人妻少妇专区

In Review

For the last 30 years, watercolor painting has been a constant in the life of Rochester native Glenn Miller. 鈥淚 was lucky never to have had the lesson that watercolor is hard,鈥� he says, calling landscape watercolor painting his favorite medium of expression.

Today, recently retired from teaching photography at Rochester Institute of Technology, Miller is a fixture in the landscape watercolor class at the Memorial Art Gallery鈥檚 Creative Workshop, taught by painter Dick Kane. The class brings Miller, who has been a regular for seven years, full circle: as a child in the 1940s, he took courses at the gallery, 鈥渇linging paint with鈥攁nd at鈥攐ther students,鈥� he recalls.

The gallery began holding art classes as early as the 1920s, but it wasn鈥檛 until 1949 that its art school became known as the Creative Workshop. Part of the gallery鈥檚 education department鈥攚hich also includes the Charlotte Whitney Allen Library, the school outreach program, the docent program, and a variety of public programs鈥攖he workshop offers hands-on art classes taught by artist-teachers to students of all ages, from age two and a half on.

鈥淲e鈥檙e an art school with no degrees, no matriculation, no admissions requirements. Our goal is to make art accessible by doing, for children up to adults,鈥� says curriculum director Rachael Baldanza, a member of the workshop since 2004 and a doctoral student in the human development program at the Warner School. Her work there focuses on intergenerational learning spaces, a topic on which she has gathered extensive experience at the Creative Workshop, where classes are offered for kids, for adults, and for children and adults together.

Most of the workshop鈥檚 more than 50 teachers come either from an art education background or from professional artistic training but with a talent for communicating about their art. 鈥淪omewhere along the line, they realized they were teachers,鈥� says Baldanza. 鈥淚n fact, a lot of our teachers started here as students.鈥�

Fundamental to the workshop鈥檚 sense of purpose is the conviction that art is everybody鈥檚 business: not just its appreciation, but also its production.

鈥淎lmost all of us as young children spent a fair amount of time on our tummies, on the floor, drawing and coloring and making all kinds of pictures,鈥� says Marlene Hamann-Whitmore, acting director of education. 鈥淎nd unfortunately a lot of us age out of that, which is too bad, because you learn an awful lot by drawing and making. You engage your brain in different ways when you鈥檙e actively drawing, coloring, writing than when you鈥檙e sitting passively. If you sit down and look at something, and you pick up even a golf pencil and a piece of scrap paper and start recording what you see, your hand, your eye, your brain, and I think eventually your heart are engaged in a way that they鈥檙e not if you don鈥檛 take the time to slow down and look.鈥�

The Herdle family鈥攆ather George, the gallery鈥檚 first director, and then daughters Isabel and Gertrude, who led the gallery after his death鈥斺�済ravitated toward the populist and the public, and the idea that anyone could make art,鈥� says Baldanza.

Having a museum with a hands-on educational component isn鈥檛 unique, but it鈥檚 also not typical, says HamannWhitmore. But at the gallery, those two pieces鈥攅xhibitions and instruction鈥攔einforce each other, with classes visiting the gallery to take inspiration for their own work.

Looking at the collection 鈥渕akes a huge difference,鈥� says workshop teacher Suzanne Kolodziej, whose background is in textiles and art education. She is also outreach coordinator for the East Asia Program at Cornell. In a recent class, she took students to the Asian collection to look at mixing patterns before leading them in a project of making kimonos from origami papers.

In the gallery, 鈥渞ather than my telling them about art, we talk about what we see,鈥� says Kolodziej. 鈥淚 learn from them what they perceive. It becomes a conversation. It鈥檚 not so much about information鈥攊t鈥檚 visual.鈥�

鈥淚t鈥檚 learning the language of art,鈥� says Baldanza of bringing people to the gallery and to the workshop鈥檚 studios to craft their own pieces in areas from painting and pottery to weaving and jewelry making. 鈥淚f you were to learn Spanish, at some point, if your goal was really to speak it, you would go to a Spanish-speaking country and immerse yourself in it.鈥� The idea at the gallery, she says, is the same.

Kolodziej sees the workshop as a valuable and inclusive resource. 鈥淣ot many cities have a studio school. It makes it everyone鈥檚 museum in a different sense.鈥�

Miller agrees. He calls the studio within a gallery 鈥渢he best of all worlds. We鈥檙e able to work in an environment where we learn to manipulate the tools of the medium鈥攁nd then run upstairs to see what the 鈥榤asters,鈥� so to speak, did.鈥