A Window on a Doorway to a Launching Pad

I’m pretty busy these days working on the art for Boom Boom, so I am re-posting a piece that I wrote for my other blog, Pebbles In The Jar, a site I created to be a resource and forum for people interested in connecting public schools to the arts community. I have worked as a volunteer arts liaison in Seattle public schools since 2000, when my eldest daughter started first grade.

This is one of my favorite posts that I’ve published to date, largely because it grew out of a conversation I had with my dad about his experience of the arts in education when he was a teenager in New York. I couldn’t help but compare it to the situation I’ve observed in schools here in Seattle.

I’m lucky that my father got the encouragement in the arts when he did. He went on to study ceramics at Alfred University, where he eventually met my mother.

A long time ago in a school district far, far away…

Well not that far away really, just the Bronx.

At the beginning of World War II, when New York was still heating up the melting pot of immigrant cultures that would define the five boroughs, my father started his Freshman year at DeWitt Clinton High School, class of ’45.

My father’s father had come alone from Russia at fourteen, eventually finding steady work in the garment district in New York City. His family lived in a one bedroom apartment in the Amalgamated Co-op on Van Cortlandt Park South. My dad and his older brother shared the bedroom. Their parents slept in the living room on a Riviera hide-away bed.

The DeWitt Clinton student body at that time drew from the immigrant families who lived in the neighborhood; largely Eastern European Jews but also Italians and Irish as well as black students coming up from Harlem–thousands of them pouring out of the Mosholu Parkway station on the Lexington Avenue line every morning.

As my father describes it, DeWitt Clinton was an all college-bound high school. When he attended, there were over ten thousand students, all boys. I have his Arista pin, signifying his membership in a city-wide honors society which came with enviable perks like unmonitored access to the hallways between classes.

In addition to the core curriculum of math, language, science, history and English at this college-prep, ethnically diverse, public high school, students at DeWitt Clinton also had a full spectrum of arts classes to choose from. These included drawing and painting, theater, choir, band, and sculpture. My father particularly enjoyed sculpture.

They also apparently used what we now refer to as arts integration. My father’s Sophomore English class studied “Macbeth” with each student being given lines to memorize and recite. My father’s assignment was Lady Macbeth’s soliloquy. “Come to my woman’s breast and take my milk for gall.” I’m quoting my father, not Shakespeare. He still remembers a few choice bits.

And then there is The Magpie, DeWitt Clinton’s student literary magazine.

Read this for example, written by a young James Baldwin, ’42,

Black Girl Shouting

Stomp my feet
An’ clap my han’s
Angels comin’
To dese fair lan’s.

Cut my lover
Off dat tree!
Angels comin’
To set me free.

Glory, glory,
To de Lamb
Blessed Jesus
Where’s my man?

Black girl, whirl
Your torn, red dress
Black girl, hide
Your bitterness.

Black girl, stretch
Your mouth so wide.
None will guess
The way he died

Turned your heart
To quivering mud
While your lover’s
Soft, red blood

Stained the scowling
Outraged tree.
Angels come
To cut him free!

—The Magpie, Winter 1942, v. 26, n. 1, p. 32.

And look at this illustration by his brother John Baldwin, ’40.

A Stroll Down Broadway, End Paper (Part 1) January 1940 issue

And this image by Robert Blackburn, ’38,

School Yard, p 21. 20.

James Baldwin served as The Magpie’s literary editor for a time. Richard Avedon was his buddy. Neil Simon was there then too, probably wandering the hallways wearing his Arista pin.

Countee Cullen, Will Eisner, Avery Fisher, Paddy Chayefsky, Frank Gilroy, Fats Waller–DeWitt Clinton has graduated an amazing list of illustrious people, as well as my father, who went on to become a high school and then a community college teacher in both ceramics and math.

Keep in mind that this was the high school you went to for a good education. If you wanted to be an artist, you went to The Music and Art High School next to CCNY.

So here was a public high school in a working class, immigrant neighborhood, during wartime, following the most traumatic economic period in US history, before fundraising auctions or walk-a-thons were a twinkle in any PTA member’s eye, providing art for its students without questioning art’s educational value or requiring significant data or RFQs in order to continue its funding, turning out some of the most creative American minds of the past century.

Yes, I am naive and no historian, and that was New York and this is Seattle, but still, the contrast is pretty awesome. What happened? Why don’t we value the arts in education anymore?

I think the answer may be that we don’t value education anymore. We value stuff. Lots of stuff. And Power.

