Teaching Artist Podcast

Eileen Powers talks about looking at an issue from all sides and how artists are problem solvers. I love how she applies this both physically to the engineering feat of creating hair out of all kinds of materials and metaphorically to the challenge of adjusting to big changes and getting through and talking about hard things like illness and death. She also talks about embracing differences and finding joy in even the most difficult situations. There is so much in her project and in this conversation that is super applicable to the many challenges facing us here in the U.S. and across the world today.

I really appreciate how vulnerable she was in sharing her continued struggles with her adjusting identity. That message to accept ourselves is so powerful, but also very difficult to embody. My tiny bit of advice is to start wherever you can, just like we try to do with our students: meet them where they are. Meet yourself where you are. Maybe that means just taking a deep breath every time you catch yourself in negative internal self talk. The more strides we can make on both embracing ourselves and embracing the differences we see in others, the better we can model this for students.

Eileen Powers is an artist, photographer, graphic designer, and cancer survivor. She was living on Cape Cod and working as a freelance graphic designer when she received her lymphoma diagnosis. From that moment on her life changed and would never be the same.

In January 2019 she began a rigorous chemotherapy regimen. After the second treatment, her hair began to fall out and she just decided to shave the rest off. The change was frightening. It took six weeks before she could look in the mirror. But when she did, she became oddly fascinated. She saw a blank slate, a clean sheet of paper, and the potential for an art project. In the past she’d run after people who looked different and asked to take their picture. Now, she was that person.

When people started to drop off casseroles and pot roasts (which she couldn’t eat), she had an idea. Why not take all of that energy and funnel it into something positive. She invited friends and family to make hair for her out of surprising materials which she then styles and photographs into a series of humorous and colorful self-portraits. At the time of this writing, Eileen has nearly one-hundred heads. She has been interviewed and asked to show her work in galleries and exhibitions in the U.S. and abroad.

Eileen currently lives on Cape Cod and returned to the Lesley University MFA program in June 2020, after a 2-year cancer hiatus.

Blog post with images & links

@canyoumakehair on instagram

Can You Make Hair for Me? video

www.canyoumakehairforme.com

Project Fundraiser

Exhibitions & Talks

@CanYouMakeHairForMe on Facebook

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Register for Call to Art 2: Un-Conference for Art Educators!

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@pottsart

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

We also offer opportunities for artists!

I enjoyed hearing how Michael Millam took a leap to pursue adventure in China and has built these dual careers of artist and teacher alongside and intertwined with each other. He talked about finding his own voice in his artwork and helping students to find theirs. We also dug into failing, making mistakes, and developing resilience.

It was such a great conversation and I especially loved hearing about his process combining photography and ceramics!

Michael Millam has been an art educator for 13 years, 10 of those years in Southern California, teaching Photography, 3D Design, and Ceramics. He currently lives and works in Qingdao, China teaching in an international school. He is starting his third year teaching ceramics and photography at Pegasus International School. He loves to share his passion for the art-making process with his students. Through his classes, he hopes students gain a lifelong appreciation for the arts and develop their creativity, problem-solving, and critical thinking skills.  Michael’s artwork reflects his love for pop culture, punk rock, and the gritty textures he finds around him. He is exploring making ceramics that incorporate textures found around his school site - from pothole covers, asphalt, and dirt. He definitely lives the artist-teacher life both teaching and pursuing an art career.

I especially liked Michael’s idea of the wall of rejection letters displayed in his classroom! What a way to show students that journey and start a conversation about overcoming fear.

Go apply to something!

Blog post with images and more links

www.theartistteacher.com

www.michaelnightmare.com

Instagram: @mikenightmare

Book: Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking by David Bayles & Ted Orland

Book: Steal Like An Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative by Austin Kleon

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@pottsart

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

We also offer opportunities for artists!

In this episode, I connected with an incredible artist and educator who is working to promote artists and share resources for art educators. Victoria Fry is the founder of Visionary Art Collective, an amazing platform for contemporary art. She has taught in a variety of settings, including as a teaching artist traveling between many schools and as a classroom teacher working art into all subjects.

It felt empowering to hear how Victoria has shifted her mindset and approach to teaching. It’s helpful to hear about others making those changes. It’s so important for us as educators to continue to re-evaluate what we think we know and to adjust our methods and curricula as we learn to do better. Whether you’re just starting teaching or you’ve been teaching for decades (or somewhere in between), you can always improve - it is never too late to shift towards more inclusive and intentionally anti-biased anti-racist methods and curricula.

I loved hearing about Victoria’s intuitive and experimental process of art-making using wax and oil paint. That sense of when something is finished that’s so hard to articulate, but you just know. Do you feel that?

