Transcription of Roger Dell for the show Artists & Education, #107
Dr. Lisa: Anyone who has spent time on the mid coast and has an aesthetic sense has probably spent time at the Farnsworth Art Museum up in Rockland. Today, we have with us Roger Dell who is the director of Education at the Farnsworth Art Museum. It’s quite a privilege to have you with us. Thank you for coming in.
Roger: Thank you so much for having me.
Dr. Lisa: Roger, I know that one of the things that we’ve talked about a lot on the show is education, and how do we bring art to people and people to art, and how do we make it a more integral part of their lives? I think this is something that you’ve spent a fair amount of time working on yourself.
Roger: Absolutely. I think when we separate art out and we think about it in privileged places like museums and galleries, we’re missing something that goes back thousands of years where art was totally integrated into everybody’s life. Any culture you look at, ancient Greece, ancient Egyptian, Medieval cultures, and then certainly around the world, Africa, Oceania, Native America … many places didn’t have the word “Art” at all. They had objects that were made primarily for religious and utilitarian reasons that were beautiful and were artfully done, but the object itself didn’t become venerated like we did in the west that really began with the Renaissance and through modernism.
I’m actually calling for going back Medieval to a certain extent, and looking at art as an integral part and important part, not a frill, not an extra, but deeply embedded in the way we perceive the rest of the world, because you can think about art in and of itself, but it also helps us become visually literate for the whole world that we live in, so when we leave the gallery or the art museum, what do we take out as we look at our environment? I think if we were more visually literate, more critical, we wouldn’t allow ugly buildings to be built and cities to fall and to decay. We would take care of them because we wanted them to be beautiful just like the objects in the museum. I have a deep and abiding interest in bringing art into everyday life.
Dr. Lisa: That’s an interesting comment, because as a doctor, I’ve worked in many medical facilities, and have seen the difference between ones that are very much designed with the patient and the aesthetic in mind, versus ones that really were kind of thrown together, and there seems to be a significant … and we know there are studies that have to do with healing and beauty.
It also speaks to just a certain level of care that we would want our patients to have that beauty. You’re suggesting that we broaden this and just put it out there in general for the population at large.
Roger: I think it’s not so much putting it out there for them. It’s helping them discover that they love beauty too, and they can be artist or they can be audiences of art, they can go to art museums. When I say the arts now, I’m thinking of dance, music, theater, literature, and the visual arts. Everybody has that capacity to appreciate it, and also to make art too.
We have a lot of classes at the Farnsworth for adults art-making classes using their hands, painting, sculpture, life drawing. We’re starting a new class in a couple of weeks how to make films and videos for adults, for older people. We do this with younger people, but why not older people.
One of the things that always moves me when I have an older person say, “I never did draw. I couldn’t draw. I can’t draw a perfect circle. I can’t draw a straight line.” Well, nobody can without a ruler or a protractor.
So if somebody told these people, and they bought it that they didn’t have talent in either singing or drawing … for 20 years, 40 years, most of their life they didn’t try, and now as adults, they’re taking classes which is great and wonderful. We want more of that.
It’s just sad to many that for all of those years, they didn’t sing, they didn’t dance, they didn’t try these things because typically, some adults, when they were young told them, “Try something else. You’re not good at this, or you don’t have talent. You’re not artistic.” Every kid is artistic if given access to resources, some adult education and atmospheres that let them discover their own creativity.
Dr. Lisa: You’re not from Maine originally?
Roger: I’m not.
Dr. Lisa: You have been many places but you’re born in Manhattan?
Roger: Yes.
Dr. Lisa: You were at the Honolulu Academy of Arts. You were at the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, Fitchburg Art Museum … There must have been some formative things that occurred in your early life that caused you to be one of these children who actually believed that you could do art, or you could become visually literate.
Roger: My parents took me to the great museums in New York as a little boy because I was fascinated with no so much the art museums as it turns out, that that became my life track, but with the American Museum of Natural History because they had the skull of the Tyrannosaurus Rex which they still have which I just saw two weeks ago, seated on the floor in an old-fashioned museum case glass with a wooden trim. I was four years old, and I crawled up to it and its teeth are nine inches long. That was awesome. Awesome.
