Storytelling and art combine to help students communicate
creatively
By Michael Lollar
April 27, 2014
It is Elaine Blanchard’s second semester as an adjunct
professor at Memphis College of Art. Blanchard is a storyteller and a woman
that one art student is convinced “could get along with a brick wall.”
Blanchard is best known as a woman who goes beyond some of
the biggest walls in the city along with the razor wire atop them to reach out
to women in prison, helping to “set them free” by getting them to tell their
stories.
She also is a teacher who has taught special education and
gifted students at Snowden Elementary School. And she is an ordained minister
who teaches classes called “The Preacher As Storyteller” at Memphis Theological
Seminary to help future ministers relate to their audiences.
Blanchard’s roles as educator and mentor came together at
Memphis College of Art last semester when her optional class drew students for
the current semester by word-of-mouth. “It’s one of those classes that’s now in
high demand,” says Maria Bibbs, the Memphis College of Art teacher who
recommended hiring Blanchard as part of a liberal arts curriculum tailored to
artists.
"She’s electrifying. I love to hear her voice and just to
see her coming. She’s such a warm and engaging person,” says Bibbs, who learned
of Blanchard through her volunteer project, “Prison Stories,” which has turned
Blanchard, 62, into one of the most recognized women in Memphis. It earned her
a Jefferson Award, an award from The Commercial Appeal as one of the Twelve Who
Made a Difference and a winner of the vision award this year from Women of
Achievement.
It will also turn Blanchard into a TV personality next month
when WKNO-TV airs a 30-minute documentary about her by Craig Leake, a nine-time
Emmy winner who followed and filmed Blanchard’s seventh installment of “Prison
Stories” for 15 weeks. The documentary will air five times beginning at 9 p.m.
Thursday, May 15. In it, Blanchard enlists women to tell their stories, then
writes and produces a play based on their hard-luck lives and the misdeeds that
landed them in prison.
“Miss Elaine makes you feel like someone ... She gives you
hope,” says one inmate in Leake’s documentary.
When he learned that Blanchard joined the faculty at the
College of Art, Leake, who teaches in the department of communication at the
University of Memphis, said that whoever hired Blanchard is “very wise. Anytime
you see her in a crowd you know people flock to her because they want to talk
to her. She’s one of those people who makes you feel somehow important. What
you say she really wants to hear. That puts her in an ideal position to
influence students.
“A student would never feel that, ‘Oh, here she comes with
her old yellowed notes.’ She’s got to be a breath of fresh air. If she is
encouraging artists to tell their own stories and the stories of their own
artwork, wow, you couldn’t find anyone better to do that,” says Leake.
And that is exactly what the College of Art had in mind,
says Bibbs.
Art students may be great artists, but they are not always
the most communicative people when it comes to telling the story of their art
or learning to play a role in the marketing of art.
Memphis College of Art is focusing on an innovative
curriculum that tries to prepare artists for the real world, says Bibbs. It may
be one of the few schools, possibly the only one, to employ a storyteller to
further that goal.
The class with 16 students this semester is called,
appropriately, “The Art of Storytelling,” and it helps students learn to build
a narrative using elements of theater, writing and performance art that come
into play in Blanchard’s “Prison Stories.” Bibbs had been exposed to a related
idea while in graduate school at the University of Wisconsin, she says. It was
a volunteer project that involved students to help teach African-American
studies and creative writing to African-American inmates.
Blanchard’s class is not a volunteer project, but it exposes
students to the real world through field trips each semester. With Blanchard
they visited with homeless people, incarcerated women, adults with
developmental disabilities, nursing home residents and men in transitional
counseling after long periods of imprisonment. Students talked to members of
each group and chose one person to focus on as their individual class project,
creating artwork inspired by that person.
Robby McElhaney, 22, an illustration major of Franklin,
Tenn., said he chose a developmentally disabled man as his project because of
the man’s ability to constantly find joy in a life that, on the surface, has
little to offer. As part of the preparation, he said the class learned from
Blanchard to listen. “I think we (the students) would all agree it’s had an
impact on us.” One of Blanchard’s major influences, he said, “is just learning
to pay attention and to pay attention to details instead of waiting for your
turn to speak.”
It is one of the reasons why he says Blanchard’s class has
become one of his favorites and that she “could get along with a brick wall.”
Classmate Crystal Foss, 22, a photography major of Seattle,
planned to focus on a female inmate and said that one of Blanchard’s best
lessons was to emphasize “vulnerability. We sat around the classroom for the
first five weeks and talked to each other. It gave you a way to be vulnerable.
It’s like bringing everyone together. It’s important to share that
vulnerability. It’s so easy to censor yourself. Then, it (art) is not really
true anymore.”
Blanchard often shares part of her own past and how her
misogynist father focused on his sons, treating her as an afterthought of
little value. She said such painful memories come out in what she calls
conversation” instead of storytelling. “Just look at me. Talk to me about your
life. That’s how I help people get in touch with their vulnerability and
authenticity.
“I’ve learned that the things in my past that hurt are what
led me to be who I am now and to enjoy being who I am now. I am almost as
grateful for the hurts in my past as for the wonderful and nice things that
have happened. I wouldn’t enjoy my life so much if it wasn’t for all that I’ve
gone through. The gratitude has pushed my resentment out.”
Blanchard says it is a joy to work with art students because
they “really get it. I don’t have to teach them that creativity is important.
They already know that. And I don’t have to teach them that human beings can
create something new. They’ve already got that. The thing about the College of
Art is that the students come, and we all appreciate that we’re creating
something new. It’s for the sake of creating, not that we think we’re going to
get rich or famous. It’s just that we’re creating.”
The projects were set to be unveiled Saturday at
TheatreSouth, beneath the sanctuary at First Congregational Church at 1000 S.
Cooper, with students presenting their art and telling about it.
Blanchard is exploring whether the artwork can be publicly
displayed later, either at the college or in a nearby gallery.
“It’s so different than any other academic class we’ve
taken,” says Foss. “I don’t know whether to be nervous or excited.”
That angst is part of the course, says Blanchard. “We become
artists shaped by the pain of our lives.”
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