Victoria is a NY based painter, educator and founder of Visionary Art Collective. She was born in England and lived in Singapore as a child before moving to the United States. Victoria received her BFA from the School of Visual Arts in 2012 with a concentration in painting. After graduation she was selected to be part of the Guggenheim Museum's Learning Through Art program, where she taught elementary students within the museum, as well as at PS.9 in Brooklyn, NY. In 2014, Victoria received her Masters of Arts in Teaching degree from Maine College of Art.

Victoria has taught in San Francisco, Oakland, and Los Angeles. She returned to New York in 2019 to continue her career as a painter and educator. Victoria has exhibited her work in Manhattan, Brooklyn, New Jersey, and California. When she’s not in the classroom, she can be found creating beeswax & oil paintings in her studio.

Blog post with links and images

www.visionaryartcollective.com

www.victoriajfry.com

@visionaryartcollective on instagram

@victoriajfry on instagram

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@pottsart

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

We also offer opportunities for artists!

Matt Macfarland shared so many amazing books and artists! We teach for the same organization, P.S. Arts, and had met a few times at PD, but it was nice to hear more about his background and his work. I love how he weaves stories together combining truth and fiction. His “teaching chronicles” are hilariously accurate to the life of an art teacher.

I especially liked hearing how Matt uses books in his teaching to help discuss weighty topics. He talked about the power of stories to change minds and to empower those who tell them.

Matt is a contemporary artist, cartoonist, and teacher whose ongoing graphic narrative Dark Pants follows a mysterious pair of pants through Los Angeles as they impact the lives of whomever wears them. MacFarland has also compiled his 15+ years of teaching experience into a self-published comic, The Teaching Chronicles Volume 1 and 2. His book series, My Troubles with Crumb (parts 1 and 2), documents his conflicted feelings toward his one-time artistic hero, underground cartoonist R. Crumb. Matt's current project, 4 Seasons of Gary, collects several four-panel comic strips about his father into a makeshift memoir that documents their loving but sometimes complicated relationship.

His work has been written up in The Los Angeles Times, Comics Bulletin, Comics Grinder, Artillery, and X-tra Online. His artwork has been featured at such venues as 356 Mission Road, the Vincent Price Museum, Armory Center for the Arts, and Torrance Museum of Art, and his comics have been published in a variety of Comic anthologies, including Sliced Quarterly and Milk & Honey Comics. He received his MFA from Otis College of Art and Design in 2003 and currently serves as co-director of Elephant, an artist-run space in Glassell Park.

Blog post with images and links

www.mattiemac.com

@macfarlandart on Instagram

MacFarlandArt on Patreon

Dahlia Lithwick's article: "What Ruth Bader Ginsburg Would Want America to Do Now"

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Follow: @teachingartistpodcast

@pottsart

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

We also offer opportunities for artists!

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Melanie Anderson has been teaching for 18 years, but had a 15 year career in advertising before going into teaching. She talks about the difficult decision to leave her first career in order to devote herself to motherhood and then her path to teaching.

Melanie shared so much encouraging advice and experience. It felt so hopeful and helpful to hear her perspective as a parent. I definitely need that reminder to soak up this time with my daughter and give myself some grace with all the other things. This life is a marathon, not a sprint. There will be time when I won’t be juggling quite so much and maybe now I need to set down a few things momentarily. Do you feel that way?

This conversation was recorded the week that George Floyd was murdered and I awkwardly asked Melanie about addressing racism as a white teacher. It’s something that has been a part of my teaching practice for years, but I’m still (and will always be) figuring out how to do anti-racism and anti-bias work as a teacher and now as a podcaster. I appreciated Melanie’s willingness to share her thoughts and how she sees her role as amplifying student voices. Scroll down for a short video about the student project she talked about, which looks at stereotypes.

Melanie also talked about the book she has been working on, which sounds so exciting! Keep an eye out for Melanie’s book!

Melanie earned her BFA in Graphic Design from the University of Memphis and her Masters of Art Education from Memphis College of Art.  She began her career as a graphic designer and served as the Director of Advertising for Catherine's Stores Corporation for fifteen years before becoming an art educator.  She is a working artist, high school art teacher, and dog advocate living in Arlington, TN, a suburb of Memphis. She was recently named the West TN Art Educator of the Year, and she serves on the board of the TN Art Education Association.

Melanie is most recognized for her large scale paintings of colorful, happy dogs.

Her personal artwork was featured in 2014 and 2016 in the Incite: Mixed Media Series published by North Light Books, and was featured in August 2020 in the a special edition of acrylic works from Artists Magazine.  Her work and teaching practices are featured inthe college textbook Teaching and Learning in Art Education by Deborah Sickler-Voigt.  Melanie is in the process of writing a book entitled You Can Be A Maker: How to Find the Time and Space to Create. Her work can be found in personal art collections around the country.

