COVID-19 may be keeping students at home, but it can’t keep them from producing art thanks to the innovative teaching of Shoreline’s Visual Arts faculty. Online since March of 2020, students and faculty alike have found new ways to experience, create, and share studio arts like painting, drawing, and ceramics in quarantine.
“The innovation of the faculty in transitioning to online learning has been inspiring,” said Mary Bonar, Program Manager for the Visual Arts department at Shoreline. “Ceramics students are learning everything from setting up a DIY home studio to techniques for hand-building ceramic forms using materials they have at home. And exhibitions for all arts have moved online to forums like Instagram.”
Art has always been a medium for helping people make sense of the times they live in, and the COVID-19 pandemic has been no different.
“Continuing to create art during the pandemic is supremely important, as it helps students find purpose and a sense of relevance,” said Zach Mazur, Visual Arts instructor. “The curriculum has adapted to online learning with the goal of helping students heal, gain visual literacy, and find purpose while also helping them adapt to a changing, online industry.”
“When we first moved to online teaching in winter 2020, everyone’s lives were so abruptly upended,” said Mazur. “Fellow instructor Gary Georger and I asked students to create art that responded to that by reimagining traditional fairytales within a COVID world, whatever that meant to them.” The resulting works were displayed in an Instagram gallery titled “Covid-19: A Fairytale Re-Interpreted”.
Students created pieces that fostered connection with their classmates. “Through their art, they were able to express their needs and experiences without coming out and saying them,” said Mazur. “Works explored things like depression, anxiety, and racial tensions. The class really bonded because they could see through each other’s art that they were living similar experiences. And if they weren’t living the same experiences, they were at least developing empathy for each other.”
As the pandemic continued into spring and the protests around Black Lives Matter dominated headlines, the cultural moments converged in an assignment called “Shelter in Place,” which asked students to create works reflecting their lives in that unique moment.
“As we’re being held back from the outside world, art is helping students to get out into the world by walking in someone else’s shoes, values, visions, and experience, which is one powerful way that art connects us,” said Mazur. “Some students portrayed the quiet, lonely scenes of life in lockdown, while others chose to go to the frontlines of protests and get tear-gassed. The pieces created out of that class demonstrated both how art was helping students through COVID by giving them purpose, as well as how art can represent a more honest view of events than news media.”
Works created through the “Shelter in Place” assignment will be displayed in a physical exhibition at Shoreline’s art gallery sometime in 2021. They’ll also be shown in an exhibit at WSU’s Jordan Schmitzer Museum of Arts in the fall of 2021.
Looking forward to 2021, the Fine Arts program continues to provide students with skills necessary in the modern world.
“We’re teaching visual literacy,” said Mazur, “which is vital in this increasingly visual world.”
“The trick for our online curriculum is helping students create works that are relevant to these times, that will be resume builders, that will help them grow as artists, and that will allow them to connect to the changing face of the industry, which is moving increasingly to an online environment,” said Mazur.
Faculty have already proven they’re up for the challenge. So is during a pandemic a good time to study art?
“Absolutely,” said Mazur. “When all is said and done, art is the unifier that helps us make sense of the world around us.”
Learn more about Fine Arts at Shoreline.