Art Teachers ... what should i do

November 5, 2006 4:43 PM

Should college art professors have an outside career in their field of arts aside from teaching?

Im a new young art teacher at a university. I went to gradschool and have had little time outside the academia world of art. Im beggining to wonder if it is important that i try to make a name for myself in the art world outside of academia. Is it necessary to be involved in the art world outside of acdemia to succeed as a teacher?

posted by matimer to education (18 comments total)

What do you mean by "succeed as a teacher"?
Your department should tell you what's required / expected to get tenure. Definitely speak to your head of department about this question. And see what other people in your department do.

If you mean something more nebulous, like whether having a reputation as an artist will help you teach students better, I'm not sure.
posted by LobsterMitten at 4:46 PM on November 5, 2006

what about success as an artist?
posted by pyramid termite at 4:46 PM on November 5, 2006

I know at least a couple of top tier schools who have a large number of art professors coming from professional backgrounds (this was a desired trait). As a teacher, you're probably fine without professional experience, but it may help you in terms of advancement in your career. Something to keep in mind.
posted by devilsbrigade at 4:50 PM on November 5, 2006

My dad was an art professor for 20 years. He worked as an artist (painter, mostly, but also as a printmaker and draftsman) that entire time, and then quit teaching to paint full-time in the mid-'80s. He also worked as a sign painter (his father's trade) and courtroom sketch artist when he was a teacher, too.
posted by scody at 4:53 PM on November 5, 2006

Is it necessary to be involved in the art world outside of acdemia to succeed as a teacher?

Think about the art teachers that really taught you stuff. Did THEY have an career outside of academia?
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 4:59 PM on November 5, 2006

Assuming you're in the same boat as me (adjunct professor in an art program (teaching at the same program I got my Masters)), you aren't teaching full-time. Spend some time working on your portfolio, get jobs that will get you connections in the field, (if applicable) work with other professors in your program.

I spend most of my time in residencies, working with other artists and trying my damndest to apply my professional work to what I do in class. While I plan on going back to school for a PhD, I don't expect my academic work to be the driving force in my applications, but the work I do outside of the program.

While there are plenty of teahers who rest on their laurels, the best ones are those who are still experimenting as much, or more so, than their students.
posted by tip120 at 5:02 PM on November 5, 2006

IMHO, the answer is that it might help slightly. (Although I know next to nothing about art, I am a junior in college, so I'm experienced with evaluating professors. ;) )

To me, the most important thing, by far, is how well a professor can get across what he's trying to say. Having held a job outside academia can help sometimes, but it's not the most important thing. For example, my current psychology professor is also a therapist/counselor, so when we have difficult grasping a concept, he's often able to give some real-world examples of how what we're learning about play out. At the same time, though, it's not everything... I've also had plenty of professors who worked in non-academic settings who gave completely unhelpful answers when asked for help.

The other way it could help is if your job helps you learn more about the subject matter. However, I'd hope that, as a professor, you're already pretty well-versed in your subject.

Long story short, it probably can't hurt, but I'd also doubt that you'd grow too significantly as a result.
posted by fogster at 5:27 PM on November 5, 2006

"Succeed as a teacher" could be interpreted two ways. One is how well you get paid and what the university thinks of your credentials. To that I say feh.

The other way is how well you can help a student draw out her skills and talent. How well you can help a student maximize their potential. IANAArtist but as an athlete, I know that my best coaches did not necessarily have great skills at the sport. They understood the fundamentals, the principles, and the techniques to help us help ourselves become better players and teammates. That is how to measure success as a teacher -- how well your students reach their potential.
posted by JohnnyGunn at 5:37 PM on November 5, 2006

Considering that most professors in other fields conduct research in their particular field, it would only make sense that an art professor be a practicing artist. Sure one could be busy mostly teaching, but it's important to continue learning and growing. The best way to do that is by continued practice.
posted by Aanidaani at 5:44 PM on November 5, 2006

A good teacher is just that: a good TEACHER. Teaching is a distinct skill, which means a brilliant scientist might be a lousy science teacher. He might also be a great teacher. The point is that brilliance (or mediocrity) in the field is not correlated in ability to teach that field. (Though you do have to understand the field.)

The key requirement of being a good teacher is recognizing that teaching is a distinct skill. You can't just "be" a good teacher; you have to work at being a good teacher. You have to work at it every day, just as athletes continually work out, even off-season. You have to lay in your bed at night and go over that day's class, thinking about what went right and what went wrong -- and how you can improve what went wrong.

In answer to your question, if you feel that working as an artist will improve you as a teacher, then work as an artist. If you feel like something else would improve your teaching ability, do that.

The key requirements of a teacher are (a) the ability to communicate clearly and evocatively; (b) the ability to improvise, in order to deal with classroom events that naturally unfold in real time; (c) the ability to "get" all different sorts of people with a wide range of learning styles; (d) the knack for creating productive learning environments -- which means setting up scenarios in which students discover things for themselves; (d) empathy; (e) patience; (f) the ability to submerge ego, because it's about the student learning the subject -- not about the student liking or being-entertained-by you; (g) An solid grasp of the subject-matter they are teaching.

