Art Education

"What do you see?" asks Noreen Scott Garrity, pointing to the painting. Hands shoot up. Voices call out. "I see a boy sleeping and someone throwing up on him. " "A boy sleeping and a monster beating on his head. " After some gentle prodding, someone suggests that it is a sleeping boy and his guilty conscience. A guilty conscience, muses Garrity. "If you had to draw your conscience, how would you do it?" "It would have blue hair, a blue face, three toes and three fingers.

Deborah Warner, 64, a textile artist and faculty member at the Moore College of Art and Design from 1970 until she retired in 2010, died of lung cancer Saturday, July 7, at her home in East Falls. Ms. Warner was chair of the Moore textile design department for several years and dean of the college from 1990 to 1993. Inquirer art critic Edward J. Sozanski noted in a 1997 review that "fiber art has been transformed in recent years by imagination, technical adaptation, and willingness to move beyond utility and traditional forms.

THE SKINNED, headless rabbit hung upside down above a wood table, its feet bound and its arms outstretched as if it were racing toward the ground. The table was adorned with lavender baby's breath flowers, a glass of white wine and the ingredients used in Osteria's signature dish, casalinga , or rabbit with polenta: kosher salt, butter, rosemary, sage and pancetta . For fine diners at the Spring Garden restaurant, this is dinner. For visiting art teacher Deva Watson and her four students from Southwest Leadership Academy Charter School, in the Paschall section of Southwest Philly, this is art. Food linked with art is one of Watson's out-of-the-box ideas that excite her bosses, nonprofit officials and, most significantly, her students.

Horticulture and art are related fields, but in bonsai, they are one. As curator of the bonsai collection at Longwood Gardens, Mary Allinson makes use of her art education and her childhood experience on her family's farm. She is teaching two sessions in bonsai at Longwood this month that already are filled. Bonsai is the art of growing plants as dwarf, picturesque specimens in containers. The technique originated in China and was developed further in Japan.

Paul B. Flick, 73, a retired Glassboro State College (now Rowan College of New Jersey) art professor and Mickleton resident, died Thursday when he was hit by a car near his home. "He was deeply involved with art and teaching art at Glassboro State College," said Burton Wasserman, a senior art professor at Rowan since 1960. "It was central to his life. " While there, the bulk of Mr. Flick's work consisted of teaching art- appreciation courses to non-art majors. "It is a special challenge to make art interesting to students who aren't art majors," said George Neff, chairman of Rowan College's art department.

The Chamber Players of America Ltd. is seeking classical musicians and listeners to participate in a chamber music conference Feb. 17-20 at Eagle Lodge conference center in Lafayette Hill. Cellist Jeanne Kelly will be music director of the event. The Chamber Players was formed to bring together professional and amateur musicians in an environment suited for well-matched ensemble play while providing other leisure and recreational activities, according to Ira Gutzeit, president.

I have a bachelor's degree in marketing, but I'm seeking a career change in a fine-arts-related field. I am enrolled at Kutztown University to obtain certification in art education. What's the future for art teachers, where are the best opportunities and what are the salary levels? Will art-teaching positions be more limited due to preference for math, science and computers? Will my age (28) and my marketing degree limit my employment opportunities? - J.R., Forty Fort, Pa. The job outlook for art teachers in Pennsylvania is better than ever, due to a new state requirement of two credits in arts or humanities in secondary schools.

Every spring for 35 years, the School District of Philadelphia has mounted its annual spring art show at the museum of the Philadelphia Civic Center. Featuring 1,500 pieces of art work representing students from kindergarten through senior high at 200 schools, the show is a moving and impressive display of creative energy and talent. It is the largest show of its kind in the nation - a perennial jewel in the tarnished crown of public education. But under budget cuts that will be made unless the bailout promised by the mayor and the president of City Council materializes, "Young Artists 1994" will be the district's last student exhibition.

As the drive to move the Barnes Foundation from Lower Merion to Philadelphia gathers momentum, one worthy group could get passed by the parade. That would be Barnes students - those who over the decades have used this great art collection as the basis for an art education, just as Albert C. Barnes intended. Yes - and this bears repeating - the Barnes Foundation is an art collection and a school. (Don't call it a museum.) Students have studied there, at low-cost tuition, since Barnes was alive.

Kenya Cassell, an 11th grader at Girls High, is the winner of a contest among Philadelphia School District art students to create an illustration based on the spirit of the French Revolution of 1789. She and the four runners-up will receive their prizes this afternoon from Constance Clayton, superintendent of schools, in a ceremony at the Board of Education building, 21st Street and the Parkway. Cassell's prize is two round-trip tickets to Paris and a three-night stay at the Meridien Hotel there.

