Students from Catlin Gabel and Wilsonville High School are working together on a groundbreaking program, Word and Hand. Its aim is to build new creative skills in young artists and writers by having them responding to each other’s work. Four student writers and four students who are visual artists from each school are paired with their opposite in the other school. In this pilot program funded by the William T. Colville Foundation, the students learn how artists and writers can derive inspiration from each other, and how that unleashes a new area of creativity that most of them—and most mature artists and writers—have never experienced.
Word and Hand projects have taken place in the past 12 years, but only between adult artists and writers. This is the first time it’s been tried with high school students, who send their poem or artwork anonymously to their partner. The partner then sends a work in response, and the cycle continues. Each student keeps a journal of the process. The last exchange takes place on March 22.
The first time these students will get to meet their creative partner will be at an opening of their work at Portland’s Blackfish Gallery in late May or early June (date TBA). The exhibition will be paired with a catalog about the project, featuring all the students’ work. The Colville Foundation hopes to write a curriculum for other high schools based on this pilot project.
The results are phenomenal, says Catlin Gabel art teacher Dale Rawls, who guides the project along with English teacher Ginia King. He says that his students have made great conceptual leaps in thinking about the way their work communicates to others, and how they can make their writing or artwork say what they want it to. They are challenged creatively and intuitively by Word and Hand, and they are excited by those challenges.
Dale and Ginia’s counterparts at Wilsonville High School are art teacher Christopher Shotola-Hardt and English teacher Jay Rischel. The project was the concept of sculptor Steve Tilden, who has done Word and Hand projects (as has Dale), and is on the board of the Colville Foundation.