A Call To Action: Educating our High School Students About Artistic Careers
When someone is asked what they will use their art degree for, artists are often taken aback and defensive. After all, most people in our society do not believe that artists have skills that can contribute to society or that they can make a living from. Instead, they will say that the chances of you becoming famous and selling work is so unlikely that you might as well give up. This is disheartening particularly because there are so many places where artists can utilize their skills and visions to create meaningful work while also making money. Our education system has failed high school artists when we fail to show them the full range of possibilities that their skills can lead them to.
I am making a call to action to art teachers around the world; a call to expose their students to how artists can create meaningful work in communities. If we truly want these students to go to school to pursue art, we must give them more examples of how to use their degree and skills aside from “fame” and selling enough work to make a living. Mike Hoyt, an instructor of HECUA’s Art for Social Change, said that “even the most talented people I knew have stopped making work,” when discussing the disillusionment that comes when artists leave school and hope to enter the gallery world. Too often it seems as though people with great skill go through school and walk away unfulfilled because they never got a chance find alternate ways to be successful aside from showing in galleries and selling work. Existing in a community art space is what gave me the inspiration to pursue art in college.
Throughout my life, I have always been sketching and doodling: video game characters, comic books, cartoons, even an attempt at something with a little bit of complex detail like a dragon. I never knew that I wanted to be an artist until high school, when I learned about printmaking. The combination of my high school art class and the nonprofit arts organization RedLine’s Teen Resident Artist program, where I learned about printmaking, advanced my creativity and work in a significant way. Redline is a non-profit organization that combines Artist-in-Residence programs, printmaking studios, gallery space, and a Teen Artist-in-Residence program. I was part of this Teen Resident Program for two of my most foundational years as an artist. As a result, I was pushed to develop my imagery in a more confident way. This confidence helped me believe that I could focus on the arts at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. When you leave your home state to go to school, you must feel a certain level of faith in yourself to pursue your dreams. In my time here in Minneapolis I learned a lot about what it means to live as an artist, especially the type of small gigs, networking, and the community environments where you want to be.
Now I am in the HECUA Art For Social Change program and I am continuing to learn how artists can make a living with their skills. Most of all, I am learning to see the value of artists in their communities around the nation and the world, and especially working with other organizations that can assist artists in finding fulfilling, and well-paying jobs. Personally, I feel as though I have put in a ton of effort to keep my eyes peeled and my ears open to learn all this information and to try to see it being actualized in the real world. This type of information is what should be inspiring the youth and coming generations to continue to have faith in themselves and pursue their arts.
I believe that exposing high school students to the arts communities around them is essential. Being involved in or at least aware of what the different organizations in your area are doing is a fundamental step in forming long lasting artistic careers. My other Art for Social Change teacher, Molly Van Avery, had a formative experience in high school where she would go to the Guthrie theatre every day for 2 hours. The program called “GATE: Guthrie Active Teen Ensemble” was created by her teacher Sally French. “ She was really visionary and she was kind of an art patron extraordinaire,” is how Molly describes French. This program gave Molly and her fellow students connections to tons of local theaters and encouraged them to see all the shows they could with free tickets.
The power of an instructor like this cannot be understated and is an incredibly unique experience that provided foundation for Molly, and can do so for a countless amount of students. When students are exposed to such a breadth of work and art environments it creates a strong bond between the arts and students. While not every teacher will have the ability to give their students such opportunities, I believe that it highlights how effective the connection of the real art world to high school education can be. High schools, therefore, should do their utmost to provide similar experiences and to push to build connections between schools, organizations, and students.
The saddest part about what I have written so far is that it has taken me until my third year of college to really have a good grasp on these concepts. I would still consider myself to be extremely lucky because the chances I had to connect with art in the community is what inspired my artistic practice at its core. I can only imagine what it would have been like to get this type of knowledge in high school. I would have felt even more confident in my ability to navigate the reality of making a living as an artist.
With so little money available to high school art programs, what can art teachers do to expose their students to the reality of life as an artist? In my experience, a teacher gave me an application for a Milwaukee Art Museum internship and wrote me a letter of recommendation. As a result, I got the internship, which led to a second internship where printmaking would become my primary medium. I was so lucky to have someone expose me to this type of opportunity–I know that young artists are really in need of it.
Schools need teachers that can find opportunities to push and inspire their students. If possible, they should expose students to local shows, events, or demonstrations where they can see how artistic skills can be used in so many ways. Asking this means that we need people who are connected to our communities and always have these event on their radars. As the art world is largely connected to grants and outside funding, it would be amazing to show students how these relationships can form and the artistic manifestation that is a result of it.
In the present society there are so many unique and special ways that artists can play a key role in their communities and work environments. With more widely available forms of technology and high-quality art supplies, there is nothing stopping our youth from pursuing their craft and following their dreams. However, when so many still have the skewed perspective that the artist’s only goal is to show work, sell work, and be famous there is clearly a lot more education that needs to happen inside and especially outside of the classroom. Students need to be aware of the organizations in their communities and the relationships they have with artists.
