Author Jennifer Bergmark describes an art project with the purpose of providing a collaborative creative experience to break down school-community barriers and provide a space for conversation and community building. A goal for the school where this project took place, Stratton Academy of the Arts, located in Champaign, Illinois, is to create a…

All disciplines have particular ways of knowing, common practices, and means of using language that mediate and potentially support engagement with the discipline. For multilingual learners, language demands of a discipline can be a closed door or a facilitated entryway. Drama and theater arts, the focus of our article, are often marginalized in…

Painting is believed to predate recorded history and has been in existence for over 35,000 (Ayres, 1985; Bolton, 2013) years. Over the years, painting has evolved; new styles have been developed and digital media have been explored. Each period of change goes through a period of rejection before it is accepted. In the 1960s, digital media was…

Albrecht Dürer is well known as a Renaissance artist, but his 1525 work, the "Underweysung der Messung," or "Manual on Measurement," also contains a significant amount of mathematics. This article outlines four projects inspired by parts of this work, with additional material coming from Staigmüller's 1891 "Dürer als…

In this article, Miguel Aguilar describes the process of mental preparation he performs before beginning a new graffiti mural. This may include reviewing recent sketches and his lists of color palettes. Aguilar mind maps ideas he wants to connect, thinking about intentions or the goal he wants to accomplish. Aguilar further states "this…

In this issue, editor Amara G. Hark-Weber speaks with two practicing artists who teach in very different programs and settings at college level. The first works with individuals who want to make a career out of their craft. Terry Gess is a potter in Western North Carolina who maintains his own practice and studio while also teaching at Haywood…

This article discusses ethical questions raised by an exhibition of work by an artist with a history of mental illness and the exhibition's relevance to art therapy and “outsider art” discourse on the subject. Considerations for how such an exhibit could be handled had the circumstances included an art therapist and art therapy client are…

In this essay, author Steven Ciampaglia reflects on the creation of a guerilla art course he and a colleague designed to engage students in the process of creating contemporary art relevant to them outside the traditional classroom setting. He examines how reflecting on his teaching practices led him to rethink the key objectives and design…

This article provides a space to explore, through artistic representations and the words of artists themselves, the manner in which politically engaged artists use their visual art, poetry, music, dance, and theatre performances as an effective tool for public pedagogy. In turn, these artists provide those who enter into their cultural production…

In 2011, the author made the transition from teaching assistant to teaching artist. From 2007 to 2011 she was an assistant teacher at Marwen, an organization that provides free art classes for middle and high school students in the Chicago area. It was there that she began to realize how much she enjoyed helping people as a teacher, whether…

Writing about the teaching artist practice should mean writing about art making. As both teacher and artist, the authors are required to be cognizant of their own art-making processes, both how it works and why it is important to them, in order to make this process visible to their students. They also need the same skills to write about how and…

Using videoconference, three different groups met to talk about teaching artist practice using the same three convening questions--How do you make art? What communities are you a part of? What, for you, are the connections between your art making and communities?--and the same piece of student work--a short video composed of a series of digital…

This article is a brief synopsis of a much longer report, "Teaching Artists and the Future of Education: A Report on the Teaching Artist Research Project," which is available in full at http://www.norc.org. The Project, for which I was the principal investigator, was a three-year investigation of the world of teaching artists in a dozen…

The United States has a long proud history of innovation and creativity. This is one of its greatest assets and what will give its workforce an edge in an increasingly competitive global economy. But to do this, individuals need to prepare the next generation of inventors, designers and creators. Arts education is a solution to many of these…

Pilsen Art Pilsen Artist Pilsen is a qualitative study utilizing archival research, autobiographical writing, oral history, and participant profiles to examine historical phenomena. The study explains the immigration patterns of Mexican Americans in Chicago while also discussing the art and cultural institutions that this group developed. This…