PRESIDENT'S GREETING

October 2010-11

Literacy has been the big buzzword in my district this fall. I have been thinking specifically about how to incorporate literacy strategies into the art classroom. Visual literacy is something that is more vital than ever in the 21st century. We are image-saturated each day on our cell phones, tvs, billboards and computers. Teaching students how to interpret, analyze and create these images is a vital survival technique and part of the push for literacy training in my district. We have been trained and encouraged to utilize many strategies to help students understand what they read and make the reading experience more interactive. While listening to our new Literacy coordinator talk at a recent inservice it ocurred to me that my job was even more vital than any. I not only held the keys to training students to be literate with words, but I could teach them to be literate through images. Students who are technically savvy and visually literate will be the ones to get the jobs in the current 21st century economy.

As human beings communicating through pictures is primal. It is one of the first things we do along with talking and walking...we pick up that crayon or possibly our mom's lipstick and we scribble on the back of a couch or a wall. This instictual urge to make our mark and draw is critical to our development as a human being. The ability to communicate a cognitive idea....a concept through imagery is what seperates us. I have been following the series in the New York Times called "Line By Line" by James McMullan.

In the first installment McMullan discusses drawing as a "phantom skill" that we lose shortly after elementary school. In the series his goal is to re-educate the ordinary, non-artist adult in the joys of drawing, just for fun. He wants any adult to be able to pick up a pencil and communicate by drawing with confidence. He also hopes to illustrate what really great drawing looks like and how to find it. One of my favorites parts of this article dealt with the recent William Kentridge exhibit at MOMA in New York City. I quote here:

"Drawing is a process of engagement for the artist, a period of both time and struggle that pulls the artist deeply and intensely into his subject and his ideas. Projecting a photograph in order to give you a perfect drawing of your subject has robbed you of all the imperfect yet more interesting drawings you might have made. The recent exhibit of the art of William Kentridge at The Museum of Modern Art in New York was the most powerful expression of the vital possibility in drawing that I have seen for some time, and it made so much other contemporary drawing seem dry and intellectualized."

That vital possibility of expression is something we can communicate to our students, giving them lifelong abilities to communicate through visual means. What an amazing gift we've been entrusted with as artist educators; the gift of visual literacy! It is our task to pass on the strategies that will make us better communicators and vital artists.

Fostering that gift in ourselves is critical. I encourage you to find time, even 15 minutes a day to draw. I carry around a moleskine sketchbook so that anywhere I go I can draw, rendering a thought, a word, a scene... anything. I don't plan to exhibit these drawings. They are selfishly, just for me--survival tools really. Carve out that time and celebrate the artist you are. Continue to foster your own visual literacy. October is a fantastic time to stop and do just that. Have a wonderful autumn...my favorite season of all!