Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art docent (and artist) Camile Lovaz has been admiring some of the student drawings from Bus to Barrick field trip workshops. She writes—
For over a year, I’ve worked as a substitute teacher for the Clark County School District and as a K-12 field trip docent at the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art. The two jobs have a lot in common, with the main similarity being the short period of time I have with the students. But it’s enough time for me to form some idea of their personalities, their likes and dislikes, and what they seem to have a passion for. With every passing tour and classroom, it’s exciting to see familiar faces revisit the museum with friends or loved ones, and to have the chance to be a substitute for a class that remembers me.
As an artist, there’s one thing in particular that stands out to me when working at the museum. With each Bus to Barrick exhibition tour, we end with a workshop where students respond to the exhibitions with artworks of their own. I love to see how they transform the ideas we discussed by turning them into drawings and collages. Their artworks challenge and motivate me to view my surroundings as possibilities for new concepts rather than visual guides for existing artwork. It also helps me step away from my usual approach to artwork, where it’ll take days to build a strong foundation, and instead draw quickly and see how each detail leads to the next.
The workshops during Actions for the Earth were unusually inspirational. In Actions, the artworks focused on “participatory artistic interventions,” which encouraged our visitors to explore new ways to focus and get in touch with the world around them. Throughout our fall exhibition, it seemed that the drawings from the students were extremely perceptive. We gave them worksheets with “Thought Cloud” areas where they could write down their observations before transforming them into pictures. They were collaborating, making drawings with never-ending details, and finding ways to reshape the artworks into something entirely new. They were attentive during our tour discussions, and many times I would find the information transformed into visual imagery. There were a couple of artworks that truly stuck with me to this day, with some having been handed to me personally, and others that I have witnessed hanging on the walls.
On April 17th, we ended the tour with the usual smiles, laughs, and goodbyes. As we rounded up all the drawings, I noticed two that were so in sync with one another that it didn’t feel like a coincidence. On one paper, a student wrote “nature” and “birds” and drew two loop-de-loop clouds in the top center and top-right corner of the page. Towards the center was a simple tree, with two different hues of green to show variations of leaves, and a branch on each side. On the right branch stood a small yellow bird, alone, facing to the right. The student sketched the grass at the bottom of the page with a graphite pencil, leaving behind quick, soft marks. The second student had written down “the birds chirping” and marked the page with light movements going back and forth, filling it with a pale shade of blue. The student made quick strikes of green that followed along the bottom line of the page, representing a grassy field, and to the right of the page stood a brown-barked tree with no leaves in sight—on the very edge of the longest branch stood a yellow bird, facing to the left of the page, singing to the wind.
If you were to place the top-right cloud of the first student’s drawing over the “Thought Cloud” of the second student, the drawings become one. The birds are now facing one another, singing to each other, calling for each other, in the same vast, luscious field. As I placed these drawings together, it occurred to me that I might be witnessing a friendship that had transcended matching bracelets and sleepovers. I could picture the two mini artists deliberately using their art to illustrate their strong bond. I imagined them as closely meshed as the colored wax and oil that made up their pencils. I thought of them marking the world with their friendship just as that mixture of oil and wax materialized birds and trees onto the pale emptiness of the museum’s white paper.
On March 27th, I toured a lively group of high schoolers, all of whom were suffering from contagious social yawning. Still, the children would pounce on us docents with questions and curiosities. They giggled with one another, guessing the meaning behind each piece, and tried their best not to get caught running on the shiny wooden floor. One student in particular caught my attention as the most lively of them all. They went around the exhibition like an expedition, exploring each work’s hidden secrets, and with every treasure they uncovered, they collected more friends to discover with them. They were vocal with their opinion, participating in group discussions and raising their hand so high that I felt as if it would reach the ceiling panels. And yet, they weren’t afraid of new knowledge and seemed willing to twist their head all the way around if it meant seeing a new perspective.
