Five Habits Of Highly Imaginative Families

FIVE HABITS OF HIGHLY IMAGINATIVE FAMILIES

Five Habits of Highly Imaginative Families

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or five years we have interviewed young artists and writers, along with their teachers, in order to capture the thoughts, efforts and experiences that lie behind their works. But there was always a third presence in the interviews: family. “My mother said…; my dad read…; my aunt gave me…; my step-father used to take me…” ran through the stories, like a chorus or a heart-beat. The message was clear: young artists are not born, they are raised. Daily, families buffer, offer, ask, give and teach.

Above: Talia Shabtay, student award recipient from The Scholastic Awards of 2003, and her grandfather posing with his portrait at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Photo by James Kegley.

Digital image by Julia Chesky, from The Scholastic Awards of 2004, Photography Portfolio Gold Award. City landmarks superimposed on photographs of nature.

So this year, we asked the families of Scholastic Award recipients and other young artists to share their wisdom about raising creative children. Many family members talked about the concrete choices they had made: never owning a television, making trips to museums, and going without in order to afford art lessons. Less concrete, but possibly even more powerful, were the “ways of being” which threaded through their stories. From those stories, we have culled a list—call it the five habits of highly imaginative families:

Creation: Making Things I am in love with travel. Even though I wasn’t born in this country I know the national parks better than most Americans do. And everywhere I take photos to have those places with me always. Growing up, my daughter used to say to me, “Mommy, no more pictures.” Now she is an amazing digital artist. A very few of the family members we interviewed were artists in the sense of earning their livings as poets or photographers. But all of them invented: travel photos, studies of hermit crabs, a newsletter for aviators. In many cases, they made sacrifices in order to be makers, whether that was leaving safer, more well-established jobs, saving for trips, or giving up sleep for the sheer pleasure of being free to create in the hours after work. It is this appetite for creating something where there was nothing that seems contagious, indelible and sustaining for their sons and daughters. Young artists may not need to grow up among published authors or print makers. An album of Zion National Park may well be enough if it brings together appetite and the pleasure of invention.

Delight: Being Amazed

Among the greatest gifts is delight. A young potter absolutely remembers when his ceramic bowl was set in the middle of the Thanksgiving table, not out of kindness, or usefulness, but out of awe. A painter carries with her the image of her father standing before her painting in a museum, silently, joyously, crying. She says it serves her like a passport into every new artistic territory she dares to enter. These moments convince young people that what they say or make is heard—it has an audience and an effect. Young artists and writers especially thrive on “informed” delight—the kind that occurs when a mother or a grandfather tracks their work so closely that they can detect small changes, new frontiers and even small forms of mastery. To comment on a new glaze, or to ask about an image in a poem not only signals intimacy and interest, it fuels the work. That single question practically sings, “Yes, the choices are visible, the handiwork speaks, the message flows.”

Advocacy: Transforming the Odd One of the neighbors complained because he was downstairs in the building laundry room at 2 in the morning. I showed the manager the newspaper article on his award. With the building name and address right there in it. So he was so proud, he gave my son one of the storage rooms for a studio. Young writers and artists rarely fit the mold. Far past midnight, they use the folding table in the apartment laundry room to draw. A young man may prefer painting to soccer. A girl’s report on horses may be narrated by a chestnut mare and be graded as “off topic.” In a world that wants only laundry on the table and believes horses whinny, rather than speak, young artists and writers need ambassadors and advocates who can translate their passion and choices from “strange” to “miraculous.”

Left: Lauren Cunningham, Age 18, GA, Art Portfolio Silver Award recipient of 2005. Lauren’s teacher Maggie Davis: “Lauren has shown incredible initiative in constructing the installation piece When Is a Fork Not a Fork? She discovered that Wendy’s made forks that melted the best, and she talked one manager at Wendy’s into giving her about 500 forks for her project.”

FIVE HABITS OF HIGHLY IMAGINATIVE FAMILIES

Left: Maxime Lacroix, age 11, at the opening reception of P.S. Art 2004, a celebration of the visual arts in grades K – 12 in New York City public schools, at the Tweed Courthouse in New York City.

