A New Beginning: The Evolving Relationship between Artist and Community

“A New Beginning” is a comic depicting the inner dialogue and challenging journey of my experience during the first semester of my studies in the M.A. in Community Arts Program (MACA), Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore, Maryland. This essay is meant to provide context for the reader since the imagery and text are both metaphorical and symbolic in nature. I wanted to create an equally personal and universal piece that would be accessible and available for general reference, while still honestly portraying the challenges I faced during the summer of 2007.

Page 2 of "A New Beginning," Christina Ralls' comic describing her experience with MACA. Click here to enlarge

My teaching experience at my summer internship site proved to be both difficult and rewarding for our team (which consisted of two MACA graduate students including myself and one high-school intern). Our site was a library and learning-resource center that served the many communities surrounding the building. Our students were aged seven to 12, and came from different backgrounds and neighborhoods. This made our placement unique compared to many of our colleagues’ sites, which were mostly concentrated in one Baltimore neighborhood. The site’s summer program consisted of math and literacy classes for our students in the morning, and then our art class after lunch and recess in the afternoon. Our class would huddle into the smallest of the three classrooms for art making after playing outside in the humid weather of Baltimore’s summer. The compilation of our youth’s efforts during the summer weeks would be exhibited in an outdoor gallery setting in July at Artscape, Baltimore’s three-day-long arts festival. It is an enormous event that brings both local and national artists, musicians and performers together in the city, so the youths’ participation was a very special opportunity. Our students would also have the opportunity to teach an art workshop to festival attendees, based on their own work during the program.

We entered our first class with enthusiasm and many fantastic ideas about how the summer would evolve, and we met with frustration. Our first lesson for the youth was to make self-portraits that consisted of silhouettes using collage materials. The objective was for the youth to express their identities through symbols, words and visuals that they felt defined who they were. It seemed like a simple enough activity and would provide us with a way to gauge their interests and personalities for future reference when designing lesson plans. It proved to be chaos, though. For example, several of the students didn’t know how to handle scissors properly. Also, many of the students’ pieces did not reflect the objective of our project, but we did not feel at that time that we had the right to interfere with their creativity and point them in the “right” direction. Another mistake was to assume that the collages would take up the entire two-hour period. They didn’t take that long and we didn’t have a backup plan for children who finished early. These are only a few of our initial mistakes!

The task before us was not what we had expected. Developing appropriate lesson plans that were simple enough for the younger students but challenging enough for the older students was far from easy. The cognitive, creative and motor-skill abilities of a seven-year-old vary greatly from those of a 12-year-old. Both my MACA partner and I had taught inner-city youth before, but they were different situations in terms of the ages of the youth and the location. We could not assume what worked for those groups would work for our current class.

We had numerous discipline issues with our students that slowed progress toward our goals. My team was conflicted because we wanted to provide an experimental kind of instruction, one that would not rely on the rules of a traditional teaching realm. We just wanted as our overarching goal for the children to enjoy themselves and discover their own creative potential that would nurture their sense of identity. We did not realize at first how important firm and sometimes hard discipline builds trust in the classroom and how the site’s other programs relied on these more traditional methods. We had to make a lot of compromises with our original beliefs if our lesson plans were to be successful.

The Artscape exhibit and workshop that we needed to accomplish as our end result seemed like a distant reality and we were losing time to resolve our conflicts and complete a collaborative project. There were classes where we thought that we had everything under control and were improving, and then the next class would prove us wrong. There were several times where I felt we were losing the youth’s attention and interest due to all the distractions that were inadvertently permitted in the classroom. Feelings of discouragement and doubt seemed to linger in the room even when things were going smoothly, and I found it difficult at times to measure our. We were literally riding a rollercoaster. The same analogy could have applied to my unsteady relationship to the MACA program.

