Artists Shouldn’t Starve, a new club awaiting formal approval to official status, hosted its second workshop of a number of planned events on Thursday, April 3 in the Redfern Arts Center’s Room 320 meeting space.
The workshop focused on art education, specifically on how to become an art teacher, and included a curriculum breakdown covering age-appropriate art projects for different grade levels. A brief presentation was given at the start of the workshop before participants were given the opportunity to work on art projects specific to the grade levels they were interested in teaching.
The workshop and presentation was run by junior and Artists Shouldn’t Starve Vice President Caitlin Balestrieri, who said she wanted to give artistically inclined students the opportunity to consider a career in art education.
“I personally have wanted to be an art educator since late middle school, early high school, and I know that a lot of people here don’t know that they could become an art educator,” said Balestrieri.
According to Balestrieri, the purpose of workshops and presentations like hers are meant to give students insight into art career fields they want to learn more about.
“With a lot of the different topics that we cover, we ask people what they want to learn more about and do research into it,” added Balastrieri. “We try to do our best to help the people in our club learn more about how to do what they want to do.”
Balestrieri’s art education workshop echoed the purpose of the newly formed club, which began operating during the current spring semester According to junior and Artists Shouldn’t Starve co-president Logan Nicholson, who co-founded the club with Balestrieri, Artists Shouldn’t Starve is meant to be a place where KSC art students can engage with the career-focused side of art.
“A lot of art students have been saying for a while that they don’t feel like they get the full, proper ability to leave the college and get a job in the arts,” said Nicholson. “For many students who are only studying art, that fear and that inability to feel like they can go out and get a job outside of the school, or have the information on how those jobs actually work can be pretty depressing.”
“Me and our Vice President Caitlin [Balestrieri] were talking about this, and we decided to try and make a club about this where students who feel comfortable with their information about the art world outside of the classroom can help teach their peers in how these fields work,” added Nicholson.
Junior Emily Clark attended the event and chose to participate in the curriculum option for preschool and younger elementary-focused educators.
“I joined this on a whim because I wanted to see what kind of art you can make as a job,” said Clark. “I think it’s interesting that lots of people are discouraged from majoring in art because of the job prospects, but this presentation proved that wrong.”
Ryan Pacheco can be contacted at
rpacheco@kscequinox.com
