Art & Identity: Barraza's Roots Reflected in Color, Canvas - Dr. Santa Barraza

We have so much talent in Texas.  I'm happy to share these images and story by and about Dr. Santa Barraza, respectively, that appear in the Javelina Today, the Magazine of Texas A & M University-Kingsville.  

She is the quintessential Tejana artist and teacher, widely respected for her many contributions, most especially her artistic representations of indigenous, pre-Columbian icons, themes, and folklore.

To these, I add a photo I took of one of her pieces in a colleague's home in California that graces her living room wall.

Thank you, Santa, for your inspirational work that continues to enrich, deepen, and nourish our sense of selves as people native to this continent, to these very lands that we have inhabited for literally hundreds of years.

I hope that someday UNESCO will recognize the unparalleled strength, beauty, and power of your work as a World Heritage contribution to humanity.

Con toda sinceridad,

Angela Valenzuela

c/s

Art & Identity:  Barraza's Roots Relected in Color, Canvas

Why The Arts Are As Important As Science Or Math

Harvard professor Ellen Winner is featured in this piece on the importance of the arts in education. I think that this is a beginning, important statement that arts are important to culture regardless of any "non-arts" benefits and that all civilizations are prized on the basis of their art.   Dr. Winner further makes the "creative class" argument, if you will, that art engenders the "artistic creators of the future," as well as the "innovative leaders."  

These are good liberal arguments, but there are clearly other important concerns.  Let's start with equity.  Arts for the wealthy is not in jeopardy while the arts for the poor and disenfranchised is.  Another is fairness.  Art by the poor frequently gets appropriated (stolen) and monetized by the wealthy, undermining the productions of community artists. Relatedly, identity and representation, and thusly, power, politics, and cultural integrity are profoundly at play.   

To justify the arts in liberal terms, risks their portrayal as a luxury when for our communities, these looming issues of equity and fairness make them squarely about survival as our Austin Chican@/Latin@ artists and community are often quick to note.  That is, when your community is constantly subjected to marginalizing forces like gentrification, job insecurity, and poverty, artistic productions are a meaningful, historic way to find a place on the seemingly always contested American landscape and in so doing, to write oneself into history in a way that both honors this heritage and renders it visible, complex, and powerful.
 
Much to consider here. I am happy, in any case, to at least see some attention accorded to this matter, particularly when our arts programs (like physical education) in many of our low-income schools are getting abolished.  This tragedy of policy, politics, and political will symbolizes the ways in which so many of our children are systematically deprived of essential content areas like the arts that breathe identity, intellectual depth, and a sense of what it means to be human, into the curriculum.  For all of this, too, we must continue to struggle.

Angela Valenzuela
c/s

Dipin Damodharan Become a fan Journalist

Why The Arts Are As Important As Science Or Math

Posted: 19/02/2016 08:12 IST Updated: 19/02/2016 08:12 IST

"Cultures are judged on the basis of their arts; and most cultures and most historical eras have not doubted the importance of studying the arts. Let's assume then, that the arts should be a part of every child's education and that they are given serious treatment as is the case with mathematics, or history, or biology. Let's remember why societies have always included the arts in every child's education. The reason is simple. The arts are a fundamentally important part of culture, and an education without them is an impoverished education, leading to an impoverished society. Studying the arts should not have to be justified. The arts are as important as the sciences: they are time-honoured ways of learning, knowing, and expressing." -- Ellen Winner, Lois Hetland et all, "The Arts and Academic Achievement"

With the sciences increasingly gaining in importance, this is an interesting juncture in which to review the state of the arts in education, along with their importance, relevance and influence on students.
"When schools cut short the time reserved for the arts and reallocate the time for some other 'important' subject, they may not just be losing their ability to produce the artistic creators of the future, but also innovative leaders who can improve upon the world they have inherited," say Ellen Winner and Lois Hetland, both experts on arts education.
What is the role of the arts in moulding a person? The question assumes great significance today in the backdrop of a culture - including in India -- in which arts are seen as unimportant, perhaps even a waste of time, as compared to 'strategic' subjects. This trend has raised the hackles of education experts across the world, who argue that arts can indeed contribute tremendously to the overall development of a student and should not be ignored at any cost.

