Student art has come a long way, baby

I remember making my parents an ashtray in art class. I must’ve been in second or third grade, and that’s what we made: Ashtrays. Mine looked like a piece of malformed lava, but nonetheless: Ashtray.

Five things about this before we move on to the main course:

1) My parents didn’t smoke. The ashtray became a coin holder, and if I’m not mistaken, it’s still in use today.

2) Holy bananas, my how things have changed. Seriously: If someone’s kid brought home an ashtray as an elementary school art project in 2017, it immediately goes on Facebook, someone like me sees it and writes a column about it, and next thing you know Anderson Cooper has a panel on CNN discussing “Ashtrays in Art: Acceptable or Asinine?”

3) My goodness, do I miss the 1970s. I miss the innocence of it being 100 percent acceptable for a public school art teacher to have their students make ashtrays. Ashtrays!

4) I’ve never actually seen a “kiln.” Do they really exist? 5) I kind of want a cigarette now. Let’s move on. “Yeah, you won’t be seeing any ashtrays,” said Crockett Middle School art teacher Lora Durr, discussing the pair of student art shows coming to Trenton this month.

First up is the state of New Jersey show, sponsored by the Art Educators of New Jersey (AENJ). This show will be located in the New Jersey Statehouse annex starting March 25, with a reception on March 31. Each county in the state will be represented with six works of student art.

On an even more local scale is the Mercer County exhibit, which will be held at Artworks in Trenton from March 10 through April 22. Durr, along with Tamika Diaz of Kreps Middle School in East Windsor, are the co-chairs of the event which will feature work from 16 different county schools, a number Durr is happy with, but wishes was higher.

“It’s like wrangling cats,” Durr said, laughing. “A few years ago we only had four art teachers participating, so this is good!”

You might remember Durr as the woman who began Hamilton Rocks! last summer, a little Facebook page that asked people to paint rocks and leave them all over Hamilton. What she hoped for was a small little community art project; what she got was about 4.3 trillion* painted rocks all over town and other, neighboring towns getting in on the action. (*estimated)

“It’s still going crazy,” Durr said. “I still have people telling me every single day about rocks they’ve painted, rocks they found. It’s unreal.”

Durr, to put it mildly, gets pretty excited about art and, specifically, the work her students do.

“Every day, I’m surprised and delighted by what they do,” she said. “I love my kids. They’re amazing. And as our population changes and they become more culturally diverse, the things they bring in have taught me so much.”

In short: Art class has changed. Durr explained back in the ashtray days, art teachers concentrated strictly on technique and formal study. Kids were taught how to do things, and then they did it, and then they ended up with hunks of malformed lava.

But these days? It’s about expression, which is what art is supposed to be about anyway.

“In the past, teachers would solely concentrate on teaching the art elements; line, color and shape,” Durr said. “Now most teachers are more interested in teaching the kids the idea that art gives them a voice, that art is a means for expression and a way to express your cultural values, your cultural identity, and your personal identity.”

I don’t want a cigarette anymore. But now I have a hankering for some clay. Jeff Edelstein is a columnist for The Trentonian. He can be reached at jedelstein@trentonian.com, facebook.com/ jeffreyedelstein and @jeffedelstein on Twitter.