Blog post with links, images, and videos

www.melanieanderson.net

Instagram: @melanietanderson

Facebook: Melanie Trout Anderson

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Follow: @teachingartistpodcast

@pottsart

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

We also offer opportunities for artists!

Blog post with images and links

I’ve been thinking a lot about how to share the incredible work of more teaching artists and also share some of the amazing resources I’m seeing as well as my own tips and experiences. That’s where these mini-episodes come in. I plan to include a few segments here. First, I’ll share a bit about a featured teaching artist. Then I’ll share tips and resources. Then some challenges, and finally shout-outs.

I’m so excited to share Maria Coit’s work! She makes beautiful dreamy landscape paintings in oil as well as prints. Maria is a middle school art teacher and founder of Curated for Kids. I’ll be sharing her work on our instagram this week as well as on our blog.

Want to be a featured artist? Apply here!

Maria Coit is a painter and printmaker based in the desert of Southern California. She is a mother of three feisty kids and an art educator in addition to being a practicing artist. She says “Engaging in my own creative practice is vital to my ability to teach art, as well as be an effective parent.”

Maria’s work is intuitive in nature, guided by feelings and memories that are eternally linked in her mind by imagery. She documents moments infused with emotion and memory through photography, translating these through the physical & tactile processes of painting and printmaking. Through the physical act of layering colors and textures, she explores the effects of Time on the memories and emotions captured in her photographs. This work continually confronts the question, “how does Time, as an unrelenting force of change, affect our innermost thoughts and deepest memories?” The intuitive & exploratory processes she engages in highlight the change that Time affects within and outside of herself.

I will be sharing 6 Printmaking techniques for at home learning on Be Fun Be Kind later today!! If you miss the live workshop, there will be a replay available.

Time! Ah! Where does the time go? Are you feeling an intense lack of time?

I was beyond excited when I saw Megan Driving Hawk post a photo of herself wearing the Teaching Artist mask and T-Shirt! I have been loving the work she shares and her advocacy. When Megan shares one of her stunning double-exposures, she also shares the indigenous land on which it was created using the Native Land App. Grab the Native Land app in the app store or google play and get a Teaching Artist shirt or mask at our shop.

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Follow: @teachingartistpodcast

@pottsart

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

We also offer opportunities for artists!

It was so great to reconnect with Reuben King! I worked with him 10 years ago when I managed art education programs at the Bronx River Art Center. He was an incredible teaching artist there, teaching workshops in the center and in schools. I loved hearing more of his background and how he’s worked his way into his dream of having his own teaching studio. Reuben now owns Brooklyn Clay Industries where he offers his own classes, manages other teaching artists, offers production services, and creates his own artwork. He shared some of the business side of this venture, which is so helpful to hear. I’m always grateful when artists open up about their struggles and share more details of their successes.

I also loved hearing how teaching helps Reuben refine his process and how students inspire him. He spoke about working with students who needed art and how moving it was to see them process some of the challenges they were dealing with in life, express their emotions, and find moments of joy. I saw a connection to his current work where he’s using images on the clay to process and express what’s going on in the world right now - the protests, the brutality against Black people, and the pandemic. I’m excited to see this work that’s been incubating! Keep an eye on his site and instagram for updates.

Reuben King has been a ceramic artist and art teacher for over 25 years. He was born and raised on the Caribbean island of Dominica, where his art education began at Marigot Arts and Crafts Institute. He studied at the Jamaica School of Art, the Caribbean’s only formal arts institution. His fine work and command of the material won him a scholarship to study design at the State Institute of Art in Naples and Florence, Italy. He has also taken several professional development courses at New York University, Lincoln Center, and several museums.

Reuben has maintained a personal pottery and ceramic studio at the historic Brooklyn Navy Yard for a decade and a half and founded Brooklyn Clay Industries there. The mission of Brooklyn Clay industries is to encourage people of all ages to develop their full creative potential mostly through pottery, ceramics and sculpture. BCI strives to create a unique environment in which people with varying abilities, ages, and experience can feel free to imagine, learn, create, and welcome a variety of art concepts into their lives, all under one roof. We are raising the profile of the ceramic arts, supporting the development of ceramic artists, and bringing the joy of the arts to our most underserved communities. We provide a professional work environment that is rewarding, creative, and respectful of ideas and individuals. BCI is dedicated to providing an affordable, fully equipped and functioning artist studio and gallery that can be shared and appreciated by all.

Blog post with images and links

www.brooklynclayindustries.com

@brooklynclayindustries on instagram

Brooklyn Clay Industries on Facebook (RTK Ceramics)

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

We also offer opportunities for artists!