THE SKINNED, headless rabbit hung upside down above a wood table, its feet bound and its arms outstretched as if it were racing toward the ground. The table was adorned with lavender baby's breath flowers, a glass of white wine and the ingredients used in Osteria's signature dish, casalinga , or rabbit with polenta: kosher salt, butter, rosemary, sage and pancetta . For fine diners at the Spring Garden restaurant, this is dinner. For visiting art teacher Deva Watson and her four students from Southwest Leadership Academy Charter School, in the Paschall section of Southwest Philly, this is art. Food linked with art is one of Watson's out-of-the-box ideas that excite her bosses, nonprofit officials and, most significantly, her students.

She doesn't look like a revolutionary. Now in her early 70s, Linda Lee Alter is diminutive, gracious, and soft-spoken, with a fringe of white hair and rimless glasses. During an interview in her light-filled Center City apartment, she was dressed simply and conservatively: charcoal sweater vest, pearl-gray blouse, black slacks, flats. Yet with one bold gesture, Alter has transformed Philadelphia into a must-visit city for anyone interested in the work of female artists. Alter spent a quarter-century assembling an impressive collection: approximately 400 works made during the last four decades by more than 150 American women.

  When Justin Mitchell and Karina Restrepo created the Mi Cumbia Spa on 17th Street, they didn't hire a decorator. Mitchell, an artist, approached the task as Albert C. Barnes would have evaluated a piece of art. To appreciate Mitchell's approach - and that of so many others who have studied the Barnesian method - you must understand Barnes. Imagine you have never seen or heard of the Mona Lisa or its creator. When you do get to view the painting at the Louvre, you admire the artist's use of color, the lines or shapes he has created, the illusion of distance, and the marvelous light he installed on the subject's face and breast and in the background.

Alan M. "Mike" Kriegsman, 84, a critic for the Washington Post whose prose style earned the first Pulitzer Prize for dance coverage, died Aug. 31 of heart ailments at his home in Chevy Chase, Md. The death was confirmed by Suzanne Carbonneau, a dance critic and historian. In an interview, Mikhail Baryshnikov, the Soviet-born dancer and former artistic director of the American Ballet Theatre, called Mr. Kriegsman "one of the best writers" on dance. He said that Mr. Kriegsman was an accomplished pianist whose educational background in music "brought an intelligent approach to writing about music in choreography.

Deborah Warner, 64, a textile artist and faculty member at the Moore College of Art and Design from 1970 until she retired in 2010, died of lung cancer Saturday, July 7, at her home in East Falls. Ms. Warner was chair of the Moore textile design department for several years and dean of the college from 1990 to 1993. Inquirer art critic Edward J. Sozanski noted in a 1997 review that "fiber art has been transformed in recent years by imagination, technical adaptation, and willingness to move beyond utility and traditional forms.

Surrounded by the great squares of scored limestone quarried from the Negev Desert and now gracing the walls of the light court of the Barnes Foundation on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, the city's business, political, social and civic elite gathered Thursday evening to honor two of their own: Joe Neubauer and Aileen Roberts, winners of this year's Philadelphia Award. Neubauer, who just stepped down as chief executive of Aramark Corp., the food services giant, and Roberts, a philanthropist trained as a landscape architect, were instrumental in bringing the Barnes Foundation to Philadelphia from its original and only home on 12 arboreal acres in Merion.

On the day when, at long last, the reincarnated Barnes museum opened to the public, the collection of visitors was so strange a conglomeration that the eccentric Albert C. Barnes might actually have approved. Early Saturday morning downstairs in the auditorium, a private symposium, sponsored by Christie's, was held for about 200 art collectors, museum directors, educators, and auction-house representatives - the very sort of cuff-linked and pedigreed swells Barnes disdained. The first speaker, John Henry Merryman, an emeritus professor at Stanford University, lamented the growth of cultural nationalism, which keeps many important art objects sequestered in "dead storage," like the 30,000 objects unearthed in Greece during preparations for the 2004 Olympics.

Like the fabled Japanese soldiers who stayed in foxholes in remote South Pacific islands years after the end of World War II because they didn't know the conflict was over, opponents of the move of the Barnes Foundation to the Benjamin Franklin Parkway battle on. Yes, the Barnes litigation, now nearly a decade old, refuses to go away. This even as the Barnes was preparing for a huge opening Saturday, and as hundreds of journalists from around the nation and the world swarmed its galleries Wednesday for an advance look.

Can we all get along? — Rodney King   The remarkable art collection of the late Albert C. Barnes has been moved to a new, more appropriate home within the city that will allow thousands more visitors to see it than could have at its former suburban location. This should be a time of celebration. And yet, some want to continue fighting the civil war over moving the art that finally had to be resolved by the courts. It's hard for the move's opponents to get over what transpired, but it's time for them to work just as hard to see that Dr. Barnes' vision is adhered to as much as possible in his collection's new abode.