Nashaly Diaz

Seminar: Arts Education

Studio: Visual Art
Why Is Art Education Important?

Ms. Plotkin started singing when she started to speak, so this when she began her music journey. Later on she started to play piano when
she was five years old and also played drums. Her whole family played music and she grew up with music everywhere. Yet she did art in
school but not music. At the same time she was not learning to become a musician. So this when her music journey began. Ms. Plotkin’s
journey with music inspired me because she wanted to have an opportunity to play an instrument that she didn’t have, but she still managed to
play it without any help.
The seminar I joined was art education. I joined art education because I want to express art through my piece and give an opportunity to
other schools that don’t associate with art education and or don’t even know about the arts to have a chance to know what it’s all about. I
choose to study arts education because it’s important and I feel like more students and adults need to know more of the arts and how they can
express their emotions throughout their careers. Students who are engaged in the arts will understand more of our society and history that they
otherwise wouldn’t know about. Students that go to schools with art programs gain more skills overall than students going to a schools without
art programs. Also students that learn the arts become more successful. In fact some parents prefer their children to go to schools with art
programs. Students learn more skills like resistance overall through art education. Students that integrate the arts with their academic classes
progress more and have a growth mindset, meaning that if they fail, they will start over again. According to Nell Swapp in “Creativity and
Academics,” students that go to schools with an art program have a better reading ability and verbal memory. Art is a way where students can
gain self confidence and where can experiment more. In fact art have many other benfies than creative thinking. Overall, both arts and
academics are equally important.
When I first imagined my art piece, I thought it would have students holding books about art. I wanted someone looking at my piece to
not only see art as painting, but to see it as a way to see our world. I only thought of that first idea because I wasn’t really paying attention to
the details I had to put in my artwork, all the hard work and effort. In fact, the piece I did now was a more detailed drawing and I showed
diligence in working on it. I thought I was going to do many details in my drawing. Instead of creating a drawing, I decided to make a collage.
I felt that with a collage I could put in more images to represent what art really means, why it’s important. While going through drafts of my
collage, I finally made my final piece. My final piece has many detailed notes and drawings and a lot of feedbacks with the ideas my teachers
gave me. My vision changed a lot through my studio time because I only had one idea and now I have many ideas to put into my drawing. Ms.
Schibuk gave me an idea to put strings on top of my collage and this helped me find a way to make some of my art words stand out. The
purpose of my piece was to tell why art education is important. Many things in my piece included messages I wanted my viewers to know
about the arts. The themes I want to communicate is these are reasons why art is important to society and the world around us and why we
should add it to schools. The learning in seminar influenced the purpose of my piece because I had many more ideas than what I had before
when I started. In seminar I learned that students gain more skills when they have an arts education, I showed this learning in my artwork by
putting in words such as “resistance,” and “perseverance” that show how they were able to gain those skills.
The form I used was visual art and my media I did was collage. I chose visual art as my art form because I like to draw and be creative.
In fact having visual art as an option was a perfect opportunity for me to express myself through the arts. However, doing art education into
visual arts was difficult because I have to organize my collage with words that make it connect with my question. This was easy at the same
time because I know what I was talking about. One artistic challenge I encountered is putting my drawing into a collage and figuring out how
to communicate why art is important. Some creative decisions I made was putting in many powerful words that connect to the arts to why it is
important and making it clear it’s connection to the art education. The feedback that I got on my studio teacher was very helpful because I got a
bunch of ideas to put in my collage.
What I learned about myself as an artist is that I can be a artist when I put a lot of time and effort in my drawing. Even though,
sometimes I wanted just to quit, but I still went through and made my artwork look alot better through these two weeks and a half. Just like I
learned about in my reading, I had a growth of a mindset. In spite of me doing so many drafts and to make my work even better than what it is
I discovered many skills I have. Trying to express social change through art was very hard because I have to put in many details into my
drawing and trying to express why art is important in my drawing. Yet I still am not sure how I will make a social change. During the capstone
I have challenged myself alot because capestone is a way where you can have self confidence, get to express more of yourself. Also, during the
capestone I grew a lot with my work, drawings I made because I get to know more about my personality throughout the skills I gained with
capestone. Getting to know more about my personality is when you look at my artwork and you see that I like to do collages and draw. At the
same time I used crew qualities in my studio work, like perseverance because I persevered through my artwork and drafts I had to make during
my studio times.