Learning to See Through Visual Arts

Last summer, in a Hackley Review article about the evolution of Hackley’s academic program over the last 21 years, Visual Arts Department Chair Greg Cice observed that the Visual Arts at Hackley “are not a respite from intellect and challenge, but a means to extend that intellectual experience visually.” This is the department’s K-12 mission, and under Rick Diaz’s leadership in Hackley Lower School, students gain skills every bit as foundational to their ongoing growth as those they gain in Literacy or Math.

As Greg Cice observes, Lower School art programs are typically “heavily craft-based, with fun activities but not much in the way of formal training.” In contrast, the Hackley art curriculum K-12 is deeply rooted in formal training, specifically in drawing – the skill that supports the outstanding and sophisticated work our Senior Studio Art students produce. As Greg points out, Hackley has long been known as the place students learn to write – yet it is also the place students learn to DRAW. Greg stresses that drawing is, absolutely, a learned skill – often, the senior prize winners in Visual Arts are students who didn’t start out as “stars” with natural talent. Instead, they grew through a very formal process. That process begins in Lower School as where students gain skills, knowledge and confidence in age appropriate ways

The Lower School art projects change year to year, as each year, Rick Diaz focuses on a specific theme which, in turn, helps shape the projects that drive the curriculum. Last year, for example, the theme was “Community,” and students practiced their drawing skills as they drew Hackley’s campus buildings, then constructed their drawings into a 3-D model of campus, which they then populated with portraits drawn of various teachers and staff who work in the buildings they had drawn. Lower School students, faculty and parents also worked together to create a Community Quilt, which now hangs in the Lower School entry hall. The Community Quilt features the old oak on the quad seen from the windows of the Upper School windows. The tree transforms before your eyes in four seasons surrounded by animals found in the Hackley woods.

The year before the theme was home, where students created art about their family homes, architectural styles from around the world and fantasy homes from literature. The art was exhibited on a life-size installation in the form of a white foam core house with a pitched roof, surrounded with a picket fence.

This year, the theme is “Identity,” which will give way to a new set of projects that challenge students to think in different ways about their own identity and the meaning of identity more broadly.

Rick begins with lessons in observational drawing. “Drawing is seeing,” he says. Even mistakes are important, as they represent opportunities. What do you see? How can you represent that more clearly? Rick looks for ways to make the experience interdisciplinary, often using picture books as a means of introducing concepts and art techniques, while connecting art to literacy.. Rick collaborates with other Lower School teachers to draw connections between mapping personal narratives in the fourth grade, poetry they may be reading and writing in the classroom, or lessons on symmetry they are learning in math. He also works to help students develop a proper Visual Arts vocabulary, which both supports their growth as artists and as readers. The “Word Wall” in the Lower School art room contains words like “analogous” and “composition,” and students are encouraged to use these words in discussing their work, applying the same vocabulary they will use in Middle and Upper School. In all these ways, “art” becomes so much more than an activity -- it’s a way of learning, of exploring, of seeing and expressing.

All of this is particularly exciting to me, as I was one of those kids who was never a natural artist -- and, I’ve come to understand, was never taught the skills that could have helped me become an artist. When I expressed my failure as a young artist to an art teacher and friend, she said, “You were deprived in your education. You could have learned. You just needed to be taught to look.” I think about the value of learning to look, learning to see, and I know the value of this skill goes far beyond helping one make pleasing pictures on a page -- it is, in a sense, the essence of real learning.

The Visual Arts program at Hackley is outstanding -- we often hear from new Lower School families who choose Hackley in part because of the strength of the Upper School art program. Yet while annual Upper School art shows are certainly a wonderful showcase for student accomplishment, I’d be hard pressed to find another Lower School that takes art as seriously at even the earliest grades. The impact of this learning is huge because it happens K-12. Over the years, students only get better.

We end the year with a culminating showcase in Allen Hall -- just like the big kids do. This allows the student accomplishment and learning to resonate strongly, and the students are so proud. I’m sure many of the pieces still go home to hang on the refrigerator, but increasingly I hear about a piece that is framed and hanging in the front hall or the master bedroom, where only upon second look might one gather that the artist was still in Lower School!