During my time in the classroom I’ve been confronted with a lot of questions that if I'm being honest, I feel like I need better answers to.
What can I do with an art degree? How do I do more than get a ‘day-job with health-care’ and make my art on the side? Do I have to choose between being an artist and making money? Why do my creative gifts feel like less of a blessing and more of a curse?
All these questions funnel into one bigger, more pressing question for me as an educator:
How do we create an arts education that serves more than just the 1%?
This generation has big questions about how their creativity can bring value to the world. We need better, more imaginative answers. Telling students to move to NYC and ‘fake it until you make it’ as an artist is not a sustainable solution. Hell, it wasn’t a sustainable solution for my generation either! I want to know what can live between Jeff-Koons-on-a-yacht famous and I-have-to-take-what-I-can-get-because-I’m-barely-paying-my-bills.
Perhaps this is why so many of my students from community-center classes didn’t go to art school at all. Because the practical demands of making a living limited their freedom to investigate their creative lives.
We owe it to the next generation to look at these questions and create something better.
The next few months I’ll be digging into this, starting some new initiatives, collaborations, and working with a National Science Foundation funded organization that researches how our world needs artists- in the sciences, in business, and elsewhere.
I’m excited, I'm scared, I'm ready, I'm hungry...? Stay tuned for what I find out.