As our discussions came to an end and the students began to draw at the workshop tables, I looked around to see what they were creating. With each step I took, I saw waves of color, patterns, collages, and sketches; memories of the museums were now recreated on paper, ready to be hung on the museum’s walls or on the fridge at home. As I walked by the lively student, I caught a glimpse of their drawing, and I couldn’t help but grin at the sight of it. Written in the “Thought Cloud” was the word “Nonchalant” in pencil, and in what looked like Calibri font. Straight lines and no hesitation; there was no room for error. According to Merriam-Webster, the word “nonchalant” means to be calm and relaxed, almost indifferent. And yet, their drawings were almost the exact opposite.
There were hypnotizing swirls that resembled cursive writing and stars that bounced off every corner of the border lines. They reimagined the complexity of Zarina Muhammad’s Calendrical Systems for the Afterlife by replacing the wooden structure with straight lines that resembled the number seven overlapping a capital L and translated the offerings into two simple ovals. Katie West’s Clearing was drawn in a bird’s perspective, and Pauline Oliveros's mural of a solid circle was abstracted into dozens of swift marks. The illustrations were made with such saturated red and bright blue that they bled through the white sheet. In all honesty, I felt like a kid again trying to look at the sun, and when I closed my eyes, a rainbow parade would dance around the pitch-black darkness under my eyelids.
I found it a little strange at the time and wondered why the student would have written down such different words and tried to correlate them in the same space. This felt like a visual depiction of an oxymoron, writing down nonchalant next to such a chaotic and whimsical drawing. All I could think about was my experience with the student. Why nonchalant? Did they feel indifferent to the artwork and wished to see it from a different perspective? Did they simply write the word due to its current popularity on social media? Or maybe, just maybe, they were being a kid and wanted a good laugh. All their energy and emotions were expressed in their illustrations, illustrating a day in their childhood they could look back on.
On April 24th, I don’t recall anything out of the ordinary or anything that might have caught my attention, and I simply remember another successful tour with our K-12 students. It wasn’t until I went through the donated artwork days later that I found the drawing that had struck a chord in my heart and has yet to leave my mind. A sea of white held most of the space in the illustration, untouched by any ink or colored wax, not even a smudge of graphite. But in the top-right corner of the page was a sketch of West’s Clearing, drawn almost like a still-life. West created a long and large silk fabric that was suspended above the floor, colored with natural dyes that she herself had gathered in her journeys. The silk fabric created a U-shaped form as it hung from the museum’s ceiling. Surrounding the almost-floating fabric was a collection of pillows, dyed with the same beige, browns, and oranges.
In the corner of the student’s page was a small sketch of Clearing, no bigger than my palm. They chose not to depict its towering size, nor did they color in the earthy tones. They did, however, depict the form of the fabric so accurately that it was without fail a miniature version of West’s work. You could almost see the silk’s translucence and how the museum’s light shone through it by how lightly the student sketched the fabric. The proportions of the pillows to the hung silk were spot on; the shading of the darks and lights of the organic forms were all in the right places, and if you were to place a vanishing point on the page, everything would surely align. It was a strange drawing to see in person; everything about it visually looked like Clearing, but something about it was different. The meaning of the silk had changed. And in the middle of the page was a word written with the same graphite pencil used in the drawing: Alone.
There are times as a docent and as a substitute in which I truly realize what a short amount of time I have with the students I’m teaching. It’s times like these that I wonder what each student may be thinking and how they might be doing outside of school. Even with their uniforms and filled-to-the-brim backpacks, these kids are still kids with dreams, aspirations, and struggles too. I can analyze this drawing dozens of times, guess the student’s meaning, and try to see what they were thinking when they wrote the word “Alone.” But I’m not sure if it would give me a true answer; not every artwork is meant to give you a straightforward answer. What I can do is simply admire the child’s creativity and interpretation of the work. Look in awe at how they were able to reshape what they had witnessed that Friday morning and smile at their creation.
Actions for the Earth is a traveling exhibition curated by Sharmila Wood and produced by Independent Curators International (ICI), New York.