According to research, students who study the arts show improvement in their capabilities in other areas as well, including in the sciences, math and reading.

According to various research studies, students who study the arts show improvement in their capabilities in other areas as well, including in the sciences, math and reading. Practicing the arts develop imagination, innovative thinking and creativity, thus adding value to non-arts academic outcomes as well.
However, experts like Ellen Winner point out that it is dangerous to classify arts education as secondary or supplementary in comparison with the "super" non-arts subjects. Doing so puts the arts in a weakened and vulnerable position.
"Arts educators must build justifications on the relevance and significance of these subjects based on what is inherently valuable about the arts, even when they contribute secondary benefits other than purposeful orientation. Just as we do not (and cannot) downgrade history and overrate mathematics, we must not allow policy-makers to justify the isolation or inclusion of the arts for the sake of other academic subject matters," Winner says.
According to Winner, the arts are the only school subjects that have been challenged to demonstrate their usefulness. If we deprioritize physical education and give more attention to science, the results will only prove to be detrimental. Perhaps, with more attention to the potential of the arts to foster transfer (of knowledge applicability in other spheres), we can begin to understand their importance better. But even when the relationships are understood, the justification for arts programmes must be based on their inherent merit.

Image: www.ellenwinner.com

The arts are good for our children, irrespective of any non-arts benefits. They must be considered as an integral part of a well-rounded education.

The arts can help a person cultivate a way of thinking that is not possible in other disciplines. The same might be said of athletics. What if coaches begin to claim that playing baseball increases students' mathematical ability because of the complex score- keeping methodology? Once researchers put such a claim to test, they will only find that it doesn't hold true. In such a scenario, would school boards take a hard stand against baseball by cutting the budget for the game? Of course not. Because irrespective of the positive academic effects of baseball on students, schools believe sports are inherently good for kids.

We should make the same argument for the arts: the arts are good for our children, irrespective of any non-arts benefits. They must be considered as an integral part of a well-rounded education.
Winner sums it up best in the paper "The Arts and Academic Achievement":

"Let's bet on history. Of course, we do not know for sure what is the best education for children to ensure that they will grow up to lead productive and happy lives. But the arts have been around longer than the sciences; cultures are judged on the basis of their arts; and most cultures and most historical eras have not doubted the importance of studying the arts.
Let's assume then, that the arts should be a part of every child's education and that they are given serious treatment as is the case with mathematics, or history, or biology. Let's remember why societies have always included the arts in every child's education. The reason is simple. The arts are a fundamentally important part of culture, and an education without them is an impoverished education, leading to an impoverished society. Studying the arts should not have to be justified in terms of anything else. The arts are as important as the sciences: they are time-honoured ways of learning, knowing, and expressing."

A version of this article was published in Education Insider magazine

'Icons & Symbols' at UTEP Centennial Museum

"Icons and Symbols of the Borderlands" is one of the most powerful art exhibits I've ever seen. Hats off to curator and former Austin-ite, Diana Molina, for doing such an excellent job in pulling all of this exquisite, hard-hitting work together.

The exhibit is at the Centennial Museum at the University of Texas El Paso and runs through January 16, 2016. Among the featured artists are Cesar Martinez, Antonio Castro, Margarita Cabrera, Mery Godigna Collet, Delilah Montoya, Benito Huerta, Richard Armendariz, Delilah Montoya, Andy Villarreal, Lydia Limas, Oscar Moya, Luis Gutierrez, and Diana Molina herself.

Read below the El Paso Times review of the exhibit.

-Angela

'Icons & Symbols' to open at UTEP museum

Luis Carlos Lopez , El Paso Times 12:37 a.m. MDT October 4, 2015

(Photo: RUDY GUTIERREZ / EL PASO TIMES)

Story Highlights

• Exhibit will be on display from Oct. 10 to Jan. 16
• Pieces will be available for purchase; prices range from $800 to $10,000
• More information available at museum.utep.edumuseum.utep.edu

The Rio Grande. La Virgen de Guadalupe. Pancho Villa. Matachines.
Some images have shaped the El Paso region throughout its history, says artist Diana Molina, curator of the upcoming Juntos Art Association exhibit “Icons and Symbols of the Borderlands.”
“Who are those cultural figures that we've seen and we've grown up with?" she asked as she surveyed some of the art that will be featured at the Centennial Museum and the Chihuahuan Desert Gardens at the University of Texas at El Paso.
"The artworks are symbols of the Borderland," Molina said. "They reach across time and across continent."
More than 60 pieces will be on display for the “Icons and Symbols of the Borderlands” show. They will be available for purchase, with prices ranging from $800 to $10,000.