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These mini-episodes are a way to share more art by amazing teaching artists as well as some resources and tips, challenges, shout outs, and wisdom from my 5 year old. The goal is to make these weekly, but we'll see how that goes!

FEATURED ARTIST

RESOURCE / TIP OF THE WEEK: NAMES!

Paula Liz recommends the book Teach Us Your Name: Empowering Children to Teach Others to Pronounce their Names Correctly by Huda Essa.

She created a fantastic bilingual Spanish/English video for this lesson and you can get the lesson on TpT.

Follow her @ms.paulaliz and subscribe to her YouTube channel for more amazing lessons.

Here's another great book to use for this lesson: Your Name Is a Song by Jamilah Thompkins-Bigelow.

Here are a few articles and books on translanguaging:

CHALLENGE OF THE WEEK

SHOUT OUTS

I also just love to hear your thoughts! What do you like about this show? What should I do more of? Leave a review and let me know! Thanks!

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Blade shared how he teaches with a focus on process over product and bringing his ways of looking and making into his classrooms. He shifted from teaching at the university level through a summer career shift program and just dove into teaching at the elementary level, primarily 2nd grade, this year. What a wild first year! Blade is constantly inspired by the work his early elementary students create and talks about the inventiveness of this age level. He also shares some of his favorite lessons so far and how teaching is akin to improv in some ways.

Blade Wynne was born in 1980, in Providence, Rhode Island. He received his BFA in Painting from Pratt Institute in 2002 and his MFA in Painting from Rhode Island School of Design in 2008. His work has recently been exhibited at Shockoe Artspace of Richmond, and The Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art. His work has appeared in publications such as “Journal of the Print World" and "New American Paintings." He is a recipient of the VMFA Visual Arts Fellowship, (Professional Award) as well as the Virginia Commission for the Arts Fellowship in Painting. As an educator he taught 2D design, Painting, and Drawing for several years in the Foundation Art Department at Virginia Commonwealth University and The Governor’s School for the Arts in Norfolk, Virginia. He is currently entering his second year of teaching elementary art in the public school system of Chesapeake, Virginia.

I love how Blade has adjusted his own art practice to fit into his life as a busy first year teacher and parent of 3 young kids. He’s growing trees in pots as an art form, as objects to draw or paint from, as sculpture, as a practice that feeds creativity. I can’t help but relate his plants to his students. He spoke about how he gives a little water and helps shape the plants and the plants continue to grow for years. It makes him think about longevity and a brighter future. Children bring me to those hopeful thoughts.

Blog post with images and links

@bladewynne on Instagram

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https://befunbekind.com/listing/teach-the-art-of-printmaking-to-anyone/

https://www.teachingartistpodcast.com/together-while-apart/

https://www.teachingartistpodcast.com/opportunities/

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Follow: @teachingartistpodcast

@pottsart

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

We also offer opportunities for artists!

I loved hearing Karina Esperanza Yánez share some of her story. She offers insight to the challenges facing our Black and Brown students as well as ways to begin addressing them as a teacher.  She gave me so much food for thought. As I continue the internal work of becoming anti-racist, while adjusting my curricula and seeking ways of using this platform for anti-racist work, it’s so helpful to hear from art educators who have been doing this work much longer, especially art educators of color. I deeply appreciate the time Karina has taken not only here on the podcast, but also on her instagram feed to help educate and share resources. Go follow her! Support her work!

Karina Esperanza Yánez is an artist + arts educator from South-Central Los Angeles, Ca. As an experienced art educator, with a demonstrated history of working in arts education and arts management, her goal is to provide students with the necessary tools to not only become creative in their own right as young artists but positively engage with their community. Karina is committed to cultivating welcoming and inclusive art experiences for the youth of South Los Angeles. Her art ranges from photography, printmaking, sewing, drawing, and everything else in between. Fascinated by history, sociology, politics, and literature, Karina incorporates all of these interests in her work as much as possible.

She is currently pursuing a Master's Degree in Art Administration from Claremont Graduate University, holds a Graduate Degree in Community Arts Education from the Rhode Island School of Design, and a Bachelor’s Degree in Fine Arts from the California Institute of the Arts.

Karina founded the organization Greetings from South LA, an arts-focused community resource for the youth, educators, and families of South Los Angeles. They do wonderful work in South Central LA, and have also created online resources, including ideas for parents, tutorials for students, and some amazing educator resources.

Blog post with images and links

greetingsfromsouthla.org

@karinaesperanza on Instagram

@greetingsfromscla on Instagram

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Follow: @teachingartistpodcast

@pottsart

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

We also offer opportunities for artists!