Tucson Teaching Artist Carolyn King

“Raising Analyssa,” by Carolyn King

Between the interior world of creating art and the exterior world of teaching art, Tucson mixed-media artist Carolyn King has found a true balance.

“I never tell people that I’m an artist. I always tell them that I’m a ‘teaching artist.’”

Originally from the Chicago area, King lived in Mexico much of her adult life. She and her daughter Analyssa moved to Tucson twelve years ago seeking services for Analyssa who is disabled. King was hired by Tucson Museum of Art to administer an arts grant, and two years later she was appointed TMA’s Director of Education. A key contribution she made in that position was to create TMA’s Sunday Family Art Program.

King eventually left TMA to establish her own teaching studio in Tucson, Heart to Hand. She also has been an Artist in Residence for the past nine years in Tucson K-8 schools. Summers are full, too. In the summer of 2012, King guided a group of Oro Valley high school students in a grant-funded Public Arts Project arts apprenticeship program.

King made a decision early in her career to find that balance between studio art and teaching art. She turned to education to supplement her income, but she quickly discovered that teaching was just as much of a calling for her as her studio work. She explains her attraction to teaching art this way.

“I feel that creation is a birthright. My passion for teaching is about the future and the evolution of the human spirit.”

That evolution of the human spirit is apparent in King’s mixed-media paintings. The works often reflect universal themes of love and romance, family, and parenting that are expressed in King’s uniquely personal way.  Her work Cuentos de Una Conquista (Tales of a Conquest)  is about how love and romance have affected the women in King’s family –  her grandmother, mother, and sister – all of whom had relationships with those handsome “hard to resist” guys who turned out to be not so dependable. El Jardin de Mi Abuela (My Grandmother’s Garden)  is about King’s relationship with her grandmother.

Two of King’s most compelling works address the challenges of parenting. We notice first the hands in Raising Analyssa.  The painting is stunningly beautiful with its harmonious colors and textured surface, but it’s the hands that grab our attention.  Holding together, pulling toward and pushing apart, arranging and ordering things, expressing emotions, the hands remind us of what every mom and dad knows about bringing up a child. Parenting is a real “hands-on” project.  The hands in King’s painting show us many ways to engage in parent-child interactions.

Colgandome de las unas (Hanging by My Fingernails) is another King work that addresses the challenges of parenting that can apply to many of life’s challenges as well. Again those beautiful and expressive hands carry the message. King’s painting tells us of the frustrations of parenting her special-needs daughter Analyssa. “There have been times when I just felt I couldn’t do it anymore,” King says. “I was hanging by my fingernails.” This painting is very personal, but it also expresses the universality of dealing with life’s adversities.

The transformative butterfly in this painting comes out of a philosophy King developed when earning her master’s degree in Art and Consciousness at John F. Kennedy University in the San Francisco Bay area in the 1980s. The goal of the university’s program was to help adults to transition to new careers. The university curriculum was based on a holistic approach to education that integrates mind, body and spirit. This holistic philosophy has deeply informed both King’s art and her teaching of art.

In this case, the butterfly is symbolizes King’s ability to step back from the distress of a frustrating experience, and to consciously change her idea about what was happening to her. Thus her experience was transformed into something more life-affirming.

King has a very diverse background that brings a lot of richness to her art and her teaching.   As a teen, King went to Europe as an exchange student, a time which she describes as a “threshold experience that set my life on the art path.”  Next she traveled to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, where she studied printmaking. She returned to the U.S. to finish her BFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Then it was back to Mexico. An unexpected detour took her to the Yukon in Canada’s far north for six months where she established a print workshop and taught art classes to Inuit children. She left her home in Mexico again to earn her MA degree at John F. Kennedy University. She stayed on after graduation to run the university art gallery, and eventually she became director of the Art and Consciousness program. But Mexico called to her again, and King returned to the place that she had come to consider her real home, San Miguel de Allende.

Living in Mexico for nearly 30 years had a profound influence on King’s life and art.  She is fluent in Spanish, and she considers herself bicultural. She established and operated an art school in San Miguel de Allende, Corazon del Artista (Heart of the Artist), for eight years. There she taught arts and English-language classes for Mexican children in the summer. In the winter when American snow birds migrated to San Miguel de Allende, King taught art classes for adult learners.

Although King says she loves working with children, she’s quite clear that she has a real calling to work with adult learners.

“Many adults want to express themselves through color in art. But I hear them say things like “I can’t draw.” I can’t do art.’  I want to help them find a way to express themselves and get past the ‘can’t’ that they tell themselves.”

King believes that it’s a mistake for adults to focus on product instead of process. “If you nurture your inner life, it becomes the spark for creativity, and the product will be beautiful and real…..In my classes, I want to empower the spirit in a person to go forward and play.”

King would probably still be in San Miguel today, but she decided that her daughter needed the more advanced educational, medical, and therapeutic services available in the U.S. They came to Tucson in 1999. Since living in the Old Pueblo, King has been actively involved with Raices Taller Art Gallery and Workshop where she regularly shows her work. She had a one-woman show at Contreras Gallery in 2010. In the fall of 2012, she will be showing work at Bentley’s on Speedway. And she teaches throughout the year.

Regarding her very full life of parenting her disabled daughter coupled with teaching art students and also producing art herself, King says, “My basic premise is that everybody’s spirit is intact. The essence of every person is whole. For me, spirit and creative expression are intimately related, and I address both in my teaching.”

Visit Carolyn’s website at www.dreamco.com/hearttohand

“El Jardin de Mi Abuela,” by Carolyn King

“Cuentos de una Conquista,” by Carolyn King

Category: Arts