I was awestruck by objects and by things that were magnificent, and also things that were beautiful. I also – I guess drew a bird once that everybody thought was fabulous, and I immediately became the artist of our family, and that support, whether that bird was good or bad having the clue doesn’t exist anymore, but that support from my parents, my grandparents, my aunts and uncles.
I’m saying with kids today, if we can put them in a position to begin to discover their own creativity, we will be amazed at what they do. We can’t even predict what kids do when given video cameras, digital cameras, camcorders, paints, clay, stone because we’ve never seen it before, and they’ve never had the chance before.
I’m a big advocate for art teachers in the State of Maine, art teachers in every state in America, being rehired, if they’ve been let go, and hiring more because we need more. The irony is, business wants creative workforce, but without teachers, art specialists, modeling, creativity, innovation and imagination, where will our children see that?
Dr. Lisa: It’s an interesting question because we’ve become very focused especially with the economy being shaky in the last few years. You’ve become very focused on value for money. It’s easy to measure things like if you have a big college football team, they bring in revenue for the university. Sometimes it’s harder to see the value of an arts education, but there are probably some things that you could offer that would counter those arguments about the value of art.
Roger: Right. There are all kinds of studies that show the arts in a creative economy being absolutely important. Just taking Rockland for example, there are about 25 art galleries in a town of 7600 people, in large measure because in 1948, the Farnsworth opened its doors, it was kind of a magnet for culture.
Now, we have a very active music scene up there, we have all kinds of wonderful performance going on, and then, most importantly in many ways, is the great restaurants that we have in Rockland. This all came about through kind of Renaissance that began, and I guess I am tooting my horn right now with the Farnsworth opening and having 60 year run of supporting culture in that area, which led to jobs and people opening restaurants and hotels, B&Bs. There is that economic part what I call, “The utilitarian or functional part” were instrumental part of art, but then there’s also art for the soul and soul making that’s so important. If people don’t have that anymore, I really worry.
One of the things that I’m concerned about is the lack of arts and humanities education, not only in elementary, middle and high school, but in our colleges. When professors of the humanities are retiring now, they’re not being replaced, courses are being cut from the syllabus, so there’s less and less courses in the humanities. When I say the humanities, that does include our history, aesthetics, philosophy, anthropology, history, and a number of other literature of course. If that isn’t being taught in the elementary, middle and high school, and in college, where will people be exposed to arts and humanities?
Dr. Lisa: You were the curator of gallery education at the Honolulu Academy of Arts, and that is maybe as far away from Maine as one can get, except maybe Alaska. I’m not really sure of the geography, but probably as far away.
How did you end up here? What are some of the differences that you see and the similarities that you see between Honolulu and Maine?
Roger: When I was being interviewed at the Farnsworth for my present position, I told my wife who was back in Massachusetts that, “When you come up here, you’re going to think it looks like home.” What I meant by that was Honolulu. I had to quickly add the … rejoinder not the weather, but beauty, nature … these fingers of dark land going into this blue, blue ocean, the light and the kind of more casual living, and yet a kind of sophistication, because we find on the mid coast that people want their excellent restaurants, they want the metropolitan opera in New York to be telecast in high-definition television every Saturday when the Met is live.
There’s a coming together of nature, beauty, sophistication, culture that reminded me of Hawaii. When my wife came up here, she felt the same way. It wasn’t a direct route from Honolulu to Rockland. Over the years, I was hired to help build the new museum in Chicago, which was the Museum of Contemporary Art, and then I was teaching in the Green Mountains in Vermont outside of Burlington for two and a half years, and then I worked in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, which was an old mill town on the Nashua River doing the same thing, working with kids in public schools, putting on public programs. In the places that I’ve lived, I’ve always taught in the evenings as an adjunct professor.
In Fitchburg, I started teaching at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in their arts and education program. I taught there for 10 years, and then I also taught at the extension school at Harvard for eight years, that is 10 years overlapped.
I’ve had a good fortune of hands on practice of what we’ve been talking about during the day, and then going and teaching it to really bright students in the evening. When we moved up to Maine, I continued my association with both schools at Harvard. After Massachusetts for the last six years, we’ve been in Rockland.
Dr. Lisa: I probably don’t have to ask this question because I think anybody who’s listening knows the answer, but what drives you? It seems like you have some drive, some internal drive that you probably have had since you were quite young that keeps you feeling so passionate about art and education, and bringing art to other people?
