A Collaborative Art Project
by Students and Teachers of the Jeremiah Burke High School

Arnheim Gallery
February 24 – March 7

Panel discussion: February 26, 5:30
Opening reception: February 26, 6:00-8:00 pm

Artist to Artist

An artwork can be a place to riff, to proclaim, to spar, to yield. A
classroom can be as well. The works of Artist to Artist present us with
solutions to such exchanges. For the teachers, this has meant to participate as
peers and to author alongside students. For students, this has meant to
participate expansively as artists, adapt new techniques and even shed
preconceptions of what is possible in a work. Together, these artists enrich
our understanding of what can be achieved when artists define the terms in
an urban school.

The concept was sparked by Professor John Crowe’s example, carried by
student teacher Adam Tibbets to supervising teacher Alisa Rodny, and
ultimately shared as an option to the students of Boston’s Burke High School.
Each panel was created with a teacher and student taking turns working on
the same piece. This created the challenge for each artist to solve for the turn
before, a problem-posing activity which Tibbet’s describes as being like
playing fifty games of chess at the same time. The student artists were given
the final move, ending the exchange when they felt it was complete.

This is the richness of dialogue that we artist-educators hope for–
multi-faceted and multi-generational, democratic in authority and open to
possibility. Trace the conversations within these works and you will find no
singular answers—only multiple dialogues in multiple languages, coalescing
under a common commitment to validating exchange— which is the very best
we want for our classrooms.

Beth Balliro
Assistant Professor of Art Education
Mass. College of Art & Design