is in the world as she heals generational and childhood wounds.

Blog post with images and links

www.megandrivinghawk.com

@MDrivingHawk00 on Instagram

@PerrysFinestPhotos on Instagram

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Featured Teaching Artist: Amanda Nadig

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Adrienne Brown-David creates gorgeous paintings, drawings, and paper dolls!

It was so helpful for me to hear that she doesn’t actually have it all together all the time despite seeming very put together and successful from the outside. She talked about how she allows herself to not be good at everything all the time - to have times where she is excelling at teaching and motherhood, but not painting; and times where she is making incredible artwork, but her home is a mess and her kids are eating cereal. Hearing this felt like permission to give myself more grace, to stop trying to do it all.

Adrienne paints her daughters and places them in settings in the American South. She talked about how she captures the varied aspects of her children and validates all sides of them as Black girls who will become Black women in a society that tries to invalidate their complexities.

Adrienne Brown-David is a freelance artist living in a small, rural town in northern Mississippi.  Though she is originally from St. Louis, Adrienne has lived in both Chicago (where she briefly attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago) and the Virgin Islands before settling in the south.  Adrienne is a wife and mother of four daughters and the experience of motherhood greatly influences her work.

Blog post with images and links

www.adriennebrown-david.com

@adriennemeschelle on Instagram

Book: The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home by Susan Wise Bauer and Jessie Wise

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Support this podcast. Subscribe, leave a review, or see more ways to support here.

We also offer opportunities for artists!