Introduction and Acknowledgments

How it began

About 18 months ago, I started to think about individuals and families and how they could bring more art into their lives. I saw that the Center for Latter-day Saint Arts was uniquely positioned to serve as an arts educator, but my thoughts went broadly: everyone, no matter what you believe or whether you believe at all, could use a dose of art. The Center had the platform and distribution to do something about it, access to scholars, the confidence of artists, a growing audience of curious learners, and the beginnings of a global reach. I wondered whether an engaging and enlightening course on visual art that mostly used LDS artists as examples might fill in some of those gaps.

When I began looking at online art education resources that some of my friends used, I felt like much of the content was disconnected from the actual world of art today. The more I looked into it, the more frustrated I became. I found myself asking how anyone learns about art.

The word “education” is connected to children in my mind, but I was also interested in finding ways to talk about art with teens and adults. Although everybody draws as a kid, nearly all of us stop. I stopped. I wanted to know why.

I was interested in more than just the encouragement to make art, however. Why don’t we know how to talk about it, either? On many levels, it made little sense to me. We are surrounded by visual images—saturated, really— but we struggle to express our reactions to art and objects with much clarity. That goes for the convoluted art-speak of scholars, too. Meanwhile, we can read novels and gather in book groups to discuss literature at length, we talk about food as if we were all food critics, we can go to movies and speak in depth about what we’ve just seen like we’re qualified voters for the Oscars. Is there something about visual art that’s just too hard to talk about? Are we destined to repeat the old, tired trope, forever, “I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like”?

Finding Help

I sought the expertise of Brent Wilson. Brent is an artist, but he is also a retired professor and one who served as the head of Art Education at Penn State University. He’s an international expert on Art Education, an author of books on children’s drawings, a frequent lecturer on education topics, and an advisor to the Getty Museum and to the U.S. Department of Education. His book, The Quiet Evolution: Changing the Face of Arts Education (published by the Getty) is the codification of Discipline-based Art Education and the result of years of study and national seminars with art teachers in the United States. Discipline-based Art Education (DBAE) was a way of dividing art education into different lenses for classroom purposes: Art Creation, Art History, Art Criticism, and Aesthetics. I poured over Brent’s book, hungrily. This framework of topical divisions became the basic architecture for Art at Home.

Brent became a trusted advisor and sounding board, particularly in my initial writing about how and why children learn to draw. I am unspeakably grateful to Brent, who also provided hands-on examples of his own drawing interactions with children at church and at home. This online course would not exist without him, although I am not going to say that he would agree with everything I’ve written.

Currently, the U.S. National Core Arts Standards (for Dance, Media Art, Music, Theatre, and Visual Arts) are grouped with the following headings: Creating; Performing/Presenting/Producing; Responding; and Connecting. Ultimately, I became comfortable with the vocabulary of Art Creation, Art History, Art Criticism, and Aesthetics (I call them Create, Study, Interpret, and Value) because I saw those tools used in real life by artists, art historians, art critics, and philosophers. I am confident in their usefulness although I readily acknowledge that for classroom discussions, the newer Standards highlight conversations and issues, purposes that are particularly timely and important today. For better or worse, though, the methods and approaches of the chapters of Art at Home are mine.

Changing My Mind

As I’ve learned and ruminated on the issues at hand, my thinking about art has changed more than I imagined it could. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, the much-decorated American historian and author, challenged me regarding the bias of museums in favor of fine art at the exclusion of objects. This was backed up by Brontë Hebdon, a PhD candidate at the New York Institute of Fine Arts, who told me that young scholars today—they are tomorrow’s curators and museum directors—are trained to examine art much differently than the generations before them did. Now, the major emphasis of study is the social ramifications of art and objects. The approach of art history regarding timelines and their accompanying -isms is mostly discarded. In my writing, I attempted to emulate the inclusiveness of this profound scholarly shift with all the repercussions it brings.

I did some soul searching: Was it proper for me, for example, to continue to accept the Modernist manifesto—the bedrock principle of my scholarly training in other artistic fields—that innovation (“the new”) is paramount in art? I spent a lot of time mulling over big issues like this one, too: Who decides what is included as “important” in history? Also: What is art and what is it for?

