Jessica Stockholder, "Red Tube + Two", 2005

Season 3 artist Jessica Stockholder states, “What kids do with play is a kind of learning and thinking. It is a kind of learning and thinking that doesn’t have a predetermined end. I think I am involved in that.” Stockholder has spent a career exploring how disparate materials go together. After viewing the segment on Stockholder, the first graders in my art class got to explore their own unique sensibilities and create a sculpture based on intuitive thinking.

Dr. Stuart Brown, founder of the National Institute of Play, defines play as “a thing of beauty best appreciated by experiencing it.” This is what makes watching first graders explore the work and ideas of Jessica Stockholder so enjoyable. Just by setting out various materials (rubber bands, pipe-cleaners, tape, popsicle sticks, paperclips, straws), students can cheerfully and expressively create works while exploring the creative process. This type of innovation and creativity is what artists and art educators have been involved with for a long time It’s also the type of thinking that everyone from Daniel Pink to Apple to the Partnership for 21st Century Thinking Skills is talking about.

In a reflective class discussion upon completion of the sculptures, we examined what makes creating these works of art different from other ways of making sculpture. Most students responded to having fun while making the sculptures (6 and 7 year-olds tend to respond like this to most projects). Some responded excitedly about how they could easily take their sculpture apart and make something different. One student even pointed out how her sculpture included sound and motion. The idea of Play allows students to make artwork without the pressure of making Art.

Nate Morgan is an art teacher at the Hillside School in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, and also serves on the Art21 National Education Advisory Council.

I tend to be very impressed with how the Museum of Modern Art presents artwork to elementary aged students. The museum educator picks images based on a theme, they lead the students through guided inquiry-based discussion of those images, students create sketches of ideas that are being presented to them, and they conclude the day by creating a work of art in the educational studios. MoMA has always been willing to make the tours as individualized as possible, so I always ask them to conclude the tour in the galleries displaying contemporary artwork.

Ms. Berry’s fourth grade class was recently led into the current exhibit, Here is Every: Four Decades of Contemporary Art, and the tour concluded with examining Arturo Herrera’s A Knock (2000). There is always something a little more exciting happening when students view contemporary art. It tends to lend itself to the natural sensibilities of children—a sense of fun, the whimsical nature of play, and a reflection of the world around us. When students encounter this work there seems to be a little more engagement on their part, possibly because the work genuinely reflects some of what they are thinking about. When the class sat in front of Herrera’s work and excitedly uncovered the many layers that exist in the piece, they began identifying the shapes and forms hidden within his cutouts and slowly realizing he used comics as his source material.

Personally, I have loved Herrera’s work for quite some time. But I was pleasantly surprised when our tour finished with A Knock because I knew that I could share Herrera’s Art:21 segment as a follow-up. My fourth graders loved seeing Herrera work in his studio and explore the different materials that he uses, especially the photo based work. Seeing the studio practice of artists can demystify the artistic process. Not only does it give a student the chance to say that “I can do that” but it gives them the chance to say “I DO THAT!”

What is so impressive about Herrera’s creative process is that it truly embodies how fourth graders create. Watching Herrera play with the images for his collage is the exact approach my students take….they re-contextualize the visual imagery in front of them to create some type of meaning. When students are presented with the question, “What does it mean for a work of art to be a portrait?,” they are now meaningfully engaged in the same type of questions that contemporary artists battle. Children have a wonderful ability to represent their reality in a way that offers terrific surprises in the same way Herrera uncovers in his work.

Collage created by Emily, age 9, Hillside School, New York.