"Rico Chicaron" by Victoria Suescum (Photo: Courtesy of Juntos Art Association)

Molina, who is executive director of Juntos, used one of her own paintings — one that combines the flow of the Rio Grande with green and gold color — to illustrate that the exhibit is meant to represent the broader history of the border region, from the arrival of the Spanish to the importance that religion and landscape play in the shaping of the region's identity.
Her "Serape XX" is a collage using of what she called basura, trash — discarded beer labels and candy wrappers.  "Some people see  the river," Molina said, pointing to the stream of Dos Equis wraps. "It's just an abstract depiction. People see many different things in it."
The piece is listed to sell for $7,700.

"El Charro y la Espuela" by Diana Molina. (Photo: Courtesy of Juntos Art Association)

Among other noted artists in the exhibit are César Martínez and Gaspar Enríquez. Some of the artists will talk about their work before an opening reception Oct. 10.

The exhibit will be on display through Jan. 16 at UTEP's Centennial Museum. It will feature artists from the Juntos Art Association, which was founded in 1985 and aims to promote cultural awareness through the arts.

“I’m excited more now than with any Juntos shows that I’ve ever been involved in,” Molina said.
The exhibit will feature a lecture series from October through December. They will offer short films and themed discussions on topics such as “Día de los Muertos” and “La Virgen de Guadalupe.”

"Renacimiento/Rebirth" by Antonio Castro (Photo: Courtesy of Juntos Art Association)

"Our museum serves many different functions. First and foremost it's a natural history museum of the Chihuahuan Desert, so that's what our permanent galleries are about. With our changing galleries, we do like to focus on border life and culture as well as the Chihuahuan Desert," said Maribel Villalba, Centennial Museum director.

"This show was a wonderful opportunity for us to showcase the border life and culture."

Luis Carlos Lopez may be reached at 546-6381; lclopez@gannett.com; @lclopez4 on Twitter

School field trips to cultural institutions matter.

Through a large-scale, random-assignment study of school tours to the museum, we were able to determine that strong causal relationships do in fact exist between arts education and a range of desirable outcomes. 

-Angela 

Art Makes You Smart

Alain Pilon

By BRIAN KISIDA, JAY P. GREENE and DANIEL H. BOWEN

Published: November 23, 2013

FOR many education advocates, the arts are a panacea: They supposedly increase test scores, generate social responsibility and turn around failing schools. Most of the supporting evidence, though, does little more than establish correlations between exposure to the arts and certain outcomes. Research that demonstrates a causal relationship has been virtually nonexistent.

A few years ago, however, we had a rare opportunity to explore such relationships when the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art opened in Bentonville, Ark. Through a large-scale, random-assignment study of school tours to the museum, we were able to determine that strong causal relationships do in fact exist between arts education and a range of desirable outcomes.

Students who, by lottery, were selected to visit the museum on a field trip demonstrated stronger critical thinking skills, displayed higher levels of social tolerance, exhibited greater historical empathy and developed a taste for art museums and cultural institutions.

Crystal Bridges, which opened in November 2011, was founded by Alice Walton, the daughter of Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart. It is impressive, with 50,000 square feet of gallery space and an endowment of more than $800 million.

Thanks to a generous private gift, the museum has a program that allows school groups to visit at no cost to students or schools.

Before the opening, we were contacted by the museum’s education department. They recognized that the opening of a major museum in an area that had never had one before was an unusual event that ought to be studied. But they also had a problem. Because the school tours were being offered free, in an area where most children had very little prior exposure to cultural institutions, demand for visits far exceeded available slots. In the first year alone, the museum received applications from 525 school groups requesting tours for more than 38,000 students.

As social scientists, we knew exactly how to solve this problem. We partnered with the museum and conducted a lottery to fill the available slots. By randomly assigning school tours, we were able to allocate spots fairly. Doing so also created a natural experiment to study the effects of museum visits on students, the results of which we published in the journals Education Next and Educational Researcher.