And our culture no longer perceives knowledge as power. Instead, money and fame are what we respect most. If you asked the American people what they would rather have–a 55” Class Edge Lit Razor LED™ LCD HDTV with VIZIO Internet Apps® and unlimited cable access, a you-tube video of their overweight cat going viral resulting in an interview spot on the Ellen Degeneres Show, or a free, excellent, public education–what do you think the majority would answer?

What if that changed? What if education became the priority in our society across all learning areas? What if the entire population rose up to support schools, teachers, students, learning? What if knowledge was part of the American Dream?

If not, how many creative minds of this century will be left under-nourished?

Books By The Bay

Last night I participated in the South Sound Reading Foundation‘s Books By the Bay Gala fundraising event, (made possible with help from Rhonda Munzinger at Barnes & Noble Books), with Julie Paschkis, Robin Cruise, Judy Bentley, Eric Brooks, Ken Mochizuki, and Jim Lynch.

The South Sound Reading Foundation’s principle: To ensure that every child is read with for 20 minutes a day starting at birth, in an effort to increase the number of children entering school prepared to learn, read and succeed. Reading just 20 minutes a day with young children is the key to healthy brain development, family bonding, and success in school.

There was champagne. There were hors d’oeuvres. There was music beautifully played by a youth chamber ensemble. There was a chandelier. All against a backdrop of the Puget Sound.

Never have I had it so nice at a book signing. But best of all, there were people there supporting the cause and buying books.

While listening to foundation members tell about their heartwarming experiences of opening up the world of books to children, I was reminded why illustrating children’s books feels like a slightly higher calling than just being a run-of-the-mill, free-lance commercial illustrator.

I spent much of the past week (while waiting to hear back from my editor on the sketches I sent in a few weeks ago for BOOM BOOM . . . this is the sound of me sitting here, patiently . . . ) writing a post about arts integration for my arts-in-education advocacy blog, Pebbles In The Jar. Arts integration is a method of partnering arts and non-arts curriculum to more fully engage students and deepen learning. Doesn’t writing and illustrating children’s books kind of do the same thing?

That might explain why so many of the people I have met in the children’s book realm are caring, thoughtful, intelligent people. They use their art to get kids to read. They also tend to support the arts, schools, libraries, racial/religious/gender equality, social justice, world peace, and walk-a-thons. They’ve got your back.

And some of the kids are pretty cute, too.

Responding With Wonder

On Margaret’s other blog, Pebbles in the Jar, the January 18 post is about the state of arts education in America. (http://pebblesinthejar.org/) She writes how recent studies show that arts education nurtures certain Habits of Mind. The list includes problem solving, critical and creative thinking, dealing with ambiguity and complexity, integration of multiple skill sets and working with others. But my favorite is in a further breakdown of these Habits of Mind, and that’s what I want to put on the table today: Responding with Wonderment and Awe.

My picture book, FRANK AND IZZY SET SAIL, comes right from that place of wonder. But it started when I was messing around with paint. I drew this big egg shape, blue above/green below, and thought it looked like earth and sky, so I added a moon and then two little creatures running beneath.

The moon reminded me of a time my husband, John, and I took ballroom dancing lessons at the local community center – which is up on a hill above Lake Washington. On the last night of the class, a full moon was shining down the lake. So at the end of the class, the instructor threw open the doors and turned up the music and we waltzed out into the parking lot. A moonlight waltz. It was one of those times when life expands. When our ordinary life became, for a moment, extraordinary. A time of wonder.

So I looked at this little painting and thought how I might make a picture book that included moonlight and music and my husband and myself. I started by drawing the characters. I gave the bear John’s lanky body and expressions. I decided, like John, he’d be cautious and helpful – and that also, like John, he wouldn’t like playing his ukulele in public. The rabbit, would be impulsive and prone to exaggeration — and would enjoy playing her ukulele in public. Opposites, almost.

If you have a chance to read FRANK AND IZZY SET SAIL, you’ll see how through a harrowing sailing and camping adventure they remain good friends to each other. And that the key moment involves music and moonlight:

Frank and Izzy sang to the stars.

The poet Andre Gide once said that, “The whole of a person’s artistic expression is to try to recapture those moments when your soul first opened.” (though he said it in French.)

Sometimes I wonder about wonder. What survival-of-the-fittest need evolved our keen relish for the beauty of the world, for its quirkiness and incredible detail?

And, getting back to arts education, I can’t help but hope there’s a time – oh, maybe as part of the fourth grade and seventh grade assessments – when this habit of mind, Responding with Wonder, is on the test.