Shear ingenuity
Visiting artist enlists a few woolly rams to provide Wood Gormley students with a tactile art lesson
Rarely does an arts education program in the public schools involve the shearing of sheep, but fiber artist Lucy Ranney wanted her kids to see where the wool they used in art class came from.
So she got sheep-shearing teacher Pat Melendrez to give haircuts to three of his rams at Wood Gormley Elementary School during Friday’s spring fair.
The rams squirmed and kicked and tried to butt heads with Melendrez, all to no avail. He shaved off about 6 pounds of colored wool from each one. Melendrez likened the process to wrestling, “Only with a new opponent each time.”
Many of the school’s 300-plus students circled around Melendrez during the shearing, some holding their noses and a few shielding their eyes from the spectacle. Melendrez said the shearing doesn’t hurt the animals and the wool will grow in again pretty quickly.
Inside the school, located on Booth Street near downtown, the walls were lined with individual samples of wool art that the children in grades K-6 made under Ranney’s guidance during a two-week intensive art workshop in February.
Amy Summa, arts education coordinator for Santa Fe Public Schools, said Ranney is one of about 30 visiting artists who work with arts teachers in the district on specific projects. She said the program, funded primarily through the Santa Fe-based nonprofit ART-Smart, allows students to experience the craft of a new teacher and learn about different techniques and cultures. And for the teachers, the visiting artists can provide a fresh perspective and the chance for collaboration, Summa said.
Ranney worked with Wood Gormley teacher Mary Olson on the “wool bombing” project, which allowed the kids to work with a natural product as they learned the art of “felting.”
“They can’t get enough of the touch,” Ranney said.
Fifth-grader Adrian Chavez, who proudly showed his mother the wool snowboarding penguin he had made, agreed during the fair. “I like the feel of the wool,” he said.
National art groups such as the Arts Education Partnership and Americans for the Arts often issue reports showing that students exposed to the arts in elementary school perform better scholastically than those who go without. Arts education advocates also argue that children who engage in arts programs develop critical-thinking skills and gain confidence, talents that will pay off in real life.
Both Ranney and Olson said having the chil- dren learn how to pull wool balls into wisps and then shape them into animal imagery and other forms using such tools as felt needles and foam blocks required the development of a trait that kids don’t always possess today: patience.
They couldn’t just open up their laptops, hit a few keys and create computerized arts images. “We live in a world with kids where everything happens immediately,” Ranney said. “This took two weeks. It was like ‘forever’ for some of them.”
And, Ranney said, in an academic world pushing its kids to constantly top each previous achievement, “It allowed them to not be perfect. It allowed them to accept something they thought had to be a certain way and let it go.”
Whether any of the children want to learn the craft of sheep shearing is another matter. Melendrez, who has been doing it for about 40 years, said you have to be in good shape, be willing to get dirty, and learn how to master centuries-old tools that haven’t changed much since the first sheep got a shearing way back when.
And while sheep can gripe and groan during the process, they tend to give in and give up pretty quickly once the clippers get to working. And they’re not too bright anyway, he said.
“It’s about the only animal I can outsmart,” Melendrez said with a smile.