Sculptor’s class visit helps shape students
The students were at first a bit reserved around the man who had come to their art class to present a workshop. But by the time Muskogee sculptor Lisan Tiger Blair had finished the feet of his clay dragon and was starting on the head, they were gathered around his work table, asking to borrow his tools.
“I left them out where they could reach out and grab them,” Blair said later.
“I don’t mind them using them as long as they don’t hurt themselves,” he said with a laugh. “Now, with paintbrushes it’s different.”
Their teacher, Lauren Glenn, 35, said Blair worked that day with four of the six classes she is teaching this semester at Taft Middle School, 2901 NW 23.
“It’s important that they see that art matters, that there is something that they can do with art in the future,” said Glenn, who is in her second year at Taft.
“To see someone making a living at it gives them hope, if they have the drive to do it. It’s awesome that they got to see someone so young. He’s only 23.”
Blair might be young, but he started early, said his mother, Dana Tiger, a watercolor artist who is well known in the American Indian art world. Tiger came along for the workshop and entertained the students with tales about her son while Blair molded the oil-based clay, which would be baked in layers as the piece progressed.
“He has been sculpting since before he could talk,” Tiger said. “He showed me something when I was driving, and I about wrecked the car.”
The toddler had created a multi-petaled rose.
“I was going to keep it forever, but I accidentally sat on it,” Tiger confessed.
Blair was in first grade when he started competing in art shows, and at 18 he was asked by the Smithsonian to exhibit and teach a sculpting class at the National Museum of the American Indian.
Blair and his sister, Christie, who paints, work out of the Tiger Art Gallery in Muskogee, which was founded after Dana Tiger’s father, the renowned Creek and Seminole artist Jerome Tiger, died at 26. Jerome Tiger left behind a large body of work, and his widow and brother created prints and learned how to make art the family business.
Art is life-changing
Art is a popular elective at Taft.
Glenn has 204 students this semester, and the other art teacher, Tabitha Black, has 206.
“The fact that there are two art teachers here is amazing,” Glenn said.
Many life lessons can be learned in an art class, Glenn said.
“The most important thing I want them to learn is confidence,” she said. “A lot of kids are so afraid to make the wrong mark that they won’t make any mark.”
Glenn said she recently mentioned to a parent that her daughter was very talkative in her class. She said the mother was surprised, as other teachers had told her that her daughter was quiet and reserved, which she was a bit worried about.
When Glenn assured her that her daughter had no trouble making friends in art class, the mother began to cry.
“That’s why I do what I do,” Glenn said. “For some people, art saves their lives.”
Blair said he enjoyed having the students take turns gathering around him.
Blair brought along a couple of friends who provided clay to the students and encouraged them to make something while Blair worked.
Dakota Huston, an eighth-grader, made an acorn. Rory Thompson, a seventh-grader, created a tornado. Eighth-grader Bradley Kelly fashioned a heart on a pedestal. Seventh-grader Roselin Barrios made a cat.
Seventh-grader Charisma Stout took cellphone photos of Blair as he worked and asked permission to remain at his table until the class period ended.
Glenn said she started out teaching 4- and 5-year-olds, but she knew she had found her calling when she arrived at Taft.
Middle school kids, she said, “are emotional and thin-skinned. But they love so fiercely and are very loyal. I love these kids.”
People who want to support art instruction or any educational endeavor can go to DonorsChoose. org and look at projects posted by teachers, said Glenn, which is how she obtained some of her classroom supplies.
“And surprisingly, the things we need the most are tissues, hand sanitizers and disinfectant wipes,” she said. “Specialist teachers don’t get those things.
“They can be dropped off at the office.”