Anne M. Gregerson and Professor Donna Kay Beattie, Visual Arts
I found a setting for my project that worked well with my goals. It was the Salt Lake City YWCA’s Girls To Women program, a gang intervention program for girls aged six to thirteen. I set up a schedule with program director, Kathryn Jones to present four two-hour sessions of art instruction to a group of seventeen girls aged ten to thirteen years of age. These sessions took place at the YWCA building in Salt Lake City during June and July, 1996.
I began by showing them some of my own art work and showing them images of the large-scale ceramic figure sculpture of Viola Frey, a successful artist and professor who is also a woman of color. Then I instructed them in the basic skills of coil building with clay, assigned them to build a self-portrait bust, and gave one-on-one help and instruction.
The following week, we worked in the other domains of art education, Art History, Art Criticism, and Aesthetics. I considered with the girls the question “What is beauty?” First, they filled out a simple questionnaire to find out their ideas about beauty, and also to see where their self-esteem was based. We looked at examples of art work and other images of women showing what was considered “ideal” beauty in various times and cultures, including images of celebrities and models of our day. I told them about the old Japanese custom of foot-binding, and asked if they could think of any ways that ideas about beauty can cause harm. We talked about the portrayals in the media of extreme thinness as an ideal, and how that sometimes leads to anorexia and bulimia, particularly in young women.
We used the remaining sessions to continue work on their projects, incorporating discussions about the overt and hidden messages in advertising, television, rock videos, song lyrics and so forth. The girls chose personal symbols to incorporate into their clay pieces. Because of the scale of the pieces (several were life-size), they took longer to dry than anticipated. It was necessary to add an additional week and another session in order for them to dry and be fired. I had the girls do a drawing assignment for the extra session. They each divided a large sheet of paper in half and on one side drew a self-portrait of how others see them. Then on the other side, they drew a picture of themselves as they would like to be, or an aspect of themselves that others do not see. They used oil pastels for these drawings.
Between sessions I created lesson plans, found appropriate images, had slides made, and assembled needed art materials. After the fourth session I took all their pieces to Provo and fired them in kilns at BYU. During the fifth session, they painted their fired pieces with watercolor paints. I photographed the girls at various stages of the work, and photographed the finished pieces.
Originally, I had hoped to have an exhibition of their work at the YWCA building. However, by the time our program ended the girls were beginning to disperse at the end of the summer program, and they were not willing to leave their pieces there. We could not coordinate schedules to get them and their parents all together for an opening reception and an exhibit as I had proposed. Because of the summer day-camp format, many unforseen variables arose, and I had to make several adaptations to my original plan, but I felt that our discussions produced new awareness and insights in the girls, and that actually producing clay sculptures was a self-esteem enhancing experience for them. The process taught me much about the realities of working with adolescents, and confirmed my belief that art education can be a powerful way of addressing relevant issues with young people.