Roger: I think it’s au, the awe that I felt when I looked at into the mouth of the Tyrannosaurus Rex, and then the awe that I felt in all of the arts that I’ve looked at in museums in Europe and Japan around the world and America.
It’s awesome to see human hands creating these magnificent objects that brighten our lives. I dabble a little bit, but I don’t consider myself an artist, but I can understand by my dabbling how difficult it is to come up with beauty, new ideas.
When I say beauty, I don’t mean all paintings have to be lovely seascapes in Maine. Some of the greatest art is about warfare and terrible things. They’ve moved us like Picasso did this painting right before World War Two called, “Guernica” about saturation bombing in Spain that Franco was part of. It moved people. It moved people, so it’s hard to call that beautiful, and it’s not colorful, it’s monochromatic, but it moved people.
I think I’ve just been impressed with the working of human hands, creating objects all around the world that have moved us. I want young people especially that I do a lot with adults, but young people to discover their creativity in themselves because for me, we can talk about wind power in Maine and solar power, tide power and all kinds of power.
The power that I think we’re letting slip through our fingers is the power of the creative mind of our young people, and we’re up against huge odds that no other generation ever had to go up against with technology being so pervasive. We can do creative things with technology, but there has to be a balance. I think using your hands to make art for young kids is something we need to encourage everywhere we can, When it comes to school, what I’m talking about comes under a broader title which we call, “Project-based learning”. Get kids out of the classroom, out of their seat and into the world, and create your lessons around things that are meaningful to their existence, and you’ll be amazed at what they come up with. They’re going to learn all the basics too if it’s taught properly, if the pedagogy is correct. They’re going to enjoy school. They’re going to love school. Art is one way we know that certain kids who wouldn’t be in school, they would have dropped out have stayed in school. They wanted to be in the school play, they wanted to be in the chorus, they’re working on a mural … All of those things are communal, there’s talk going on, there’s communication, they feel included, and so when they’re in school more, they’re taking more math, more science.
I just urge all Mainers and all Americans to find ways to bring art into a parallel position with the other disciplines. Art is a discipline, and it’s an academic discipline. There’s an intellectual part to it too. It shouldn’t be a frill. It shouldn’t be a special, it shouldn’t be an extra. It needs to be central. Ironically, we’re missing the boat by thinking just math, reading and standardized test are the ways to go. Do we really want our children to be proficient in only those things? What about music in their life, and what about beauty in the form of art? I think we want our kids to be more well-rounded than that, but we’re kind of on the slippery slope because things that can be measured get measured. Things that are hard to measure like beauty and art often don’t get measured, and I’m not saying that we should measure them in an academic way, but we have to honor them because we know that they help build community, and they do things for kids that are more general instead of improving two points on a math score. We know that it causes empathy. When you look at somebody on the stage who’s performing, a schoolmate, and you know that you’re next to go up there, you’re going to have some empathy. If we have empathy, that could lead to understanding. If we have understanding, that could lead to embracing. If we have embracing, that could lead to love in a way, I mean.
This is what we’re talking about. The arts … It sounds a little hippie-dippie, but I’m saying that arts are about soul-making and about community making. Art brings people together. If we need to talk about academics, we know that when arts are deeply embedded in public schools in America, attendance goes up. Just attendance. I’m not saying the quality of instruction, but just attendance. That means, students are taking more math, science, etcetera.
The other thing we know is that when arts are deeply embedded, not fringe but deeply embedded, student’s vocabulary increases. Why? Because the arts are about a discussion, a critique. If you work with theater people, all they’re doing is talking about the performance, what went wrong, what went right, how to improve it, how are they doing … Same with music, critique and certainly with our critique so the vocabulary increases. There are always other, what I call, “General Outcomes” that are definitely present when the arts are stable and in place and not being cut this year and added back a little bit at a time over the next 10 years. This kind of process is cyclical, it’s happened before, the arts were cut, remember in California in the ‘70s, art teachers were cut, then they were brought back because, “is that what school is going to be, nothing but drill?” No. It needs to have this other humanistic, artistic part.
Dr. Lisa: One of the most compelling artistic moments of my life was actually at the Farnsworth, and the photographer was Paul Caponigro …
Roger: Yes.
Dr. Lisa: This was maybe two years ago. As a doctor, you might imagine I haven’t had much in terms of formal art education, but it didn’t really matter. I stood in front of his photographs and I felt them. I think that this is the type of thing that we can use to communicate with our children. Do you bring children through and try to help them with that as well, help them with the appreciation?
