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5 Ways to Engage Your Kids in Art and History

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5 Ways to Engage Your Kids in Art and History

By Traci L. Slatton

girl sitting in an art museumWe (parents) want them (kids who know everything about instant messaging and the latest celebrity rehab, but who run screaming from museums and art books) to grow up knowing about more than Wii and the Xbox. We aspire for them to become literate, cultured people who can say something meaningful about Michelangelo’s Pieta and Degas’ dancers.

My husband is a classical figurative sculptor, and I have a passion for Renaissance art that led me to write a historical novel set in Renaissance Florence. So we have been determined to instill some love of art in our four children, despite their resistance. Here are some of our strategies.

  1. Make a game out of a museum trip. Go to the gift shop first, and let each child select four or five postcards. Then hunt through the museum to find all the paintings or sculptures shown on the cards. The first to find all of his objets d’art wins. But they all get treats at the end.
  2. Turn holiday meals into mini art salons. This works better in the winter, when we’re indoors. At summer cookouts, there’s too much else that’s intriguing. Not even the appearance of Leonardo da Vinci himself, resurrected and in the flesh, would engage a kid when cheeseburgers sizzle on the grill and sprinklers splutter on the lawn. But at Thanksgiving, for example, each person has to bring a poem, or a picture or printout of a painting or sculpture to the table. Before I serve the first course, we each read our poem or show the picture and talk about why we chose it. My kids like the attention, and they like being the teacher for the moment.
  3. Have a family culture night each week, and let each child in turn lead the weekly discussion. Assign a topic, such as Impressionist Painters or Robert Frost’s poetry. Older children can choose their topic, perhaps arising from a homework assignment. This also capitalizes on kids’ innate love of attention and being the leader. Thursday night is usually our family dinner night, and while the older three of the four girls in our blended family spend a lot of time discussing mascara and hot guys, they also try to find something interesting to say about Charles Dickens or Gustave Courbet.
  4. Give them a get-out-of-jail-free card. If the girls spontaneously engage in a cultural activity, like perusing an art book that’s not assigned at school, or watching a television documentary about World War II or the life of Chagall, they may get a free “pass.” My kids do the boneheaded things all kids do, and they love this, especially when they haven’t cleaned their room in two months and are growing non-CDC-approved life forms in old pizza boxes (not the kind of culture we advocate). Note: this is best used for minor mischief. When my daughter got drunk at age 16, not even a four-hour discourse on Cimabue and Giotto could have gotten her off the hook. Responsible behavior means responsible behavior.
  5. Find an artist nearby and take your kids on a studio visit. Many artists enjoy having visitors to witness their process, and seeing a live person passionately engaged in artistic endeavor is the sneakiest way to spark a young mind. A painter in love with his art, or a musician in love with his instrument, is a thrilling inspiration. It’s best if the artist is at least semi-successful so the kids see the business acumen that goes along with a thriving career in the arts. After all, they will have to earn a living one day.

It’s not a perfect system, built as it is mostly on attention-based bribery and cajolery. And truly, the best way to teach kids to seek high culture, as with any other value, is for parents to embrace it themselves. That’s a tall order when we’re beset with carpooling to soccer games, overseeing homework, cooking, housecleaning, jobs, and the need to sleep a few hours each night. But with love, tolerance, and a sense of humor, we can encourage our kids to appreciate beautiful art.

FROM: new jersey family, february 2010.

 
IMMORTAL en francais, and Two great new blog posts
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IMMORTAL en francais, and Two great new blog posts

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IMMORTAL en francais

IMMORTAL en francais, and Two great new blog posts

Voila, IMMORTEL

What an awesome cover! I love it. It reminds me of 1940’s pulp sci-fi, a genre I sorely miss. Reminds me of the juicy fun covers of Edgar Rice Burroughs books, when I used to save up money from my allowance and my paper route to buy books. To the French illustrator: my compliments!

Certainly, my French translator did an amazing and meticulous job of translation. He kept emailing me with questions until he really grokked everything I was trying to say. So, for all you French speakers: Buy this book!

The journey of this novel has been an extraordinary gift. The most interesting people respond to the book. Sometimes they contact me, sometimes they don’t.

