Manship Artists Residency’s support of Gloucester arts teachers began with their purchase of a Folly Cove Designer Acorn Press and its loan to the O’Maley Innovation Middle School in 2018. This loan was coordinated to complement Cape Ann Museum’s Folly Cove curriculum and Gloucester Education Foundation’s “Artistic Bridges” programming, which supports visiting artists in the schools like printmaker Mary Rhinelander. Manship then secured funding from the Gloucester Cultural Council and Mass Cultural Council, through the Gloucester Cultural Initiative, to supply better print-making equipment and materials for the classrooms, as well as frames and other hanging devices for use at the Arts Festival in 2019. Most of the banners for the Arts Festival that year featured the students’ Folly-Cove-Designer-style prints, demonstrating that extra high-quality work is produced when students and teachers receive the proper support to excel.
Manship also worked with then Gloucester Public School (GPS) Assistant Superintendent Gregg Bach to organize professional development workshops that offered opportunities for the teachers to develop their skills and knowledge. Perhaps the most important outcomes of their first gathering were the conversations and connections that resulted from the teachers finally coming together — many of the art teachers had never met their counterparts at other Gloucester schools.
Manship has offered four professional development days thus far for GPS visual arts teachers.
Programming has included:
-
- a visit to the Manship property in February 2020 in which they learned about Paul Manship and the Lanesville community of artists, which included Virginia Lee Burton and the Folly Cove Designers. The art teachers also decorated bowls for the Open Door’s Empty Bowl auction event to raise money for the local food pantry.
- a tour of Starfield’s nocturnal outdoor sculpture exhibition, ALight on MARS, in October 2021 with local sculptor, Boston Sculptors Gallery founder and educator Ken Hruby, focusing on making and teaching 3-D work and the challenges of presenting art in an outdoor setting.
- a February 2022 painting workshop that combined the cultural history of race with the science of melanin. Dr. Dan Jay, a Manship Artist and the Dean of the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences at Tufts, led this session and shared a curriculum he developed at the intersection of art and science, which introduces young students to painting with squid ink – the same liquid that colors our skin.
- a hands-on glass blowing workshop at the Essex Bubble Factory in November 2022.
These professional development and collaborative opportunities have been well-received, impactful, and popular with the arts teachers:
“It is so good for me to try things that I have NO experience with. The discomfort and desire for competence are exactly what my students feel all the time. I was able to have multiple conversations with other art teachers and connect on some projects I have been trying to organize for a long time. As a group, we were able to discuss resources that we had to share or give each other, which will impact our instruction and students’ experiences.” – Hope Fishburn, O’Maley Innovation Middle School art teacher
Notably, Manship already has an example of the value of an arts educator residency. In 2022, Manship gave O’Maley art teacher Hope Fishburn a grant to go to Bread and Puppet for a month this past summer. This came about because, during Dan Jay’s painting workshop, Manship staff overheard Hope talking about a puppetry workshop she was attending in Boston. Manship had been eager to facilitate the creation of large puppets to bring our community together around critical issues and had been exploring options to help make this happen. When they learned that Hope shared this desire, they helped support her as she developed her skills and knowledge of how to make big puppets as a communal exercise. Manship Artists Residency is so pleased to learn that Hope has been using the experience and skill she gained working at her month-long puppet-making residency to develop programming in our local school and community as part of Gloucester’s 400th+ anniversary.
Of course we know this is just the beginning of what we can make together!
What a pleasure it was to see some of those teachers with their students this week at Manship’s Prometheus Fountain in Rockefeller Center during their Spring Field trip in April 2023!
