Welcome to ELAN’s Blog Salon! All week we’ll be featuring articles from ELAN members around the theme of “My Life in Art”. Members will talk about their lives as artists, arts administrators and arts supporters.
Let’s enjoy some art with a poem by ELAN member Lydel Matthews about her experience as a museum art educator!
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Art is powerful in so many ways. Some use it to express, transgress, decompress, or coalesce. My experience working as a museum art educator served me well as both a teacher and a student in the field of arts education and administration. I learned how to provide toddlers with a safe space for discovery, how to guide elementary students in asking questions and making connections, how to inspire young adults to be confident and articulate, and how to compel adults to take risks and open up. In the three years I taught at the Wiregrass Museum of Art in southern Alabama, each person I met – young and old, timid and bold – had his or her own unique relationship with art. Every day was filled with possibility and sometimes it was as exhausting as it was fulfilling. Although it may sound strange, I always looked forward to Tuesday morning staff meetings where a group of less than ten people would get together to discuss the basics of museum life – exhibits, programming, budgets, strategic planning, and facility requests. There was one particular late Monday night when I couldn’t sleep, and so I wrote this poem to share with the museum staff the next morning.
Sometimes I feel like a color wheel,
my green thumb having all the fun.
Which primary will the pen start to run?
Red enough to fight, blue from fright.
On second thought, a purple passage,
tiny white flowers yielding orange massive.
Sometimes adding white to adjust my tint,
weary of black, becoming easily stint.
A color-blind spectrum,
you blush as I let you in.
Color-fast, vivid, mood shifts livid;
this lackluster hue, a tinge overdue.
Sometimes pale, frequently bright,
wave lengths reflect a luminous insight.
Whether adjacent or complimentary,
mixing emerges as rudimentary.
In the life of a color wheel,
you never know just how to feel.
Lydel is a graduate student in Arts Administration with a concentration in Community Arts Management. She has a BA in Art Education from the University of Florida. Her research interests are in the trade relationships between indigenous artisan cooperatives in Latin America and ethically minded consumers in North America.