Laura Faeth, herself the noted author of the visionary memoir I Found All the Parts: Healing the Soul through Rock ‘n’ Roll, recently emailed to tell me that she’d enjoyed the book. Her comments were thoughtful and she asked if she could send questions for me to answer for her blog, Rock ‘n’ Reincarnation. “Yes, please!” I replied.

Laura’s questions were intriguing, as expected from a close reader with a unique and self-aware perspective. Her deep sense of the soul of mysticism informs her writing. She posted my replies… So take a look at Rock ‘n’ Reincarnation.

Then sometimes something about Immortal pops up on the internet, unexpected and delightful. I set up google alerts to notify me, and something fun came through: a great review on The Bookworm’s Library. A reader named Lisa posted a review: “This is a great, unexpected treasure of a story that I came across, while I was looking for something else in the library recently…. This book offers a tremendous historical fiction of a fascinating time in history….This story is an amazing read… We are challenged to find that the most important thing in this life is the true nature of the self… I loved this book, this one is a great read!”

Lisa wrote several paragraphs. Like Laura, Lisa read passionately and thought carefully. It’s a blessing and a joy to have such readers.

So, thank you to Laura and to Lisa, and take a peek at the blogs…

Rock ‘n’ Reincarnation and also Sound of your Soul by Laura Faeth

The Bookworm’s Library which seems to be by AbbyW, Lisa, and Nikki.
A visit to Sabin Howard’s studio, from Adam Matano’s blog
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A visit to Sabin Howard’s studio, from Adam Matano’s blog

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My husband Sabin Howard is an excellent cook. Caroline Myss might say it arises out of the artist archetype he inhabits. Regardless, I am the happy recipient of his delicious Italian edibles (most of which come with rosemary, now my favorite spice).
There is only one problem, and no, it’s not the extra 5 pounds I carry on my small frame since we got together. Okay, 10 pounds, but I’ve decided to pretend that it’s only 5.
The problem is that he is the messiest cook imaginable. Yes, his shrimp scampi is delectable, to die for… He buys the fresh shrimp, when he can get them, and shells them himself. He heats the butter and garlic together in a small pan with a few onion bits for added zing and bakes them together with the shrimp until the salt-and-peppered white and pink crustaceans are the perfect hot succulence….
But the kitchen looks like a cyclone hit it. Slicks of olive oil glisten on every surface: refrigerator, cabinets, counters… How does a man with singularly excellent eye-hand co-ordination get McCormick’s steak seasoning on the ceiling?
“Sweetie,” I say, “I’ve invented this new and wondrous process. When I cook, I clean up as I go along.”
Sabin gives me that blank stare as if I’ve grown a second head and am speaking Martian. Now, I contend that I do have 1/3 alien DNA, but my English is at least as good as my Martian, and I take care to enunciate clearly when I speak with him.
I try another tack. “Honey bunch, there’s no cleaning fairy. When you do this,” I gesture at the piles of dirty dishes everywhere, “I HAVE TO CLEAN IT!”
Again the blank stare. Maybe I will try Martian, he might be more receptive to that tongue.
But in the midst of our on-going domestic skirmishes, and my sense of him as the man who lies diagonally across the bed so I have to sleep all squinched up on a tiny triangle, something else comes in. A reminder that he’s more than my sweet, sexy, maddening husband.
Sabin Howard is the greatest living sculptor of male nudes.
It’s pretty intense when that realization strikes. Few of us can say we’re the greatest living anything. I try to be the greatest living Traci L. Slatton I can be, and most of the time I don’t live up to that.
A talented young artist went to visit Sabin in his studio. His name is Adam Matano and he’s entering his senior year at the Lyme Academy. He left uplifted and inspired, as does anyone who visits Sabin’s studio. I don’t think there’s been anything like Sabin’s studio for a few centuries. Matano took with him his friend Kristi Kinsella, who took the photos, and who wrote, “To be a guest in Sabin Howard’s sculpture studio was to be influenced by the magical art of living.”
Sabin’s heroic scale APOLLO, which is nearing completion, is the ultimate expression of this magical art. In my opinion, and that of a well-known art critic, it’s the finest standing male nude since the David.
The question, then, is: should I stop hassling him to clean up after himself in the kitchen?
Social Questions
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Social Questions

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Last night at a pre-Sundance party in NYC I had the great good fortune of meeting the talented and impressive Anthony Whyte, whose work is being made into a movie.