As I began to share portions of the project with others seeking their feedback, I realized that without planning it, all of my advisors other than Brent were women. This coincided with the emergence of the #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter movements, and they instilled in me an urgency to scrutinize the ways I look at art, regarding gender and race. I’m not the only one reappraising the art scene. As I neared completion of the project, Laura Allred Hurtado, the director of the Utah Museum of Contemporary art and a close friend, accompanied me through the top-to-bottom rehanging of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, and the two of us spent an entire day pouring over every curatorial choice, each exhibition label, their inclusions and omissions, and the shift in the museum’s entire narrative and, seemingly, its institutional purpose. Doing so, I felt like I was dancing through an earthquake. The experience was unsettling and energizing at the same time.

Today’s vocabulary is different, but its focus is really different. The world has changed, and the way we look at art has changed. All of this is more than merely adjusting to the zeitgeist of the day, and that is a wonderful thing. To my mind, it’s a simple matter of being comprehensive and playing fair. This course, if I’d written it even three years ago, would have been largely different.

Acknowledgments and Thanks

I owe many people my gratitude. I say thanks to the children who shared with me their drawings, scholars and museum professionals who drafted notes and provided examples of their favorite works, parents who provided access to the art and heirlooms in their homes, artists who made contributions specifically for this project, and families who captured videos and photos of themselves learning about art for Art at Home.

I also wish to thank the Center for Latter-day Saint Arts—its executive committee, boards, and donors—for their financial support in this project’s creation. We were fortunate and honored to receive a grant from the Sorenson Legacy Foundation which became a crucial partner in developing video content for Art at Home and for its marketing. Artists and scholars wrote letters of recommendation to foundations on our behalf, showing their faith in my vision, probably more than I deserved at the time. Thank you. Emily Doxford, the Communications Committee chair at the Center became an early enthusiast and supporter of the project, and her advocacy is very meaningful and motivational to me. Rachel Ruechert generously proofread the manuscript and offered elegant solutions to my meandering sentences. Ashlee Whitaker brought practical recommendations to make the course more engaging and simpler. James Ransom created the incredible photographs that are the lessons’ visual markers.

My wife Marcia was a constant support, as ever. After decades of looking at art together and filling our lives and home with it, she and I learned about and wrestled with these evolving philosophical concepts as a duo.

To every one of these people, I feel personally indebted and endlessly grateful.

One last thing

In many ways, I’ve prepared for the writing of Art at Home my entire life, but there was one lesson for the project that I felt unqualified to write. On my to-do list of 40 lessons, I put one on the back burner for as long as I possibly could. Finally, when every other lesson was completed, I forced myself to tackle something that lays bare my biggest insecurity: I don’t know how to draw. The missing lesson for teens and adults was an introduction to making art. At the time, I was under quarantine for the COVID-19 pandemic. I took the city-mandated call to stay home to work through a course on learning to draw.

I practiced what I preached: art at home, indeed. I read a lot, drew a lot, and had a lot of fun. Learning to draw was a revelation much more profound than I expected it could be. I was absolutely no good when I started, and I’m certainly not great now, but my eyes have been opened, and my creative and critical mind unleashed.

Wherever you are on the spectrum of experience in art education, I have confidence that a thorough exploration of these 40 lessons has the power to change and improve your life. I wince writing that because it sounds so maudlin and hackneyed, but I know very few people who have mastered these four lenses of looking at art, and even if they are comfortable with their training and exposure to art, the recent seismic shifts in social awareness should make them feel in need of recalibration.

I know many children who stop drawing for the sole reason that they don’t have someone to help them bridge to a new skill to keep them going. But what if every child became comfortable drawing, talking about art history, interpreting art, and valuing it? What would that world look like?

I sense how it would affect a child, teen, or adult to take hold of these ideas and make them theirs/yours because I see the effect it has had on mine. We all need more tools to describe our engagement with the visual art and objects that surround us because they are part of our story. Art at Home is a 40-piece tool kit. I offer it as a way to fix what might be missing for you. There is much at stake. As one of my artist heroes, Robert Motherwell, once wrote, “Art is much less important than life, but what a poor life without it.”

Glen Nelson

New York City, April 4, 2020