Posted Friday January 23 2015 at 06:41 am
Content: Many creatives experience creative blocks due to the resistance that is part of the creative process. Too often, resistance stops the artist from making movement in their art work or out in their careers. This includes artists with disabilities and without disabilities – no artist is immune to this challenge. However, resistance can be a conduit for change when the artist uses techniques and strategies alongside their art making process. When someone attains a disability or goes through some changes in their lives or artistically this resistance can be stronger than normal. This is where developing a toolbox to handle the many changes that effects one’s creativity becomes highly valuable to the artist. This presentation addresses the many ways in which to redirect one's creativity.
Takeaways:
- Resistance is a natural part of the creative process
- Basic understanding of creative blocks
- Employ techniques and tools to stay productive
Intended Audience: Artists, those that support artists, and also those interested in creativity and resistance
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Posted Monday December 29 2014 at 9:32 pm
SOURCE: Eisner, E. (2002). The Arts and the Creation of Mind, In Chapter 4, What the Arts Teach and How It Shows. (pp. 70-92). Yale University Press. Available from NAEA Publications.
1. The arts teach children to make good judgments about qualitative relationships.
Unlike much of the curriculum in which correct answers and rules prevail, in the arts, it is judgment rather than rules that prevail.
2. The arts teach children that problems can have more than one solution
and that questions can have more than one answer.
3. The arts celebrate multiple perspectives.
One of their large lessons is that there are many ways to see and interpret the world.
4. The arts teach children that in complex forms of problem solving
purposes are seldom fixed, but change with circumstance and opportunity. Learning in the arts requires the ability and a willingness to surrender to the unanticipated possibilities of the work as it unfolds.
5. The arts make vivid the fact that neither words in their literal form nor numbers exhaust what we can know. The limits of our language do not define the limits of our cognition.
6. The arts teach students that small differences can have large effects.
The arts traffic in subtleties.
7. The arts teach students to think through and within a material.
All art forms employ some means through which images become real.
8. The arts help children learn to say what cannot be said.
When children are invited to disclose what a work of art helps them feel, they must reach into their poetic capacities to find the words that will do the job.
9. The arts enable us to have experience we can have from no other source
and through such experience to discover the range and variety of what we are capable of feeling.
10. The arts' position in the school curriculum symbolizes to the young
what adults believe is important.
Posted Monday December 15 2014 at 10:07 pm
This is a guest blog post by Aysha Upchurch, Ed.M. candidate at Harvard's Graduate School of Education, currently interning with VSA Mass.
On Friday, December 12, 2014, students in VSA's COOL Schools Program at Boston Green Academy and Dorchester Academy got to put their creative skills on display by designing their own Converse classic high-tops. This opportunity was extended to other students in the school, bringing the total number of participants close to 300.
The "We Are All Stars" event is part of Converse's mission to engage youth creatively. Students wasted no time taking to the canvas. Converse selected 60 sneakers to display at their flagship store on Newbury Street in Boston and at their new headquarters in North Andover. Other sneakers will be featured in the January exhibit at VSA's Open Door Gallery. Be sure to visit the gallery and the Converse store to see some kickin' artwork!
VSA would like to thank all the students and staff at both schools and the Converse team for this amazing collaborative opportunity to empower youth through art.
