Lauren Erickson has always been interested in art. Her dad took tons of art classes in high school, which inspired her to do the same. However, the Shadle Park High School senior has never been quite sure what she wanted to do with all that creative knowledge, until now.
Last week, Erickson was one of 13 art students from across Spokane's school district who learned to curate and set up an art show with help from their teachers, a couple of carpenters and the Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture's new curator, Rachel Allen.
"Curating an exhibition is a complex task," Allen says. "It can be really deceiving how many different details go into it — it's sort of like a stage play in a way. There's a lot of planning and coordination going on ahead of time before you go live."
For the past few months, high school art teachers within Spokane Public Schools have worked to revamp their curriculum to include collaboration with local nonprofits and community partners to ensure students are given real-world learning opportunities.
Although the district has displayed high schoolers' art each year for at least a decade, this is the first show to be co-curated by students under the new curriculum. By doing this, the teachers hope to give students insights into the many arts-related careers available, Shadle Park art teacher Carrie Stroud says.
"The most important thing for me that came out of that experience was the conversations I had with the different students about what their goals were, which artwork they liked, and what they want to do next," Allen says.
Though it may seem simple, conversations with someone like Allen are crucial for students like Erickson who are approaching the end of their high school education.
"Rachel showed us how she curates, and I had no idea you had to research where the artworks are at to see if it's even going to fit in your show or your theme or installation. So it takes many years to learn all that, and through that experience I kind of realized that this is something I could do," Erickson says. "It was just so cool for an actual art curator to see our art. She put in her insight, and it just gave us this peace of mind."
All that real-world education has culminated in the 2024-25 high school art show "Our Time, Our Voice" at the downtown Kolva-Sullivan Gallery. The small Adams Street gallery is filled wall-to-wall with artwork, from paintings and drawings to ceramic and collage creations that aim to explore social, environmental and cultural issues that students care about.
It's not just the art students who have gotten real-world experience. Peyton Hudson's culinary arts class at Shadle catered the show's Feb. 7 opening. The gallery, open by appointment only (call 509-458-5517), will show "Our Time, Our Voice" until March 1.
CREATING CREATIVE THINKERS
In one corner of the Kolva-Sullivan Gallery there is a mischief of magpies flying around the space into a cage stationed in the middle of the room. Each magpie has been carefully crafted with recycled propaganda materials, and the cage they're all flocking to has an iPad inside, broadly representing the societal ills that social media has exacerbated.
Created by students in Stroud's class, the art installation is a metaphor for what happens when we don't think critically about the world around us.
"We spend a lot of time teaching students that art is a vehicle for change," Stroud says. "I would like to see students recognize that art can also be a form of empowerment to others."
On top of showing students what they can do with an arts education, Stroud is dedicated to ensuring that her students understand the artistic process. Before the annual art show, Stroud asked her students to think about the issues that they care about in the region and how they could reflect that in their art.
"I loved posing that question to them because I learned that they care so deeply about the world around them," she says, beaming with pride. "They chose everything from poverty in Spokane to the homelessness crisis, drug epidemic and some of them even chose overconsumption, which I thought was really fascinating."
She doesn't ask her students for perfect paintings and consummate collages, but work that reflects their ability to think creatively about the world around them.
"What we're teaching is invaluable," Stroud says. "All of us art teachers in the district, we recognize that we are teaching an artistic process to every single student, not because they're all going to become fine artists or graphic designers or architects, but because they're going to become critical thinkers and creative thinkers." ♦