He was there with his business partner Jason Claiborne, who runs Augustus publishing, “Where Hip Hop literature begins,” and fellow author Erick S. Gray.

They were an intriguing trio. Whyte has a background in the armed forces, as did my dad, so we had that to discuss, as well as books and movies.

This morning I did some googling around and learned that Whyte had trouble getting his first novel published. He then self-published, and people were so hungry for his message and his platform that he sold several thousand books quickly. Of course then a publisher jumped on the bandwagon, bought the rights, and republished… to sell over a hundred thousand copies. Pretty good! Whyte mentioned none of this to me; he was classy and unassuming, and left it to me to discover his story.

We talked about Zora Neale Hurston, author of the classic THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD. I remembered reading how Hurston had ended her life working in a library, and as a maid. It’s distressing that she died in obscurity, enduring financial struggles, when she’d written one of the masterworks of American literature. It left me thinking again about some questions that my oldest daughter had posed to me, over a year ago, when we discussed an African American Literature class she had taken: How did we in the U.S. create an underclass that left an entire group of people disenfranchised, struggling to find and authenticate their voice?

Is it enough that we have elected Obama as president? Is it enough that brilliant minds like Whyte, Claiborne and Gray are not accepting the status quo regarding their work, but are going out and creating new opportunities?

What does it take to create a truly equal society based on the hard work and merit of the individual, without regard to race, gender, sexual preference, and religion?

I hope none of these questions are offensive. I don’t know if they are politically correct or incorrect. They are the musings of a basically white woman of mixed genetic heritage who can not document her Native American ancestry because records were lost during the Trail of Tears. I’m just a mom with smart, irreverent kids, who ask good questions and expect me to engage them honestly.

And what else about the party? It was too much fun for the responsible parent I am, and included me introducing myself to a famous TV/movie actor who now believes I am sketchy. Because I did make a sketchy introduction, and he was far more gracious to me than I deserved. But I had to sally up to him with my big, tipsy grin–if only to be able to text my kids that I’d met him.

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The Art of Life: How and Why to Look at Sculpture by Traci L. Slatton & Sabin Howard

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The Art of Life: How and Why to Look at Sculpture

by Traci L. Slatton & Sabin Howard

My husband Sabin Howard (www.sabinhoward.com) and I are writing a book about sculpture together. He is a working classical figurative sculptor–think Michelangelo–and I am NOT a PhD.

I want to write this book precisely because I am not a PhD. I want to write it for the purest reason: because I love sculpture and it enhances life and I want to share this passion, and its uplifting effect, with everyone. Sculpture is too beautiful, too innately healing, too richly resonant of what it actually means to be human, to be monopolized by a few people with advanced degrees.

I stand for the democratization of art. This is precisely why I have such a strong aversion to post-modern art, which, with its emphasis on ugliness and alienation, has begged to be rejected by the ordinary person and embraced by the few who either 1, make money off it, or 2, get a PhD out of it.

I am here to tell you: art is not dead. Neither is God, for that matter. There’s a burdgeoning movement that is rediscovering both. Beauty, too.

Why do I call this book ‘The art of life’? Simple: when you pause and breathe and take in a sculpture, it brings you back into alignment with your deepest core self. It renews your Self. It deepens your experience of this moment now, of the presence, and Presence, in this perfectly imperfect moment of space-time. And isn’t that the practice of the art of life? It is for me.

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Post Modern Irony isn’t worth the toilet paper to wipe it off our collective tushie…

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Post Modern Irony isn’t worth the toilet paper to wipe it off our collective tushie…

A sub-title could be, “How to make money off people who are afraid to appear stupid.”

There is an art movement afoot. It is a movement to bring back values to art. It is a movement to bring artistry back into art, artistry founded first on an aesthetic of beauty and truth, second on real craftsmanship, and third on an extraordinary grounding in, and comprehension of, the history of art and the great, seminal problems of form that were last faced with integrity by the likes of Gauguin. By “craftsmanship” I mean years of training, apprenticeship, focus, and hard work.

An artist should be better trained than a lawyer before he or she starts selling his creations.

The art movement is tentatively called “the new realists.” My husband Sabin Howard is one of them. There’s an off-shoot called “the slow art movement,” patterned on the “slow food movement,” which affirms the quality of food and the dining experience in a restaurant that doesn’t take shortcuts but takes the real time required to make the ultimate reduction, for example.

