This speech was given to introduce Alex Robert's "Best Practice" demonstration about making a tiny art exhibit at her Dot-2-Dot gallery. To learn more about the Dot-2-Dot gallery, please click here.
- Of the many life skills the visual arts teaches us (observation, expression, persistence, engagement, craft, community, exploration, expression, reflection), reflection is perhaps the hardest life skill to practice for young people. This is for a few reasons; 1, young people are young. They don't have a lot of life to reflect upon yet. They must also create a piece of artwork to reflect upon, a step many students never reach for a variety of reasons.
But a tiny art show appears to be a lesson with reflection baked in. Curation means that there must be editing at some point, a boiling down. The minimal, the poem, the haiku, when masterful, say so much with less.
Students struggle with "fomo" and focus. They say "I don't know what to draw" or "I can't decide what to draw". They become frozen spending their time not being able to decide what to do.
I have 45 class sessions as a 5th grade public school visual art teacher. 1 class is 48 minutes. 45 x 48 = 36 hours. Therefore, I see my students for a total of a day and half of their lives.
If you live to be 80 (rounding up from 77, the average life span of an American), you live (rounding down) for 29,200 days. Divide that by 7 and round down to the nearest 100 and you get 4,000 weeks. Therefore, 36 hours of 29,2000 days means that they will have my art class for 0.00005% of their lives if they live to be 80.
With this math in mind, it seems silly to waste precious minutes being anxious about what to do. There is a joy of missing out, of choosing, going deep, letting go of anxiety and saying no to the million things we could possibly do to focus on just 1 thing, the small, the minimal ... the tiny art show.
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