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Student artwork, from the International Baccalaureate Art Program at the Victoria School of the Arts

With the buzz around the re-opening of the Art Gallery of Alberta this week, I checked out its website and found pages of courses at the AGA’s Singhmar Centre for Art Education.  On the Catholic School District site’s front page there was a link to an online student art gallery. Search for Edmonton Public Schools and you’ll find a menu of quick links — one directly to student art. Art has been important to kids for generations. I took art lessons for seven years when I was a kid — I could draw, and I was really good.  But I stopped at 13, and it’s only in the last few years I’ve started even going to galleries again. Why did that happen if, as it appears, art is considered that vital for kids?

Robert Dmytruk, art consultant for Edmonton Public Schools and a painter himself, says their board has been “re-formulating to the 21st-century learning styles, which appreciate being creative, exploring, and discovering.”  The same is true at Edmonton Catholic Schools District, says their art consultant Carole Brosseau. “The advantage of the visual arts is that they can be integrated into the core curriculums,” she says. “The arts empower students to take risks and to do something different.”

Dymtruk explains, “This is not new, but there’s more emphasis now on art. The creativity necessary for art feeds into the students’ other lessons. Making art involves critical thinking and problem solving, not just playing with painted colour.”

In asking Jessie Beier, education co-ordinator at the AGA, about the importance of  visual arts education for children, she responded that it was interesting I said “visual.”  One of the new AGA’s first installations is “The Murder of Crows,” entirely in sound. I admit my ignorance. She explains the AGA is “unique in the city in that courses build visual literacy through talking about and then participating in the art.” Students of the gallery attend exhibits, discuss what they’ve experienced and then dive in themselves.

Why then do many adults, who think art education is important for children, lose interest in it?  Beier feels that because our society is focused on “instant gratification, if [something] takes a long time to learn, people have difficultly investing the time into it.”  Both making and going to art is time-consuming, and time is a commodity too many of us don’t have.  Dymtruk says, “Creativity is educated out of students sometimes.  We didn’t realize the importance of creativity, preparing students instead for university, for professions exclusively, and it’s only very recently that this focus has changed.”

Both Brosseau and Briers had another, unsettling answer, that perhaps, as adults, we’re afraid of art.  “There are many pre-conceptions of what art should be and adults tend to be very self-critical in assessing their own art,” says Brosseau.

Briers concurs:  “What people perceive as art is very static. It’s drawing, painting or sculpting, and that’s all it can be. Unless you’re going to make a career as an artist, you shouldn’t think about it: concentrate instead on your real job.  And if you aren’t doing art yourself, you’re not allowed to have an opinion about it.  But art and participating in it should be pushed into a place where it’s about thinking. Everyone can think!” contends Beier.

What Edmonton’s educators hope of the new AGA is a collaboration, encouraging in children the openness of thinking which art gives — and helping them retain it. The Catholic board uses the AGA’s student programs, and Brosseau speaks excitedly of the annual Spring Into Art showcase, for which the AGA provides the venue for student work from all grades. There will be three dedicated education studios at the new AGA, up from two.  The changes have Beier gushing: “I’m very excited. The new gallery space is bringing in other exhibitions which the AGA couldn’t before, and will offer classes that can expose people to the gallery who might not otherwise come.”

Dmytruk says, “Elementary students are the most enthusiastic, most explorative people, wanting more knowledge, understanding, all the time.” When we get older and lose that, how much innovation do we lose? Grown ups need art as much as kids.