Art for Art's Sake

Photographs by Dilip Vishwanat

William Perry, Central Visual & Performing Arts High School

Beginning, Intermediate and Advanced Visual Arts

William Perry is not a mover or a shaker. Call him, instead, a dreamer of dreams. Perry came toSt. Louis in 1976 and has been here ever since, dreaming ambitious dreams for his students and humble ones for himself. In a fickle, epicurean art world, he lives and articulates a stoic philosophy of career: “I never had any idea how I would make a living; I just knew I wanted to paint—so I tell my kids [meaning his students], ‘Commit yourself to art, and the opportunities will come.’”

Opportunities have come, for his students and for Perry himself. At 3 p.m. every day, when he’s “a free man,” he goes home to his studio to draw and paint commissioned pieces.

He finds the schedule nourishing: “I’m constantly talking about art, thinking about art. I’m drawing and painting all the time to show the kids how. Art is like music; you have to practice to do it well. When I teach, I practice all day long.”

In personal student-teacher relation-ships, Perry maintains perspective. For someone who refers to “my kids” with all the protective instinct of a good father, he practices surprising detachment after their graduation: “I tell them, ‘Don’t come crawling around here. Concentrate on getting a life for yourself.’” Not that he shuns contact with the up-and-coming graphic designers, museum curators, art-institute students and Fulbright scholars he once taught—instead, self-effacing, he asks students to pursue excellence first.

“I want students to get on a track where they can take their talent and do something with it,” he says. “When I can help one of my kids get a break, an award, a scholarship, an acceptance—anything that puts them on that track—I feel like that’s my greatest success, so every year I try to make sure that happens.”

Caroline Kraft, University City High School

Beginning Men’s Choir and Women’s Choir, Advanced Choir, Show Choir and Voice

Six years out of college, Caroline Kraft still has the energy of a girl—one who just wants to have fun. “I don’t want a regular job,” she says with a laugh. “I want to be around music.”

Little did she know, when she decided to double-major in vocal performance and education, what “just being around music” would do. Kraft has coached a high proportion of her choir singers—including Aloha Mischeaux, a young St. Louisan who made it to Hollywood on American Idol and now has a recording contract—to the All-District level and beyond.

Kraft once “wanted to be a star” herself. Her high-school choir director asked her to join the class as a piano accompanist, but “one day she heard me humming along and said, ‘Uh-uh. No piano anymore. I need you singing.’ I started taking private voice lessons from her, and that was that.”

Now Kraft laughs about the parallel with her star student, a senior All-State tenor and Opera Theatre apprentice. “As a freshman, he really wanted to be in jazz band. There were already three upperclassmen on piano, though, so he begged me: ‘Please let me play for your class.’ Then one day I overheard him humming and singing—and that was that!”

Kraft gives free private lessons to him and to any other student who wants advanced musical training, all the while co-directing, publicizing and rehearsing the school musical. That’s just during regular hours: Kraft sings with the Saint Louis Chamber Chorus and a national Catholic church choir on weekends. Yet she shrugs off admiring words about her dedication and denies having a pure work ethic. Music is not about duty, she says.

“I do it because I love it. I get to have fun every day.”

Brother Aidan McDermott, O.S.B., Priory High School

Stained Glass I and II

Brother Aidan McDermott knows there’s not much practical application for the skills students learn in his art class at Priory, an all-boys high school run by the Benedictine monks.

“Most of my students will go on to be businessmen and doctors and lawyers, not stained-glass makers. Stained glass isn’t even trendy for the artists: That’s glass blowing, which is too much of a liability to teach here,” McDermott says with a laugh.

But monasteries have always preserved culture and knowledge, all things slow and meditative, and many things forgotten. That’s the value in what McDermott does: its tradition.

“I knew when I joined the monastery that I’d be teaching at Priory, but I didn’t expect to end up in art,” McDermott says. “I was just fascinated with the stained glass.”

Brother Symeon Gillette first showed the novice McDermott how to select, shape and paint pieces of glass, then how to assemble them into a larger project. Under Gillette’s guidance, students had previously made several large windows, including a history of the monastery in stained glass and a replica of a window from France’s Chartres cathedral.

When the older monk retired from teaching, he named McDermott to continue Priory’s stained-glass tradition. So that’s what McDermott does—trying, in the meantime, to pass on some monastic virtues as well.

