Dear Teaching Artist,
You are invited to participate in “Improbable Beautiful” The Teaching Artist Questionnaire my MFA project. I am interested in exploring how teaching art and making art connect.
What are the common struggles as well as rewards? I am asking teaching artists to respond to a set of questions and provide a small amount of additional information. My goal is
to collect your responses and post them on my blog. I will feature an artist for
2 – 3 weeks depending on the level of response. When your response is posted I
will send you an email letting you know. I’m not certain what I will learn from
this experiment but I am excited to hear from other teaching artists and find
out more about both your teaching and your personal art practice.
A bit about me: I am a teaching artist in my second semester
of the MFA-IA program at Goddard College (Port Townsend, WA). Being a teaching
artist comes easily to me. It is a role I can play quite effortlessly. On the other hand, being an
Artist has not been a strong part of my public persona. Pursuing my MFA is my sky dive into claiming more of my artist identity. Improbable Beautiful is my attempt to understand and merge these two realms.
THANK YOU for taking the time to participate in this
project. I look forward to reading your responses and getting to know you all a
bit better.
Sincerely,
Constance
TO PARTICIPATE
Click on Teaching Artist Questionnaire link on the right.
You can choose the long or updated short version.
The project and blog title comes from this poem:
Starlings in Winter
Chunky and noisy,
but with stars in their black feathers,
they spring from the telephone wire
and instantly
they are acrobats
in the freezing wind.
And now, in the theater of air,
they swing over buildings,
dipping and rising;
they float like one stippled star
that opens,
becomes for a moment fragmented,
then closes again;
and you watch
and you try
but you simply can't imagine
how they do it
with no articulated instruction, no pause,
only the silent confirmation
that they are this notable thing,
this wheel of many parts, that can rise and spin
over and over again,
full of gorgeous life.
Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us,
even in the leafless winter,
even in the ashy city.
I am thinking now
of grief, and of getting past it;
I feel my boots
trying to leave the ground,
I feel my heart
pumping hard, I want
to think again of dangerous and noble things.
I want to be light and frolicsome.
I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing,
as though I had wings.
but with stars in their black feathers,
they spring from the telephone wire
and instantly
they are acrobats
in the freezing wind.
And now, in the theater of air,
they swing over buildings,
dipping and rising;
they float like one stippled star
that opens,
becomes for a moment fragmented,
then closes again;
and you watch
and you try
but you simply can't imagine
how they do it
with no articulated instruction, no pause,
only the silent confirmation
that they are this notable thing,
this wheel of many parts, that can rise and spin
over and over again,
full of gorgeous life.
Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us,
even in the leafless winter,
even in the ashy city.
I am thinking now
of grief, and of getting past it;
I feel my boots
trying to leave the ground,
I feel my heart
pumping hard, I want
to think again of dangerous and noble things.
I want to be light and frolicsome.
I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing,
as though I had wings.
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