Will working in the arts help you with any of these things? Maybe with the last one. Maybe there are other ways to achieve the last one.
posted by grumblebee at 5:54 PM on November 5, 2006

The ability to teach comes first but it can't hurt you to be a successful artist. The art teachers who taught me were clueless and I had zero respect for them, I often had to raise my hand to help them when they were stuck on certain subjects and me and a couple of other students basically ran away with the class. It was quite embarrassing. If you can at least take a grip of a class in a practical artistic sense then it might be helpful to you, if you gain some respect as an artist locally then it will pay dividends.
posted by fire&wings at 6:17 PM on November 5, 2006

As a former college art student, I can tell you in all honesty that it's really hard to respect an art teacher if they're not active in the field.
Part of teaching undergrad art students is teaching them about the experience that awaits them upon graduation. Our best teachers took us to the open-studio events that they were involved in, took us to visit their artist friends in NYC, could discuss with authority the current trends/phenomenon in the contemporary art world, and could give us first-hand-based advice on operating in the gallery scene.
Teaching undergraduate artists is as much about the formality of art as it is about how to function as a professional artist.
From your own description of your experience, if one of your students asked you how to survive as an artist, your only advice now could be, "Get a job teaching." For your own artistic growth as well as the strength and volume of your teaching vocabulary, you need to make a serious effort to get out into the art world. Otherwise, you're not as valuable an asset to your students as you could be. Without some time in the scene, you're just a technical instructor. Your students are going to want to know how to acheive some success outside the world of art academia and you're not going to have any answers for them.
posted by Jon-o at 6:22 PM on November 5, 2006

I agree with others that your teaching ability is largely unrelated to your professional success as an artist -- but of course there's a "but." Since you say you're at a university, I'm going to assume you teach graduate students, in which case your teaching role is slightly different than other posters have assumed so far.

The reason I say this is that many MFA programs are as (or more) important to students for their networking potential as for what they learn from the professors -- and their professors' ability to help them network is directly related to how keyed in they are to a professional network themselves.

So, *if* you teach graduate students whose goals are to become professional artists, then I think you might want to consider your responsibility to them as a professional mentor -- which is part of your role as their teacher.

caveat: I'm a professor (of art history, not art practice) in an art department that probably wouldn't hire you without some kind of promising career as an artist, though, so this advice might not be relevant to your current position. In which case the question becomes, are you going to stay there?

on preview: Jon-o correctly points out this isn't a concern entirely limited to grad students... many of whom come to grad school with professional experience behind them, with the explicit intention of widening their network.
posted by obliquicity at 6:33 PM on November 5, 2006

"Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach. Those who can't teach, become deans." - Thomas L Martin,

In all seriousness, I can't imagine why teaching something would preclude practising that same something. It doesn't necessarily follow that a teacher who is also an artist is a better teacher because of it. Some people cannot teach. But I doubt that doing both teaching and practising ones art would make you worse at either.

Do it. Keep the blade of your art honed and remember that skill doesn't come from practise alone.
(/drunken profundity)
posted by ninazer0 at 12:38 AM on November 6, 2006

A great idea for anybody reading this and thinking of teaching would be to start looking at faculty listings NOW, and read them often. Consider how many of them specify an active professional career as either a must or a plus. It's never too early to picture yourself applying for positions and get used to thinking about how you'll present yourself.
posted by allterrainbrain at 12:41 AM on November 6, 2006

Speaking as someone who went this same route after graduation (teaching art), I never had a doubt in my mind that I would work on my art as a career as well as my teaching of the subject. What I think you need to ask yourself is did you study art in order to become a teacher of art, or did you study art to become an artist ... or maybe both? When you can answer that question, you'll know which path you should take. I studied art to become a better artist, but I enjoyed teaching and passing on my skills, and it was a means to have a steady income while improving my own skills and attempting to make a name for myself in the art field.

I will say that the teachers I had who I gained the most from and respected the most were those who were actively pursuing their own artistic interests outside the classroom. The others, it felt like they were capable of teaching me skills (how to do a lithograph, how to fire clay, etc,) and did so well, but the classes lack some "spark" that I can't put my finger on exactly. They taught me how to create art, but they didn't necessarily teach me anything about what it means to be an artist or what it would be like to pursue that as a career.

As far as outside artistic experience of your own helping your teaching career, those teachers I had who worked as hard at their art as they did their teaching were the ones who excelled in their teaching career as well. Whether that actually had anything to do with their outside work or not, I don't know, but I would imagine it wouldn't hurt to try to build a name for yourself as an artist. As someone mentioned above, some schools won't even hire teachers who don't have something going on in their field outside the classroom.
posted by Orb at 5:02 AM on November 6, 2006

IANAVABIAAP (i am not a visual artist but i am a poet). my mfa program was most beneficial for me in the ways it taught me to look at myself as part of a community of writers rather than a lone poet at a desk. there's this romantic notion that great art is created in solitude, but i think it's more useful to see it as a collaboration with a greater tradition. so i don't see how you would be up on the most cutting edge ideas, or the arguments of the day, if you didn't pursue your own art (unless you took it upon yourself to write some really stellar critical work). i think that in some way you need to be connected to this greater network of artists in order to really help your students take their work to the next level.
posted by apostrophe at 7:42 AM on November 6, 2006

If you are an art historian or theoretician then it would be more important to be published rather be involved in making art. I would think that any succesful professor of art practice needs to do plenty of outside work of their own. They don't necessarily need to be a beacon of the art world but anything will help to get tenure.
posted by JJ86 at 8:07 AM on November 6, 2006