“This is more of a character-building class than a career move. It teaches patience and perseverance,” he explains. “I tell the guys that it takes time, that you have to be patient. At first you say that, and they don’t really listen to you. They’re so used to having everything right now in the modern world. Then they finish their first project and see how all the pieces don’t fit, or the solder looks funny. I take that process and use it to show them that this is what happens when you try to rush.”

Kim Foster, Kirkwood High School

Intro to Art, Graphic Design I & II, Drawing

Kim Foster knows that the devil isn’t in the details—he’s in the television set. Four years ago, when Foster realized that the tube was sapping time from her own painting and pottery, she switched it off forever, without a qualm. Now she teaches her students what this episode taught her: “You have to give up something less important to get what’s more important”—a maxim the devil would almost certainly rather they didn’t know.

It’s Foster’s attention to such little things, she says, that won her a 2006 Missouri Art Education Association Art Teacher of the Year award.

“All art teachers do extras. They’re hanging student work in the hallways, encouraging students one on one, going to shows,” Foster says. She just turns the extras up a notch: hanging student work in the Missouri Capitol rotunda, encouraging students to win $500 prizes in design contests, going to statewide craft fairs and national teacher conferences.

So many extras could prove distracting, but after 16 years of concentration, Foster makes them serve her students’ growth in creativity and expertise. Her life answers one of the questions she wants her students to ask: What real-life situations can art address?

Enamored of the practical and concrete, Foster wants her students to think like artists even if they never pick up a brush again after her class. Whether they design national advertising campaigns or just pick colors for their living rooms, she wants them to say, “‘I can fix that’ or ‘There’s more than one way of doing this.’ I want them to look at life in an integrated way, solve problems, get ideas across, communicate, make things beautiful”—and, when necessary, turn off the TV.

Joseph Schulte, Saint Louis University High School

Acting, Improvisation, Public Speaking

Joseph Schulte believes that “there’s a little Peter Pan in every teacher. We don't want to stop learning. We don't want to grow up.” After 49 years teaching and 57 in the SLUH community (he earned his own diploma there), Schulte still sounds as youthful and as quick with a laugh as he must have on his own graduation day.

That sprightly spirit might help explain why Schulte won the 2006 Educator of the Year Award from the Missouri Arts Education Association. So might his success rate. One of Schulte's former students leads the Screenwriters Federation of America and writes comedy material for Conan O’Brien. Others have gone on to perform professionally on Broadway.

Yet Schulte doesn’t aim to make students want fame; he just wants them to love theater. He knows that the performing arts need more than stardom to keep them going. “It’s fun to see that kind of success, but it’s also rare,” he says. “Overall, we need to train young men and women to be the audience for the future.”

To that end, Schulte tries to pass on a broad range of skills and attitudes. He hides such lofty intangibles as confident humility up his pedagogical sleeve alongside the simplest breathing and movement tips. “You never can tell what a student is going to fix on” as valuable, Schulte says. “One young man told me that 20 years later he still practiced a relaxation exercise he learned from my class.”

Other students have learned from Schulte to see theater as service: “The actor’s major job is supporting the team and the script, the other artists he’s working with, the audience. The individual performer is secondary.”

Listen: Peter Pan is giving lessons in maturity, and he knows what he’s talking about.

Debbie Raboin, O'Fallon Township High School

Art I, Ceramics, Pottery

A believer in making connections, Debbie Raboin is always looking for ways to link her teaching to the rest of her students' experience. First, she works with teachers in other departments to knit her curriculum together with theirs. Spanish, geometry, history, physics—you name it, Raboin's classes study it as it relates to art.

Her efforts at integrating disciplines go far beyond the everyday – although, if you were aiming for simplicity, you could call them a civics lesson. In partnership with the city of O'Fallon, Raboin and her students recently transformed the newly-created Tillman Park into a sculpture park complete with concrete paths and landscaping.

Raboin hopes that working on the park will make her students feel like citizens of the art world and the world at large. “I want them to know about purchasing art – how to go to shows, talk to artists, find out what their work's about, negotiate a price. I also want them to know they can change the face of their community if they want to.”

That's why Raboin encouraged her students to do so much of the nitty-gritty work on the sculpture park themselves, from planning with city engineers to planting trees, choosing their favorite statues to contracting with the sculptor.

“A lot of times, someone their age won't get to work with the real hands-on stuff – but they did. I've had some of them comment, 'When I've got kids, I'll be able to bring them here and say to them, “I did this.”' And they did. They brought public art to O'Fallon.” So did Raboin herself.

