Ikat Studio

The idea of promoting the arts is often one I take for granted. It is such a core of who I am and what I do every day that to actively call what one does as advocacy seems redundant. But something about this assignment of creating postcards that would represent my Art Educator Colleagues and their students that struck a cord of awe and inspiration I had not predicted. I can only hope that I have done them justice through the designs in preserving their integrity.

The series of postcards are to be used as promotions for Art Advocacy and new Membership recruiting for the Michigan Art Education Association (MAEA). I have had a pleasure to be a member of the MAEA for 8 years and a Region 3 liaison for the past 4 years. This past year the MAEA launched a new website design www.miarted.org. And as any organization evolves and unveils a new vision the preservation of the old way needs to be preserved and respected. Please see the end of this post for the former postcards created by Claudia Burns (my mentor at AAPS).

Since I have been a teacher I had great guidance by the those I student taught with as well as the mentors I have had. Art advocacy has 10 tenets that I feel resonate within each and every creative person but is written for the Visual Arts. The tenets are as follows:

1. ...give tools to process an increasingly visual word.

2. ...teach communication skills that are vitally needed in today’s society.

3. ...foster cross-cultural understanding through knowledge of civilizations past and present.

4. ...celebrate multiple perspectives- there are many ways to see and interpret the world. *

5. ...teach that problems can have more than one solution and that questions

can have more than one answer.*

6. ...require one to use both hemispheres of the brain and develop cognitive, affective

and psychomotor skills.

7. ...increases creative, innovative, even visionary thinking, and promote the ability

to solve visual conceptual problems.

8. ...teach that small differences can have large effects.*

9. ...give opportunities to realize connections between the arts and other disciplines.

10. ...provide a safe place for students to explore their identities, take risks, and develop

self esteem- the arts give students a voice.

*From Elliot Eisner’s Ten Lessons the Arts Teach

I am lucky to be part of the Ann Arbor community in which both art and culture are supported. It is a dream I live everyday and one I do not take for granted. My privilege does not stop with just my own personal experience but those of my students' and my son. I reflected often on how arts and culture change them. I actively seek out innovations through the arts to explain the history of Photography and Graphic Design hoping to inspire and create the innovators of the future. This was something I learned through the Henry Ford Museums Innovation curriculum as well as divergent thinking.