You can eat at MacDonalds, if you wish–but we all know it’s going to make you sick.

Speaking of MacDonalds. We’ve all been victimized by the scam artists of post-modernism. One hundred years ago, Marcel Duchamp did us all a disservice by foisting a urinal on us. Okay, for 2 seconds, there’s a surprising juxtaposition, a shock. Intellectual chicanery. But “they” are still doing urinals, one hundred years later. Shock value is over, guys. I guess it’s just hard to leave the ponzi scheme.

All these post modernist pieces that have garnered acclaim–Piss Christ, Dung Madonna, anything by Julian Schnabel–they have a few seconds of shock value. And nothing else. They have no sub-stratum of meaning or value, no connection to a historical continuum and the crucial dilemmas of composition and structure and light, to rest on. HOWEVER, art critics, PhDs, and museum curators like post modernist pieces because they can blather on about how important they are and RACK UP SALES. Folks, it’s about money–scam art–not real art.

Koons worked at the Met and saw how the trend was going. He’s a smart businessman, I’ll gladly give him that.  But he’s no artist, and he’s not creating art. And not just because he doesn’t actually make the stuff, he hires NY Academy students and kids in Italy to do it, either. (I hear he pays them $15 – $18 an hour.) It’s because the expensive chotchki’s he’s putting out there aren’t art.

Is it big business? Yes, but so was Bernie Madoff.

I congratulate Mary Boone and that ilk on their rat-like street cunning; I can admire a pickpocket with the best of them. They created a movement that they were able to perpetrate on people who were afraid to say, “The emperor has no clothes.” So many people have been afraid to denounce this crap for the crap that it is because those gallery owners and PhD students could BLAH BLAH BLAH them under the table. No one wants to look ignorant. And boy oh boy them salesmen and dissertation wonks can really talk! But the impact of visual art is visceral. The point is–the silent truthful ones weren’t ignorant. They were being railroaded by mercenaries.

Yes, your five year old kid can do something equally worthy.

There are no masterpieces of post modern art because the stuff isn’t worth the cardboard, dung, condoms, or lucite case that are used to make it. It’s ugly and valueless. The banal is only worth about five seconds of our time; Marcel Duchamp took up those five seconds. The fact that the National Endowment for the Arts funded this junk on the basis of freedom of expression is one of the great idiocies of our time.

Freedom of expression does not validate the ugly, the meaningless, the valueless. It’s still junk. It’s just junk that the NEA funded–to the shame of the USA.

Specifically, post modern art lacks beauty and truth. It lacks transformational power. It lacks the capacity to vault us out of the coma of our everyday life into a state of heightened awareness, heightened consciousness, greater compassion for the human condition, increased seeking for what is higher. Yes, it makes money for the brokers and museums who pawn it off on people. (I heard that the director of the Brooklyn Museum got a kickback for showing some of the junk; can’t say if it’s true, but it was told to me by an art critic who runs a foundation in Manhattan.)

Look for the new realists. Look for the guys like my husband Sabin Howard, and I guess Jacob Collins is one of them, and I really love John Morra’s work, who are taking the long road around to create something meaningful and real, something that addresses art with integrity. Something founded on an aesthetic of beauty and truth. They may not be the most popular people around, but hey, the doctor who told everyone to wash their hands before delivering babies got railroaded out of medicine. Go look at Frederick Hart’s work on the National Cathedral. I admire Burt Silverman’s portraits, too. Check out Daniel Sprick. I personally find Judy Fox’s sculptures cartoonish, but they’re cute. Worth looking at. She seems to be engaged in it and she’s competent.

Go find the artists who have studied their crafts for years, who are engaged in what art means on a daily basis. They’re there. One thing is for sure: your five year old can’t do anything REMOTELY like what they do.

These are the guys who deserve millions of dollars. I am convinced they will reach those heights–Michelangelo died a millionaire–and that the tide will turn as people get sick of meaninglessness and search again for values, meaning, beauty, and truth. We’ll find the Koons balloons in the garbage where they belong.

Last note: my husband looked at this blog and exclaimed, I’m not a realist. Then he said, Oh lord, they’re going to sue you. Just to clarify, this blog contains my personal opinions.