I always framed her drawings. To this day, my office walls are filled with her work. I love looking at the progression. She wants me to get rid of the old ones; she hates having people look at them. But I won’t give up walking in every day and being amazed at the progression.

Finding a Path on the Web Connection: Cutting a Path

FIVE HABITS OF HIGHLY IMAGINATIVE FAMILIES

My grandma noticed that I drew a lot. When I turned eight she gave me one of those huge boxes with paints, and markers, and colored pencils in colors that never came in crayon boxes. She had to leave our neighborhood to go downtown to an art store. I used up everything, even the browns. When she saw that, she came up to school to talk to the art teacher to find out where I could take art lessons. She went with me the first year by bus. She took me to the museum and the Latino Cultural Center. She showed me how you cut a path for what you want. The adult world of art supply stores, museums and summer camps does not come with a map. Young people have to learn to thread together what courses and electives they choose in school, what they do in after-school programs and how they spend their own free time, so that these choices become a pathway for their talents and intentions. Particularly in a world where opportunities are unequally spread across richer and poorer communities, it takes mothers, grandmothers, and others who “hurdle” the barriers, track down scholarships and refuse to believe “the program is full,” to create a map with new possibilities for a next generation.

Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design www.aicad.org American Association of Museums www.aam-us.org Americans for the Arts www.artsusa.org Arts Education Partnership www.aep-arts.org Association of Children’s Museums www.childrensmuseums.org College Art Association www.collegeart.org Education Commission of the States www.ecs.org The J. Paul Getty Trust www.getty.edu Kennedy Center Alliance for Arts Education Network www.kennedy-center.org/education/kcaaen

Respect: Leaving Well Enough Alone

The Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation www.sharpeartfdn.org/summer1.htm

This last habit is almost counterintuitive—it is about caring intensely by stepping back. In the simplest sense, leaving well enough alone means allowing a young person to spend hours behind closed doors with charcoal, oil paint, or words on paper, without curious intrusions or nagging questions about how it’s going. But as this mother suggests, there is a second, deeper form of respect:

National Art Education Association www.naea-reston.org National Association of State Arts Agencies www.nasaa-arts.org The National Council of Teachers of English www.ncte.org

Even when my son was little I made myself ask him “What’s it taste like?” not, “Sweet, isn’t it?” What he could see, or hear, or sense would be the raw materials of his imagination. He had to learn to be responsible for his own perceptions rather than swallowing the world ready-made. So I taught myself to ask questions and to want his answers.

National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts www.artsawards.org National Association of Secondary School Principals www.nassp.org/s_nassp/index.asp

A list is not a life. These five habits practiced like exercises will not guarantee artistic children— or your money back. Instead, the list acknowledges how caring adults—not all of them blood relatives by any means—help to transform raw gifts into human artistry.

PTA www.pta.org Red Studio, Museum of Modern Art http://redstudio.moma.org

Dr. Dennie Palmer Wolf Director, Opportunity and Accountability Annenberg Institute for School Reform June 2005 Special thanks to the following families who were interviewed by Dr. Wolf and who shared their stories: Geoffrey and Sahiba Arend, parents of Flossie Arend; Felicia Boamah, mother of Leslie Boamah and Kofi Mintah, step-father of Leslie Boamah; Deanna Burney, parent; Alla Chesky, mother of Julia Chesky; Eric Scully, father of Rachel Sul-Jee Scully; Lea Wolf, daughter of Dr. Dennie Palmer Wolf.

Below is a list of websites of organizations whose work supports the creative journey of emerging artists and writers. The list is not exhaustive but offers some first steps in discovering resources for parents, students and teachers via the Internet.

U.S. Department of Education www.ed.gov VSA arts www.vsarts.org Student award recipient participating in a collaborative workshop at the national celebration events at Washington, DC, 2003.

Write It www.scholastic.com/writeit Young Audiences www.youngaudiences.org