Roger: We have thousands of students who go through the Farnsworth every year just for what you’re talking about. I feel it’s not so much help them, kids are open. It’s like, “Let’s not close them down” so they will stand before Paul Caponigro’s work and they’ll be moved, and they bring their own baggage. It won’t be the same experience that you’ve had and bring all of that, that you’ve had in your life, but they’ve had their life too.
On our guided tours, we have these wonderful guides called, “Docents” and they’re trained in what we call the “Socratic approach” … asking leading, general, open questions of these students. It begins with simply noticing, “What do you see? How do you see it?” If they say something in response, “Why do you say that?” It’s very reflective, and it’s not telling them just the art history of the Paul Caponigro photograph, which comes out in the discussion, but it begins with where these kids are.
Most of Paul’s photographs are of nature, of beauty. These kids lived in Maine. They see it all the time. They bring it themselves. Our docents are schooled in not talking right away, letting kids wander through the galleries, a little bringing them back and opening up to a discussion. It’s amazing what they say. They see the most cogent and important parts typically because they experienced it. We have a lot of groups going through, and we were able to receive money from Bank of America, so every group that goes through, every single one, we cover the bus fees and fares, and there’s no charge for the students to come in, there’s no charge for the Docent program.
In our own small way, we’re trying to reach as many students with the first program that I mentioned stories of the land and its people, and with bringing kids and to see our wonderful collection. We also have a teen program, an after school teen program where kids make films about their life on the midcoast. The first one they did using only an iPhone the whole movie. It was tremendous. We screened it in the Strand Theater which is a wonderful old theater up at Rockland. Three hundred and fifty people came up to see this movie. That was four years ago. Since then, they’ve made five movies. One was on homeless teens on the mid coast. We had teens making a film about other teens who are homeless on the mid coast, but even though they’re homeless, they love art and not through the Farnsworth. They discovered art by journaling, their music, dancing, and so this whole film, it’s called, “Artworks” was about how teens saw other teens using art to get through really difficult times.
The last film they just completed was all about bullying, but not the kind of bullying that I might remember from when I went to school. Part of it was about that, but cyber bullying and how terrible and devastating that is for our young people.
We have amazing kids all over, and all they need are as I said before some resources, adult supervision, and the permission to be kind of plumb their creativity. It’s there. I’ve seen it when I worked in Chicago with a different population, an urban poor population on the south side of Chicago. There were students there who had never picked up a crayon and a piece of paper and they were in middle school. The schools that I worked with were on the south side of Chicago, on South State Street. Some of these kids had never seen Lake Michigan. It was like four blocks away, because it’s too dangerous to go out there.
I’m just saying that we need to put kids in safe places where they can discover their creativity, because they definitely have it. By the way, their solutions to our problems are going to be really based on their creativity. Our problems are so intractable with poverty, with war, with the pollution, the ecology … You and I aren’t going to solve those problems, but a new generation will need to tackle them. If they can have a creative way of looking at things in an interdisciplinary way, that will tremendous and they have a shot at it.
Dr. Lisa: Roger, there’s a lot going on at the Farnsworth. I know that people will be interested in finding out more. What’s the best way for people to learn about the education programs and just the museum in general?
Roger: Just going to our website as a start, or just calling up the museum. There’s a wonderful newspaper up there called, “The Free Press”, comes out every Thursday. We have either ads or articles about what we’re doing, or just hopping in the car and driving on up. We’re open seven days a week until October, so we’re available. On first Fridays, we’re free in the evenings. There is a lot going on. There’s a lot going on in Portland. It’s a great state.
Kind of getting back to one of your questions, the similarities between Honolulu where there’s a lot of art and a lot activity going on are palpable. Honolulu is a city of 800,000 people and in Portland small, in Rockland … it’s tiny. It doesn’t mean that we don’t have the same energy and creativity going on.
Dr. Lisa: I feel very fortunate that you took the time to come down here and talk with us about art and education, and the work that’s being done of the Farnsworth Art Museum up in Rockland. We’ve been speaking with Roger Dell who is the director of education at the Farnsworth Art Museum. I encourage everybody who’s listening to go and spend some time in your wonderful place.
Roger: Thank you so much.