Initially, I didn’t welcome this pressure, and I debated leaving the program on many occasions. I struggled with many questions: Why am I here? Is this the right path to pursue in my life right now? Am I confident enough to be a supportive and successful teacher? Am I failing to communicate with my teammates? Perhaps my expectations were too high. Many times I was frustrated with the results of our classes and sometimes I felt I was too young and unrealized as a person to handle such work. I had to let go of many previously held beliefs in order to go on. We even had to remove one of our younger students because her behavior was uncontrollable and disruptive to the other students’ work. That was one of the hardest lessons learned because I really wanted everyone to participate and embrace the opportunity, but class behavior did improve as a whole after the student’s absence.

It was the tremendous support of my classmates, the MICA faculty and our site supervisors that kept me going here. Friends and colleagues continued to insist that I was growing as an artist, and that I was going to be a stronger individual because of this strenuous journey. Having people to talk to about such complex subjects, who actually understood what I was going through, made a significant difference in how I perceived our situation. Despite our struggles and discipline issues, we could see a gradual sense of community growing within the classroom. Our successes, no matter their size, moved us forward.

In time, my team learned the importance of staying true to our words and cultivating respect among our students. We also refined our lesson plans through practice and were able to hold the youth’s interest through creative activities that we catered to their interests. These activities included designing comic books, sculpting energy-efficient papier-mâché cars, making a ritual out of drawing everyday in their personal sketchbooks, etc. The youth’s personalities began to shine in their comic characters, the vibrant colors and decorations they used to adorn their cars, the energy and emotion in their paint-splattered t-shirts, and the varied gesture drawings contained in their sketchbooks. These projects could have been much more collaborative if we had been able to establish discipline earlier on, but we came to accept our shortcomings as lessons learned. We were much more prepared for our remaining days with them, and our future challenges elsewhere.

Our class displayed true leadership and compassion when practicing their comic-character workshop with the younger children at our site, and they repeated this at their Artscape workshop, where collaboration finally played a role in our plans.. There was a sense of ownership and pride after Artscape and you could see the influence of art in their proud smiles and eager excitement during our last few days together. One of the most beautiful results of the summer was the making of unlikely friendships. Some of the youth who clearly displayed dislike for each other in the beginning of the summer were now communicating and enjoying each other’s company. It was at this point that I felt at peace. We had accomplished our goals in the short amount of time we had (five weeks). I knew at the very end of this trying semester that I was in the right place and am ready to learn more about the communities of Baltimore, the people I work with and myself. I may not be fully prepared for a teaching role just yet, but now I am at least more aware of expectations and my limitations.

I created a comic that describes the lessons I learned during my first graduate semester, and depicts a transformation including my expectations and values as a practicing community artist. I entered a new world when I began my journey with MACA, and after this summer reflection I can now gladly accept these new challenges — and joys.

The comic may be found at http://www.mica.edu/maca/reflectioncr.cfm

This essay is part of the Community Arts Convening & Research Project, 2008, funded by a Nathan Cummings Foundation grant to the Maryland Institute College of Art.  The essay was reviewed and selected by the project's Editorial Board: Ron Bechet, Xavier University of Louisiana; Lori Hager, University of Oregon; Marina Gutierrez, Cooper Union; Ken Krafchek, Maryland Institute College of Art; Sonia Mañjon, California College of the Arts; Amalia Mesa-Bains, California State University Monterey Bay; Paul Teruel, Columbia College Chicago; and Stephani Woodson, Arizona State University.

Christina Ralls received a B.A. in Animation with an Art History minor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and an M.A. in Community Arts from MICA. She currently works as community artist in residence at University of Baltimore through the Community Arts Corps. Community art projects she has coordinated include an interactive sculpture entitled "Traum Baum" (collaboration with Katharine Better, The Baltimore Museum of Art, Fall 2006), and the "Baltimore '68 Riots and Rebirth" Mosaic Monument (University of Baltimore, Spring 2008).

Original CAN/API publication: October 2008