Arts Program Essay

New Visions, New Opportunities:
Developing Artistic Skills of Children

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By Claudine K. Brown
Director, Arts Program

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The arts are the sets, scripts, and soundtracks for the theatre of our daily lives. They provide us with a compelling record of the past and a way of envisioning the future. Artistic expression is so fundamental to human interaction that no child should be denied an opportunity to engage in creative expression because of economics, logistics, or the absence of mentors and role models.

During the early 1970s, many urban school systems down-sized or completely eliminated arts programs in the face of fiscal cutbacks. Some of these programs were never reestablished. Diminishing budgets continue to affect school arts programs in urban and rural communities. Many school administrators perceive the arts as frills that can be eliminated in favor of keeping the sciences and humanities strong and fully funded. Only a small, but growing number of districts recognize the importance of the arts in motivating students who are not challenged or engaged by a curriculum that is predominantly mathematical-logical and linguistic in its orientation.

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Working with the Durham public schools, the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University offers a photography and writing program for elementary and middle school children. Through the program, children create art, learn practical skills, and gain confidence. In its most recent project, the students are creating fascinating dual portraits of themselves, experimenting with race and identity. In one photograph, the student creates a black self...

...and in another, the student creates a white self. By using props and writing and drawing on photographs of themselves, the students reveal the differences they perceive between the races. This airing of stereotypes comes at a time when Durham is merging its increasingly segregated city and country schools into one educational system. New ways of bridging this divide between black and white Durham is a major need for the community.

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During the 1980s and 1990s, public funding for arts organizations and individual artists has diminished because of growing concern on the part of organized citizens groups about the content of publicly funded art. Additionally, municipal arts agencies have been reduced by legislators who distrust the peer review process and believe that the need to balance government budgets justifies cutting arts funding. Nonprofit arts organizations in many regions have moved to fill the void left by diminishing budgets by providing programs for students with limited access to art experiences. In some areas these organizations are the only providers of arts education for school-aged children. Arts education programs offer young people an opportunity to give voice to and concretely visualize the world which they are shaping-and are being shaped by. It also helps them to understand multiple ways of experiencing and recording memories of the past, present perceptions, and visions of the future.

Creating a Space of One's Own

Exploring effective problem-solving through design, for example, can empower young learners to take control of their environments and modify them in a manner that makes spaces and places more accommodating. The Triangle Children's Museum of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, also known as the Blue Marble, is an organization which takes creative experiences to children and adults throughout a broad region. In its Mobile Design Education Lab, children, teachers, and community leaders engage in design projects that draw upon the sciences, humanities, and the arts. The van contains a studio/laboratory complete with the latest computers, including sophisticated graphics and imaging technology.

Arts programs may include apprenticeships and other opportunities for experiential learning, providing young people with fundamental skills as well as a sense of history. The artist/mentor program of Film/Video Arts in New York City provides emerging media artists with professional guidance, training, and screening opportunities. The mentors are established film and video producers and directors who work closely with small groups of students.

Arts programs, while teaching practical skills and nurturing self-expression, also instill the confidence, discipline, and critical thinking necessary for success in school and in the workplace. The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, in collaboration with the Durham public schools, encompasses these attributes with a photography and writing program for elementary and middle school children in at-risk situations. Students in this program learn to take photographs, develop film, and make prints; they are also encouraged to write about their experiences and the images they produce. Given the chance to draw from personal themes such as families, communities, and dreams, students are able to focus on what they value most in their lives. By linking their activities at the center to their school experiences many students become more invested in the academic process.

Preserving Cultural Traditions

Arts programs promote understanding and encourage collaboration and sharing between groups with diverse experiences and points of view. Community arts organizations with responsive relationships to their constituencies are frequently able to preserve long-standing cultural traditions while encouraging exchange and building linkages between communities. The East Bay Music Center for the Performing Arts, located in Richmond, California, is a community-based performing arts education center which offers more than 100 classes and performances of multicultural dance, music, theatre, and video/film. The center provides young people from surrounding communities with a safe, noncompetitive environment in which to explore their own and each other's cultures while developing artistic skills.

Investment in the creative lives of our youth is an investment in a future fueled by innovative ideas, conceptualized by artistic problem solvers. It is shortsighted to cut back on arts programs. Private philanthropy cannot fill the gap, but it can promote, advocate, and support particularly inventive projects.

The communities that do support arts programs for youth encourage intergenerational exchange and provide young people with access to committed role models. It is through the arts that these communities are often able to engage in a dialogue after more traditional modes of conversation have failed. Art acknowledges nonverbal communication and encourages demonstrative acts; for many it is a primary mode of expression.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn viewed the arts as an essential means for transforming and enlightening society: ". . . art communicates whole, the burden of another's long life experience with its hardships, colors and vitality, recreating in the flesh what another has experienced and allowing it to be acquired as one's own."

The complexity and diversity of contemporary society require creative minds to redefine our collective identity. Arts programs that foster exchange and encourage individual expression help provide the cultural markers that reveal to us our shared humanity. process.