Keith Westbrook, Gateway IT High School

Introduction to Art, Drawing & Painting

During college and graduate school, Keith Westbrook focused entirely on studio art; he didn't see teaching on his horizon. “I didn't even take an education course. I didn't want to do it,” he says with a laugh.

But a few years after graduation, Westbrook began substitute teaching in the St. Louis public schools. Finally, he enrolled in a career-transitions program for educators at the University of Missouri – St. Louis.

So what's the difference between teaching as a substitute and teaching full-time? “It’s being a hit man for hire versus being under fire every day,” Westbrook says, laughing again.

Minus the guns, it’s an apt metaphor for the way Westbrook is often forced to teach: get ‘em quick, then disappear. Since Gateway’s art curriculum is only for freshmen and sophomores, with students specializing in a technical field in the last two years, “when I get these students I know I only have one shot.” To hold on to those with the talent or the interest to pursue art, Westbrook has founded an art club at Gateway open to all grades.

In club and in class, Westbrook moves things along at a fast and fascinating speed. “I give them projects that are linked to art history, so they can put art in a context and really understand it. I introduce a new project every two weeks and try to strike a balance between the skill-based and effort-based projects,” so that even the less technically-inclined students can do well.

In addition, Westbrook offers his students ulterior motives. Each year, the student with the highest grade by points earns a gift certificate to his or her favorite store. And in a recent project on Andy Warhol and pop art, where students chose a grocery item to reproduce visually, the student who made the closest imitation won the whole box of groceries.

While doing all this, Westbrook works to stay devoted to the practice of his own art. He recently exhibited several paintings and is currently working on a book of photographs. When school is in session, he constantly sketches concept drawings that he can turn into larger works during the summer.

Keeping his own interests lively helps him to spark his students' interest, he says. “I try to teach the things I want to know and be the teacher I wish I'd had in school.

“I tell them: I'm not a teacher teaching art, I’m an artist learning to teach.”

Michele Motil, McCluer High School

Art Basics, Drawing I & II, Sculpture I & II, Advanced Art Studio, AP Art Studio

“A home away from home”: usually it’s the language of hotel commercials or vacation-spot brochures. But Michele Motil uses it to describe her art classroom.

Most of my students who want to pursue art as a career have very strong support from their family, which is great, but the parents aren't artists,” says Motil, who credits her own parents and teachers with putting her on her current path.

So she fills the role that her teachers filled for her: picking up where her students' parents leave off, offering the guidance and expertise her studio training has given her. She welcomes her young artists at any time of day – before and after school, between classes, during study hall. Even during her interview, at one point she put down the phone and audibly asked a student who'd just wandered in: “Where did you come from?”

“This is where really talented students are going to work through their projects and develop their skills,” she says. “My colleagues and I want to be sure they have the best resources we can give them. Officially we trade days in the after-school art lab, but usually, all four of us stay.”

“There are different levels of success” for students, says Motil, who aims to reach every level. “Some will come to me and say 'I don't know why I'm here; I have to take art to graduate.' I try to help them acquire skills and find something in themselves to express, something they may not have ever known they had. Others will go on to some of the best art institutes in the country.”

Either way, Motil says, “I want them to enjoy it. I want to see smiles coming down the hall.” She wants her students to make themselves at home with art.

Lynnie McElwee, Missouri School for the Blind

Art – all levels

To say that Lynnie McElwee teaches “visual art” might be misleading, since many of her students are living with little or no physical vision. Then again, she describes her own work in visual terms: “I'm teaching them to look at things in different ways,” she says.

But how can students look without using their eyes? McElwee has been answering that question afresh for 22 years. Depending on what works for each student, from the youngest first-grader to the nearly-collegiate advanced class, she reinvents her teaching tactics over and over again.

“It depends on their point of reference,” she explains. “High schoolers, in general, understand concepts; and if someone has seen before, then they have a different perspective than someone who's always been blind.”

Most of McElwee's students, though, learn by touch. A tea towel becomes a camel's hide; wrinkled paper is the skin of an elephant. Colors are concepts: yellow means warmth, cheerfulness, sunlight. Any raised surface can become an embossing or a relief drawing. And McElwee's high school students, many of whom she has taught since they were kindergarteners, can discern and create shapes as precise as an octagon or as complex as a hawk's wing with their fingers.

Every project is tactile, from raised-cardboard insignia to ceramics and sculpture. High schoolers create chess sets, visit parks and then design their own, or practice the principles of architecture by modelling “huge, intricate” buildings out of oatmeal boxes and Pringles cans. McElwee wants them to build imagination and a capacity for design by working with their hands.