Over the course of the following year, nearly 11,000 students and almost 500 teachers participated in our study, roughly half of whom had been selected by lottery to visit the museum. Applicant groups who won the lottery constituted our treatment group, while those who did not win an immediate tour served as our control group.

Several weeks after the students in the treatment group visited the museum, we administered surveys to all of the students. The surveys included multiple items that assessed knowledge about art, as well as measures of tolerance, historical empathy and sustained interest in visiting art museums and other cultural institutions. We also asked them to write an essay in response to a work of art that was unfamiliar to them.

These essays were then coded using a critical-thinking-skills assessment program developed by researchers working with the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.

Further, we directly measured whether students are more likely to return to Crystal Bridges as a result of going on a school tour. Students who participated in the study were given a coupon that gave them and their families free entry to a special exhibit at the museum. The coupons were coded so that we could determine the group to which students belonged. Students in the treatment group were 18 percent more likely to attend the exhibit than students in the control group.

Moreover, most of the benefits we observed are significantly larger for minority students, low-income students and students from rural schools — typically two to three times larger than for white, middle-class, suburban students — owing perhaps to the fact that the tour was the first time they had visited an art museum.

Further research is needed to determine what exactly about the museum-going experience determines the strength of the outcomes. How important is the structure of the tour? The size of the group? The type of art presented?

Clearly, however, we can conclude that visiting an art museum exposes students to a diversity of ideas that challenge them with different perspectives on the human condition. Expanding access to art, whether through programs in schools or through visits to area museums and galleries, should be a central part of any school’s curriculum.

Brian Kisida is a senior research associate and Jay P. Greene is a professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas. Daniel H. Bowen is a postdoctoral fellow at the Kinder Institute of Rice University.

Schools Integrate Dance Into Core Academics

That's what I'm talking about!  Hope this makes its way to all schools, not just a select few.

- Patricia

The Infusion of the Arts Appears to be Gaining a Stronger Foothold at a Time When Advocates Are Struggling to Ensure Time and Support for Their Disciplines
By Erik W. Robelen

Photosynthesis may be an unlikely topic to inspire an opera or ballet, but in a 2nd grade classroom here recently, the children were asked to use dance to help them learn about that process.

“Do you think you’re ready to use your whole body?” teacher Katie Wright-Sabbatino asked near the start of the lesson, which featured learning objectives in both science and dance.

Small groups of pupils in this class at Fort Garrison Elementary School brainstormed to come up with dance movements to convey elements of photosynthesis, including water, sunlight, carbon dioxide, and chlorophyll. They leaned, they reached, they flowed, sometimes with surprising grace.

The idea of integrating the arts, including dance, into the broader curriculum is not new, but it appears to be gaining a stronger foothold in public schools, proponents say, though national data are not available.

The growth comes as arts education advocates struggle to ensure adequate time and support for the arts in schools—whether music, visual arts, theater, or dance—amid the financial straits facing many districts and other challenges, such as pressure to boost test scores in core subjects like reading and math.

“It’s a way of keeping arts in the classroom,” said Laura M. Smyth, a senior associate at the Washington-based nonprofit Arts Education Partnership.

Read on

Zero-Basing Public Schools, Free-Basing Education Policy

Dr. Maya Rockeymoore | Huffington Post
Posted: May 17, 2010

There was a tale of two school districts on display at Baltimore's Walter's Art Museum on Saturday morning. The occasion was Congressman Elijah Cummings's annual arts competition--an event in which students from high schools across his Congressional district submit their best work in the hopes of winning the honor of having their art hang in the bowels of the U.S. Capitol for one year.

After the competition was over, a young woman who teaches art in a Baltimore middle school remarked that it was amazing that any of the city's students were competitive given the circumstances. She said at her school, "there were no art supplies except some old spoiled tempera paint and paper when I arrived." When I asked her how she secured the supplies necessary to conduct class, she admitted that she "paid out-of-pocket for some supplies and scavenged for the rest."

She went on to say she had only been teaching for two years and the school district was "zero-basing" her school for the second year in a row. Zero-basing is a practice in which the school district terminates all of the teachers and administrators in a school that is labeled failing and requires them to reapply for their positions for the next academic year. "They are herding teachers and students around like we are cattle...in the hopes that things will eventually get better [on the academic front]," she said.

