Dream a Little Dream with Me

One of my favorite games as I was a kid was trying to figure out what I would be when I grew up. I don't ever remember having an aspiration to be an astronaut, a famous singer, or (to use the dream of a friend of mine) a paleontologist. Yes, there were times I imagined my face on the movie screens, or my voice coming over the radio, and let's not forget thinking about what the USA would be like with Miranda Hynes as Madame President. But I've always loved so many different things, that none of those dreams lasted long because how could you be President and a famous actress?

And so in my game I used to try and figure out what I could be when I grew up that would allow me to do everything I liked doing. As I've gotten closer to what I want to become, marching down the path of self-development, I've realized that not everyone asks themselves this question. Most people have their work and their hobby; what they do, and what they like to do. For me, that was never an option. My passions run my life, every part of it.

Whenever I introduced someone else to this game and explained everything that I loved to do, they came up with an immediate answer: “You should be a kindergarten teacher!” This seemed like too obvious a choice to me. Wasn’t there something else I could do? Some profession I could find that would make me able to help people while making art and not be confined to a classroom?

If you’re reading this, on a blog about community art, you can probably guess what I ended up deciding. But it took a long time for me to realize that my two passions of helping people and being creative weren’t mutually exclusive. It took longer still once I had my realization to see how I could fit the two together. When I was sixteen I solved my game; I wanted to run my own community art center. From the solution of my game came my dream, and since then I haven’t stopped dreaming about it.

With each person I’ve met my dream has grown and solidified, coming ever closer to becoming an actual concrete goal. When I began to dream of my art center, getting my degree in art was the goal, one that I was less than two years away from. As graduation drew closer, my next goal arose: to find a life after college that included art and a way to make money. And so I applied to Lesley University for a Masters of Education in Community art while also applying to the Community Art Department at the Museum of Fine Arts. With the realization of each of these goals, I faithfully continued my march towards my far off dream.

Now, a little less than halfway through my masters degree, my dream is that much closer to becoming an actual goal. I’ve recently been offered an internship at the wonderful Springstep in Medford, where I will learn about the inner workings of a community art center and add to it as best I can. With each goal accomplished, I’ve realized that my dream isn’t as far off as I think it is. Instead of a jump into space, I can now see a climbing staircase of goals that will, if all goes well and I work my little ass off, make my dream my reality.

Dancing in the... Museum?

Last Thursday I took a group of children to the MFA for a late night visit. By 6 o'clock, which is only the time that we get there, the children are typically already hungry and antsy after having been at school all day and then at the club for three hours. Despite this, they normally do quite well in the museum and are excited to be around the art and to be outside of their normal environment.

The whole way there the kids were singing along to the radio and to each others ipods/phones. When, for a moment, I slipped past a station of rock music from some previous decade there were giggles and cries of "What is this?" "Is this music?" and my personal favorite, "No offense to whoever wrote this song, but this is weird." To my ears, this music was perfectly normal and, to run the risk of sounding like an old cranky lady, much more appropriate for the kids than the songs they listen to at 8-10 years old which all seem to reference sex or drugs with varying degrees of subtlety.

The visit itself went well, apart from a short bickering between two girls and some discrepancies over eating in the can. The kids still hold a certain awe for the museum and the artist we were working with. The project wrapped up a little earlier than planned, so the kids and I took a stroll through the museum on the way back out.

In the Contemporary wing there was a small country band set up and we decided to stay for a song. One or two of the kids started to dance, sticking their feet out in front of them in their interpretation of country dancing. Soon enough there were twelve children bobbing up and down in the middle of the new contemporary art wing at the Museum of Fine Arts.

I walked over to the two employees running the event and asked if it was okay that the children were dancing.

"Of course!" cried one of them, holding her clipboard to her chest as she grinned at the kids. "This is what we want to have happen. We want it to be fun!"

It was fun.

The handful of people gathered to listen to the musicians glanced back to watch the group of flailing children, all maintaining a respectful distance from the art on the walls. The musicians played louder, the audience started to nod along, and the kids were all for it. When the song ended we all applauded, formed a line, and walked out.

The children giggled as we made our way to the exit, pausing so that each of them could touch the Abraham Lincoln Statue, the only piece of art in the museum where the sign says "PLEASE TOUCH." In one evening the kids and seen art, reflected on it, created from it, done something "forbidden" (touching an art piece), and had fun.

As I drove the children back across the Tobin Bridge, listening to them sing to the radio once again, I thought about how the kids would have reacted if they had heard the same music that they were dancing to on the radio. I can only imagine the squeals and giggles of "what is this?" But when they were faced with the real live musicians, they couldn't help but dance.

Are they getting anything?

Like any good artist/thinker, every once in a while I have an existential crisis. Is there any point? Does looking at pretty pictures ever actually matter? Am I making any difference? Why should we do anything when in the end we all die and the earth gets blown up by the sun? That sort of thing.

In the past two years or so, and even more intensely in the past six months, I haven't found these questions repeating themselves in my head. At this point in time, my life direction is clearer than it has ever been. I love what I learn, what I do at work, the people in my life, where I live, pretty much everything. It's a little surreal to tell the truth, but that train of thought is for another time.

