In Defense of Art

I'm reading Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone with my 8 year old daughter right now. Each night we make our way through a chapter. One of the conversations she and I have had is around one of the topics that Harry and his classmates take at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry: Defense against the Dark Arts.

Among my daughter's many questions have been, the following:

What is a dark art, anyway?

Why are those arts dark and other arts not dark?

Can't all art be dark and angry and mysterious, after all?

What makes something an art in the first place?

If art is the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, is there any creation that actually isn't art?

Okay, so that last one wasn't her, but you get the point.

And it got me thinking about art (and my defense of art) and the role it's played in my life. Given who my parents were, I never really identified the activities I engaged in as a child as "art" or "not art." Instead, creativity and beauty and expression were entrenched in everything. Sunsets were art. Clouds were art. My block structures were art. The dams we built in Cummings Brook were art. The bread my dad baked was art. The letters my mom decorated before mailing were art.

Everything was art.

When I graduated from high school, the greatest honor I received was being awarded the Arts and Athletics award. I was so incredibly proud of the risks I'd taken as an artist. In fact, even today I have this poster on the wall of my classroom in an effort to remind my students that art is a language and integral to our discussion of culture.

So this winter I'm doing three really specific art assignments with my students. Two are taking place right now. One is the creation of compelling, thoughtful political cartoons that coincide with the Berlin Conference of 1884; another is a map project that requires each student to create a 2-map atlas plate that displays the correlation between two disparate data sets; and the third is a project about color. That final one is still in its infancy, but essentially, students will be given a color and asked to do some research about the history of that color (I was inspired by The Secret Lives of Color by Kasia St. Clair) and then they'll do a 60 second voiceover describing the brief history and connection to culture while a video shows them creating the color by mixing paints together.

I'm excited for it, and it's gotten me thinking about art and our commitment to it at my school. I ran some numbers and learned that my 8th grade students spend 7.7% of their time in art class. If they are in an Ensemble, that number jumps to 10.6%. One of my goals in the coming year is going to imagine a world where art is immersed more deeply into the fabric of the school day. How can we, as adults, model the creative risk-taking that it takes to be an artist?

Can we create clubs or electives that are connected to art?

• a Hamilton elective taught by a music teacher and history teacher?
• a math elective that looks at tessellations?
• a poetry and painting elective that uses student poems to inspire student paintings?
• a freestyle rapping club?
• an elective that looks at Fibonacci's Sequence and other related mathematical discoveries that have implications in art and nature
• an elective that looks specifically at color and the science behind it
• an elective inspired by Diane Ackerman's A Natural History of the Senses
• a club that watches TED Talks about art and creativity
• a club that pushes students to use the right side of their brain

The possibilities are endless and the impact would be profound.

For, after all, art is dark and art is light. Art is many things. But I believe it's always worth defending.