Sabra Friedman
I am a working artist, and I teach through the Flushing Council on Culture and the Arts as an Artist in Residence at PS 22 in District 25, Queens. Two days a week I am at the school teaching; three days I paint in my studio in Long Island City. My long-term presence at PS 22 (due to continued support from the principal and the district, I have been there for seven years) has allowed for my integration into the community as well as for the development of a mutual sense of trust. The residency has also allowed for the power of visual art to slowly work its way into the fabric of the school, affecting bulletin boards in halls and classrooms and encouraging teachers to welcome these new ideas.
When I work in the classroom I utilize some of the same ideas and processes I work with in the studio. I begin with an idea and let that idea lead, rather than pre-determining an outcome. I break a large project down into separate steps, concentrating on one experience per day. Students can understand sophisticated art concepts if the idea can be explained and demonstrated in an age-appropriate manner, without being watered down. Kids feel excited to be exposed to “real” art.
Though I wear different hats over the course of a week, ideas flow back and forth between the roles. In the studio I paint on wood, canvas, or paper pinned to the wall, and I move constantly, closing in and stepping back, in what seems like a dance. In the classroom, I encourage kids to use their whole bodies to work, to feel the branches of a tree in their arms, to avoid “lollipop” trees, and to study their own faces in the mirror to avoid the clichéd smiley face. We vary paper sizes—long, wide, large, and small—to see images in different formats, to make decisions about placement and organization, and to identify and explore the many possibilities and decisions open to an artist.
Subconsciously, the ideas I use in the classroom also flow back into my own painting. Kings and queens from first grade fairy tale paintings reappear as abstracted images. Profiles from sixth grade Egyptian figures emerge as more abstracted profiles in the studio. As my mind fixes on an image or idea, it asserts itself, sometimes unwittingly, in the different areas of my life.
I like things a little on edge—not knowing in advance exactly what the next step is or how things will turn out—to keep the work surprising. For example, with a fourth grade class studying immigration in social studies, I have each student make a self-portrait as an immigrant. Then by chance I notice a small soap box and realize that it would make a fun, 3D addition—an immigrant’s suitcase! We cut the figures out, clutching their 3D suitcases, bags slung over their shoulders, and cluster them around a large, popped-out Statue of Liberty. The large-scale mural is a great success! Each step has led to the next addition.
Some classroom teachers engage in the art process along with their students. Their roles as teachers change as they sit down at the tables and grapple with the same ideas, materials, and insecurities as the group. This allows the teacher some relief from the role of authority figure and instills a sense of equality in the teacher-student relationship.
Other classroom roles shift, too, as students who may be more visually intuitive than academic rise to a new status among their peers. Different approaches and ideas are equally impressive in art. Mistakes can be changed innumerable times, and the value of the useful accident is something I always emphasize. Last year, while working with a fifth grade class creating life-sized papier-mâché puppets of characters from Twelfth Night to compliment a digital Shakespeare project, one student’s balloon partially collapsed with the heaviness of the wet papier-mâché. I encouraged her to have faith, that the “squashed” face would result in a terrific puppet, and though she doubted me at the papier-mâché point, it turned out to be a puppet she loved.
Students new to this country, some speaking little or no English, are able to participate equally in visual art because explanations can be made gesturally with verbal encouragement given by kids who share the same language and act as translators when needed. This multiculturalism is especially evident in my school in Queens where students come from approximately 50 countries of the world and speak 25 to 30 languages.
Being a tactile painter and knowing how kids create on such a holistic level, I always try to make my projects as rich tactilely as they are conceptually. Kids love the thickness of tempera and various size brushes, watery paint and small sponges, the gooeyness of wet papier-mâché. Water-based printing ink can be rolled on styrofoam for printing or drawn on top of an underpainting with Q-tips. Powdery chalks and oily oil pastels can be explored both tactilely and for making images. Messiness is allowed, tables and clothing are protected by newspaper and smocks, and the clean-up is structured and orderly.
I am lucky enough to teach part-time, so I have private time to regenerate ideas. Like a good day in the studio, working in the classroom always has an element of surprise—I never know exactly what will come out each day, no matter how familiar the routines.
Sabra Friedman is a painter and a teacher who exhibits her work and teaches in New York City.