Despite the current absence of my existential crises, I am constantly shoring up arguments for my rational self to use when they reappear in my life once again. At work yesterday a perfect example presented itself to me. I had a good chunk of time in the afternoon between two classes I was teaching at the MFA and it turns out that my co-worker and friend was in the same predicament. She suggested that we go to the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum since it is literally right up the street and I'd never been there (or so I thought).

I eagerly accepted and we made our way through the strangely warm January day to our neighbor museum, wearing our IDs on our red MFA lanyards. As we entered the new wing of the Gardner, which architecturally looks very much like the new wing at the MFA, we were kindly greeted by museum workers with bright yellow Gardner lanyards and I had to wonder if our separate museum superiors hadn't planned the obvious contrast.

Walking through the new wing was lovely. Looking at art and places where art is displayed and talked about is always interesting, particularly when you have good company. But my new found weapon against future existential crises came when my friend and I walked through the glass tunnel connecting the new wing to the original Gardner museum. As I entered the stone and brick mansion, I had the strangest feeling of deja vu. I shook it off, knowing that sometimes that just happens, and followed my friend in the main hallway of the museum that circles around the famous courtyard.

Finally, a memory that had tickled my mind for years snapped into place as I stared at the small hallway on my right.

There are some memories which are so specific that I can see bits of them in my mind as clearly as if I am looking at a video or a photograph. The hallway I saw yesterday belonged to one such memory. For years it had floated around my mind and every once in a while I would try to place it. Could it be the New York cloisters which I went to on a 2nd grade field trip? Or some scene from a medieval movie? Maybe it was from one of the cathedrals I saw in Italy that for some reason felt like it had happened a long time along?

Actually, it was the first floor hallway on the right side of the courtyard in the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum. Despite the fact that last time I saw it I was about a foot and a half lower, I recognized it instantly.

In fifth grade my class took an overnight field trip to Boston. We did all the usual historical and tourist routes, which is what I remember. However, apparently, we also went to the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum and the image of the cloister-like hallway in a building that had once been a woman's home engrained itself on my ten-year-old mind.

So how does this argue against my future existential crises?

Something that can be hard to tell as a teacher is whether you've really gotten through to your students or not. Of course there are the obvious responses, the glowing eyes, bright smiles, and exclamations of joy. But what about the kids who aren't as overt with their responses? Are they still getting anything?

I still don't have a definite answer. However, I can now say from personal experience, sometimes people are absorbing information even when they don't realize it. Ideas you were taught in your youth could be recalled from your memory banks at any point. And no, not everything will stick for every child. But there's still hope that at some point in their lives your students will have a moment of eye-opening memory that brings back some dormant lesson you taught them. Maybe they'll feel a deep connection to an art piece or a museum that you brought them to. Or maybe that's just me. Either way, existential crisis: averted.

Communities of Artists

So far I've been focusing mostly on communities creating art, which makes sense when trying to define Community Art. I've listened to musicians, read about museums, and researched as much as I can before I get distracted by my next big idea. But there is another important way that community art can be created; along with the idea of a communities creating art, there is the sister idea of artists creating communities.

This brings to mind, for me at least, a mental image of a grainy gray picture with a group of wealthy, white Europeans sitting around a tea table talking about the wide world. (Either that or scantily clad 60's hippies). While both can technically fall under this notion of a community of artists, I'm thinking on a broader, vaguer scale.

The first way I began to think about a community of artists, because of course there is always more than one way, was when I went to the MFA in Boston and saw an exhibit of the Rouen Cathedrals. In this room five original Monet paintings of the Rouen Cathedral face five Lichtenstein silkscreens inspired by those paintings. The dialogue created, not only between the paintings themselves but between the artists and their separate contexts, made me consider the fluid contemporary and historical community of artists.

Artists, like everyone else, do not live in a vacuum. They see things, read things, experience things, and this effects what they create. One of the most interesting parts of my collegiate level artistic education was when I realized that I was becoming a part, no matter how insignificant that part is, of the continuous community of artists that has existed as long as the human race.

Although artists are often thought of in the romantic light of a solitary genius, and indeed many fit that description, there is always a community of which them (we) can be a part. The solidarity of creative solitary-ness; the rich history which we come from and create. That is my first, grand scale, appropriately vague description of Community Art being a community of artists.

The second is much simpler and everyday. It is the interaction between fellow artists; the dialogue that takes place in a communal studio or in a classroom critique. Artists coming together to create a community and from that community creating better art pieces, inspiring each other, pushing each other forward. As any artist who has worked within a close-knit group knows, the frustration and agitation that come from working with a bunch of wired, creative, free-thinkers is balanced by the energy of creativity that flows around any such group.

A truly incredible experience is when the two separate definitions of Community Art (communities creating art and artists creating communities) crash together. Then we get the splendid debacle of Communities of Artists creating Art. While far from the ultimate or best definition of Community Art (because I doubt there is such a thing), this image definitely brings to mind the incredible realm of possibilities that open to us when people collaborate in creation.