“All my students should come out with some useful and practical information, so they can function in society and have an idea of what's around them,” McElwee says. Like any good teacher of the arts, she shows her students how to see.

Kelley Ryan, Clayton High School

Acting I, Advanced Acting, Directing Studio, Theatre Arts, Theatre Arts for English Language Learners, Shakespeare, Plays

Kelley Ryan learned the power of stories early in her teaching career. During college, she lived with her parents in Connecticut and worked 20 hours a week so she could afford to travel into the city to attend NYU. All this effort and sacrifice fueled Ryan’s desire to work with the experimental theater team at the school, where, finally, she won an internship.

“At that time they were working in a school in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, in an immigrant neighborhood that represented 56 languages and all these different cultures,” Ryan recalls. “We worked with the students to write and perform the story of what it was like to leave their country. It was called 'The Ellis Island Project.'”

Ryan had been hooked on theater since her junior year of high school, but this sealed the deal. “It was just one of those moments where your life takes a totally different turn,” she says.

Since 'The Ellis Island Project,' which she did in 1988, Ryan has helped her students to create much more than roles and scripts. Once, during a storytelling exercise in class, a student shared how his mother was raising him and his siblings singlehandedly. The student told how his mom worked full-time and would probably be too tired to make a Thanksgiving dinner.

“I approached him afterward and said, 'You know, I bet you could make the dinner.' We went to my office, looked up on the Internet about how to make turkey and stuffing, and printed out recipes. I told him that if he'd do this, I'd make one of my famous pies for dessert. He got this determined look, and he decided to do it. So I made the pie. This was years ago—and last week, he called me again to ask if I would take a look at the screenplay he’s writing. I just made a pie, and I have this kid forever. We'll be in touch for life.”

Ryan hopes that, especially during her advanced classes, students “develop an eye for what's true” and an ability to communicate it with others. “I also try to instill the ability to hear, give and internalize critical comments on performance without taking it personally,” she says. “Academically, that's key.”

Over the course of her whole curriculum, she says, “I want them to understand that stories are important to the quality of our lives—that theatre brings joy and beauty, as well as challenge and the power to change things.” Just like somebody we could name.

John Miller, Lutheran South High School

Concert Band, Jazz Band, Wind Symphony, Junior High Band, Junior High Honor Band

John Miller doesn’t have to think too hard to decide how long music has been a part of him. “My whole life,” he says. Starting with piano lessons at 6 years of age, “my mother and father were interested in music for me,” he adds with a laugh. “I didn't really become self-motivated as a musician until freshman or sophomore year of high school.”

So now Miller understands when his students at Lutheran South, and at its feeder elementary schools, undergo the same transition. “Several years ago, the mother of one of my fifth-graders came in, exasperated. ‘My son hates playing music,’ she said. ‘Every time he practices, he threatens to go outside and throw his trumpet in the street so it will get run over.’ I consider that one of my best success stories,” Miller says, laughing again. “By eighth grade, that young man was first chair of his section in the junior high honor band. Now he's a music major in college.”

After 30 years of teaching, this is Miller’s definition of success: not necessarily to make music majors of his students during the time they’re with him, but to help each student grow. “To watch them when they’re seniors playing Mozart horn concertos, and to remember how eight years ago they could barely play a note—that’s really something,” he says. “When they do their last concert with us, it's a very emotional time. I wouldn't say a lot of them go on to be musicians, but I am pleased by the number who come back to tell me they’re majoring in music or are playing in a college organization.”

Originally a trombone player, Miller himself doesn't perform much anymore—with a major in music education, performance was never really his plan anyway. Likewise, he doesn't prompt students toward careers in music unless they show interest and aptitude on their own. He’s learned the value of experience for its own sake: “I want my students to appreciate what it takes to make good music, good art. I want them to carry that dedication into their mature lives, whether they continue to make music or not.”

Miller practices what he preaches. Most high school bands compete in marching and symphonic contests, hoping to bring back trophies and ribbons. By contrast, Lutheran South doesn't even have a marching band; instead of teaching flashy formations and overseeing the cleanliness of epauleted jackets, Miller prefers to sit in the stands and spend his time focusing on melody and harmony. Each year, his bands also work to polish a set of songs which they then take on tour around the state and country.

“We’re in it for the music,” he says. “That's all.”