Getty Project Displays Art by Children

In a rather unusual type of East-West cultural exchange, the artwork of children from 11 Los Angeles-area school districts is being shipped to Beijing for an exhibit.

“I think (Chinese children who see the exhibit) are gonna say ‘oooh’ and then ‘I want to draw one of those,’ ” said 8-year-old Christine Tate, whose self-portrait is part of the exhibit of art from programs developed by the Getty Institute for Educators on the Visual Arts.

The Getty-developed programs--called discipline-based art education--aim to establish art as a regular course of study in elementary schools, and to place emphasis on sequential activities that enable students to develop their abilities for making art, examining art and reading and talking about art. The program, which is taught in 21 area school districts (in kindergarten through secondary school classrooms) centers around aesthetics, art criticism, art history and art production. The Getty Institute holds staff development programs to train both teachers and administrators in discipline-based art education, and provides set curricula to help school districts establish the program.

“Discipline-based art education has changed the look of our school and the look of our classrooms,” said Bev Pyott, a fifth-grade teacher at Torrance’s Anza School, during a weekend reception for the student artists and their parents and teachers. “But the production part, having them put the concepts to work, is just a small part.”

The teachers and administrators interviewed at the reception had nothing but praise for the Getty-developed programs, and they aren’t the only ones to laud it. In fact, the collection was formed because of the enthusiasm of a visiting high school art teacher from Beijing, Hou Ling, who suggested that such an exhibition would help Chinese art educators learn more about the theory and practices of discipline-based art education programs in American schools.

“The idea (of putting together an exhibition to be sent to China) was to share not only the imagery, but the students’ philosophy behind this way of teaching,” said Steven Mark Dobbs, senior program officer for the Getty, who has been negotiating with Ling on the logistics of the exhibition since the summer of 1987.

The negotiations and preparations now nearing completion have been a lengthy process, Dobbs said, because language barriers force all correspondence between himself and Ling to be translated from one language to another, and because the Chinese government has several agencies that must give their approval before the exhibit can be sent to China.

As a result, Dobbs said, the Getty Institute has had no confirmation on where the artworks will be displayed once they reach Beijing. Dobbs added, however, that the exhibition is being sent as a permanent gift to the Chinese, and the Getty hopes that “once it reaches China, it will be circulated widely by the Ministry of Culture.”

“We have no confirmation of the exhibit even going elsewhere,” Dobbs said, “but my feeling is that it will. . . . We hope that it will become a resource for Chinese educators to learn from.”

The exhibition consists of 27 pieces of student art work (including adept attempts at impressionism, pointillism, and abstractionism; life-like renditions of lobsters, birds and other forms of animal life; fairly sophisticated landscapes and seascapes and collages, and several self-portraits), samples of writing by students about the art they have studied, and calligraphic explanations (in both Chinese and English) about the philosophy of discipline-based art education. The student artists range in age from 5 to 13.

Most of the youngsters at the reception could manage only shy nods when asked about the exhibition and their drawings. But their teachers and parents were more than happy to talk about the excitement of the exhibit and the Getty-developed art program.

“We’re so thrilled about this,” said Alicia Larson, the mother of 7-year-old abstractionist Ronnie. “And (in the program) they take the time for individual little things like field trips to museums--Ronnie (an ardent fan of the “Pinkie” and “Blue Boy” paintings) had never been before.”

Said Mary Norton, the mother of 9-year-old Jennie (who rendered a monkey in the style of Georges Seurat): “I’m excited about this whole concept and the concept of this exchange. We don’t usually do things like this--it’s usually done on an adult level.”

The Getty is hoping that the exhibition will do more than just provide them with an opportunity to show off the results of their program. “In China the philosophy and emphasis of art education is to encounter discipline . . . and mastery,” Dobbs said. “There really is more at stake (with sending this exhibition) than just looking at pretty and naive images that kids have drawn on the other side of the Pacific. There’s an opportunity for penetration of intercultural (philosophies).”

But to 12-year-old Antonio Uzeta, an aspiring animation artist for Walt Disney whose collage of a fish is being sent in the collection, the exhibition has a much simpler meaning. “It will be real neat for everyone to see it up there (in China)--to see what we do here,” he said.