Lack of museum leaves gap in art education for Clark County students

By Kristen Peterson

Tuesday, Sept. 8, 2009 | 2 a.m.

Students from Pat Diskin Elementary School sat before a Donald Suggs sculpture at the Las Vegas Art Museum discussing symmetry.

They had explored relationships between man and the world, analyzed movement in paintings and discussed value in three-dimensional work.

Now symmetry had their full attention.

Knowing the principles of design and the elements of art and being able to apply that knowledge opens up worlds to them, Principal Elizabeth Smith said.

“They already know how to get information. We teach how to take information and be creative with it. It’s important to us. We’re not training kids to work in factories. We’re raising them to think and use their brains.”

Two weeks later, the Las Vegas Art Museum closed.

The Guggenheim Hermitage Museum at the Venetian closed nine months earlier.

Las Vegas is one of the few metropolitan areas its size that do not have an art museum. While students from Los Angeles to New York are boarding buses to visit art museums to study art history and art in the context of the world at large, the Clark County School District must find ways to compensate.

“Not having an art museum really limits our ability to get to the aesthetics,” said Barb Good, coordinator of fine arts in the Clark County School District.

“Our curriculum and research shows that kids can look at a slide or a poster, but until they look at a painting, they don’t have that connection. In this very visual world of kids, a poster doesn’t have the emotional or mental connection or impact as getting on the bus, stepping into the gallery and looking at art.”

This school year the Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art is the only game in town for museum-quality art. Gallery officials know this. They’ve dropped off 400 packets detailing the gallery’s free field trips, along with museum catalogs, for teachers to use in class. The gallery’s Modern Council, a group of young collectors, sends 20 percent of its proceeds to the Clark County Public Education Fund to help with the cost of busing, which school officials say is the biggest expense of field trips.

The loss of the art museum comes at an interesting time. This is the year the School District introduced the national Discipline Based Art Education program, which zeros in on four elements of art — criticism, art history, aesthetics and production.

“We are so sad to see that both of those museums are unavailable,” says Bridget Phillips, director of the Clark County School District Partnership Offices. “Anytime you provide students an experience to go see visual arts and museums to see how art affects their world, it is going to be valuable. Every year, all fifth grade students went to Guggenheim. It was something we embraced as something you got to do when you got to the fifth grade.

“All of these experiences expose children to art appreciation. You need these experiences to become a well-rounded student.”

Phillips said individual schools and art teachers will often compensate by hosting programs in the classroom.

Though it doesn’t compare to a day at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the art specialist at Bilbray Elementary School (where Phillips was principal) would host formal student art exhibits where cheese and Champagne glasses of apple cider were served.

Some high school art classes arrange to sketch figures at “Bodies: The Exhibition.” The School District collaborates with the International House of Blues Foundation, and students from kindergarten through grade 12 participate in its arts workshops, and critique and analyze the outsider art at the House of Blues.

Las Vegas Academy students attend First Friday events and volunteer with arts groups such as the Contemporary Arts Center. Students also attend touring art events, such as Kennedy Center programs and “The Da Vinci Experience” exhibit in Henderson.

Google recently awarded $10,000 to the Clark County School District for having the greatest quality participation in the Doodle 4 Google contest. The district used that money to purchase a library of digital images of art.

At least the district has the digital library, because not all of the 311,000 students in the district were taking advantage of the art exhibits — even allowing that some exhibits aren’t appropriate for small children. Although it was a “destination” for fifth graders, only 4,500 students visited the Guggenheim Hermitage a year. Las Vegas Art Museum’s education programs reached 7,766 students in 2007. The Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art had 921 students attend its “Classic Contemporary: Lichtenstein, Warhol & Friends” exhibit, which opened in February and closes today.

Compare that to Washoe County, which has 63,000 students. About 7,000 students visit the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno each year, said Amy Oppio, deputy director of the museum. From July 2008 to July 2009 the Phoenix Art Museum was visited by 11,530 students and served about 13,700 students off site.

Phillips said turnouts are highest at the Lied Discovery Children’s Museum and the Natural History Museum, which hosted more than 19,000 students during the past school year.

Concerts and other art performances also draw large numbers.

Angelique Callicoat, an English teacher at Del Sol High School, took her Advanced Placement rhetoric class to the Bellagio Gallery, where students studied, then wrote essays about, Sol Lewit’s “Floor Piece No. 4.”

“It’s the same sort of technique you use to delve into a poem, a personal essay or a Tommy Hilfiger ad,” Callicoat said. “You understand that everything is an argument and whether you can look at things critically. But you first have to be interested in art, and the way to do that is to see it live.

“I hope the Bellagio stays open. There are some kids who have never been to a gallery before, who have never seen a real piece of art.”