Midway through our conversation, her boyfriend came over and described a similar scenario at his high school. He said that the honorable mention award that one of his students received was bittersweet since, "they will be closing my high school down at this end of this year [due to academic failure]."

I didn't have time to digest the implications of my conversation with these two committed young art teachers before I began another conversation with the mother of a high school art student in the Howard County Public School System, an affluent district in the Baltimore suburbs. The mother proudly held up her daughter's framed canvas and told me how exciting it was to see her daughter discover her talent. She enthused, "you wouldn't believe the resources they have to support the art students in [my daughter's] school."

The tragic irony in the contrasting accounts is reinforced in Howell S. Baum's new book Brown in Baltimore: School Desegregation and the Limits of Liberalism. In the book, Baum recounts in aching detail the origins and evolution of Baltimore's racially segregated, poorly equipped, and underperforming schools. He discusses the combined effects of wealth disparities, residential segregation, racial anxieties, and the politics of both challenge and accommodation that converged to create a school system that was among the first in the nation to voluntarily "desegregate" following the 1954 Brown decision while also coming under repeated scrutiny from the U.S. Office of Civil Rights in the 1970s for its failure to achieve racial integration.

Although Baum's book is primarily a historical account that offers no policy prescriptions for addressing the school system's current predicament, it does offer an interesting departure from which we can judge the adequacy of the No Child Left Behind law and the Obama Administration's approach to school reform--both of which adopt penalties for schools labeled "failing" or "challenged" without regard to how state and local policies and practices have contributed to deep-seated academic and institutional inequities.

The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law, which equates the quality of schools with student achievement on reading and math tests, required that schools undergo a series of correctional measures when students failed to make Adequate Yearly Progress on the standardized tests. The "zero-basing" policy employed by Baltimore City Public Schools is a direct result of this federal requirement. It has been widely acknowledged that for many schools NCLB has also resulted in a narrowing of the curriculum that has squeezed out the arts along with other student enrichment opportunities.

Sadly, the Obama Administration's approach to reform is likely to intensify the displacement of Baltimore students and teachers in coming years by embracing mandatory school "turnaround models"--that include variations on firing teachers and administrators and closing down schools--for the lowest performing 5 percent of public schools. Prominent education policy experts Linda Darling-Hammond of Stanford University and Pedro Noguera of New York University, have been quick to point out that--although well-intentioned--the Administration's proposed turnaround models have no basis in research and are likely to further undermine the educational progress of the primarily low-income students of color attending these schools.

The stories of deprivation shared by the Baltimore City art teachers are consistent with Baum's portrait of a school system that remains separate and unequal. And yet, despite pervasive evidence of systemic inequalities undermining public education in some areas of the country, the Obama Administration has so far failed to leverage its unprecedented federal investment in K-12 education to enhance the competitiveness of these schools by incentivizing states to level resource inequities across districts.

So, what's next for the middle school art teacher? She said that, even though she loves her students, she wouldn't be reapplying to her school next year because she didn't know who the principal would be or whether that person would be committed to the arts. "I feel sorry for my students," she told me. "They know that I won't be around next year and they don't know what's coming next."

Dr. Maya Rockeymoore Cummings is the President and CEO of Global Policy Solutions, a social change strategy firm based in Washington, DC.

Follow Dr. Maya Rockeymoore on Twitter: www.twitter.com/mayarockeymoore

Arts Education and Graduation Rates

Here's another study showing the positive influences that the arts has on schooling experiences. We need to make sure that the arts doesn't get left behind.

-Patricia

RACHEL LEE HARRIS | NY Times
Published: October 18, 2009

In a report to be released on Monday the nonprofit Center for Arts Education found that New York City high schools with the highest graduation rates also offered students the most access to arts education. The report, which analyzed data collected by the city’s Education Department from more than 200 schools over two years, reported that schools ranked in the top third by graduation rates offered students the most access to arts education and resources, while schools in the bottom third offered the least access and fewest resources. Among other findings, schools in the top third typically hired 40 percent more certified arts teachers and offered 40 percent more classrooms dedicated to coursework in the arts than bottom-ranked schools. They were also more likely to offer students a chance to participate in or attend arts activities and performances. The full report is at caenyc.org.