In this track, Director of School, Youth, and Family Programs Greer Kudon talks about the origins of the LTA program, and teaching artists Jeff Hopkins, Joey Hauk Weiss, and Diane Matyas discuss their experiences working with students.
TRANSCRIPT:
Diane Matyas: Art is about lifting your life higher. I mean, we are just carbon, right? [Laughs.] We’re just some smudges. We’re a very tiny entity. Yet we have so much emotion, feelings, passion. In particular, we’re attracted to things. And what we wear, what we sense, what we think is important comes out, hopefully, through art.
Joey Hauk Weiss: There was a student today who—we we’re making collages of buildings—and wanted to make a collage of a dream he had had that was of abstract shapes. And I certainly was not going to say no to that. It was just a really interesting idea in the first place. It looked a bit like a Russian Constructivist painting. It had floating shapes, and it was interesting.
Jeff Hopkins: There was a student who was new to the country and was really self-conscious about speaking in front of his classmates. He would make these beautiful origami figures but never spoke to me. For much of the year, we communicated through art. He would make drawings. He would show them proudly. Then one day we went out to do a sketching, like a neighborhood-walk sketching, and we were walking around. And we were going to go in one direction around the corner, and he grabbed me and he said, “Mr. Jeff, don’t go that way. That’s where I live.”
He spoke. And I said, “Wow, wow.” Part of it was that I think he finally built up enough of a rapport where he knew he could say something, and all was going to be good. And I was going to listen to him and respect him. And what happens is the art allows for a type of connection between me and a student.
Greer Kudon: I’m Greer Kudon, and I’m the Director of School, Youth, and Family Programs at the Guggenheim.
H: I am Jeff Hopkins. I am a teaching artist with the Learning Through Art program.
W: My name is Joey Weiss. I went to school for painting. I knew I was potentially interested in teaching, and I decided that I wanted to do more of it.
M: My name is Diane Matyas. I am an artist and a teaching artist. It’s about response to the world. That’s what visual art can be, or music is: the response to the world that you’re living in. So that’s a high-priority problem to solve.
H: The more I do this and the more experience I have, the more I break it down to something very simple, which is that art is a very human thing. There’s a need for humans to make things and to create things and respond to the world around them. And children, in particular, have that need. They’re processing so many things in the world, and in their lives, and in their families, and in themselves. And ultimately, it just comes down to the fact that as human beings, we need a way or a place to do that. And art can be that thing.
Ultimately, I know and understand all of the research in the art-education field about why the arts are important and why they have significant impact on the way students learn, and the way they think, and the way their brains function. And I believe all those things. But what I see is that children come alive, and they wake up, and they breathe, and they feel when they make art. And I think that’s just part of being human. And somehow, the art allows them to tap into that. And that is what I love.
To read the full transcript, visit: https://www.guggenheim.org/audio/track/an-introduction-to-teaching-through-art.
Installation view, "A Year with Children 2021", Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, April 30–June 21, 2021. Photo: David Heald
