Brenda repeats this notion, that “everybody can talk about art,” several times over the course of the conversation. It’s clear that it matters to her. And as we transition into talking about Horizons and her new role teaching students to make art, not just look at it, that ideal of art being accessible to anyone shines through. When she was first starting to get involved in Horizons and thinking about what she could bring to the program, she says, she proposed coming into the classrooms with prints of great works of art or using digital tools to show images to the students and discuss them—much like guiding a tour in the Cantor, but with the artwork (in reproductions) brought to the students, rather than the other way around. But as she started preparing her coursework over the course of the year, she realized that—while discussing art could be fun and a tremendously beneficial experience—doing so every day for six weeks might be a bit too much for kids. But just coming in once or twice a week didn’t feel right either. The answer came when Brenda learned that the schools the program partnered with didn’t have art programs that gave students the opportunity to do art projects as part of their education. And, as she puts it, “I decided they should definitely have art, the opportunity to make art. And that maybe that was something I could learn how to teach.”

That my mom came to that answer so readily is a testament to how strongly she believes in the importance of making art. She had always made it clear to my sister and me that she loved art, but that she didn’t consider herself particularly adept as an artist herself. When she first announced she would be teaching as part of the Horizons program, I teased her about it, asking how we got from that constantly repeated disclaimer to her suddenly being prepared to teach. She shrugged and said she might not be especially good at making art, but she was good enough to teach first time learners.

Talking about it again in our interview she said, “If you had told me 10 years ago that I would be doing this, I would’ve laughed you out of the room, because it’s like you said, I don’t know that I’ve ever considered myself particularly skilled at making art. But part of the beauty of tackling this is I have also improved. I think anybody can learn it and can get better.” She added that she feels that thinking of herself as “not much of an artist” is a good perspective to bring into the classroom, because it allows her to encourage her students from the level they’re at. When they look at a project and say, “I can’t do that,” she tells them, “You’re only allowed to say that in this room if you tack on ‘yet.’ You can say, ‘I can’t do that—yet.’ Because we haven’t tried yet. And if I thought you couldn’t do all this, why would either one of us be here?”

When I asked her why she thought it was so important that these students experience a class where they could make art themselves—important enough that she would throw herself into the steep learning curve of figuring out how to teach it—she makes a face I understand, after 27 years, to mean I’ve just posed a question much bigger and more complicated than I realized. “Okay,” she says, “where to start…” With a laugh, she dives in. “So, first of all I, I think art making—in particular for younger children—can just be a really pleasurable, joyful thing. Kids are naturally creative. They’re less inhibited than they are when they get older. And so, to think that there are a lot of students out there who don’t have this exposure to art in school just seemed kind of unfair to me, and sad.

“I also believe that art making, if you’re in a structured program where someone’s also teaching you a variety of techniques, exposing you to a wide variety of materials and a more complex art project, hones an awful lot of skills without the student really thinking about it—skills that are transferable to a lot of different classrooms – and life. There are fine motor skills involved. Multi-step projects take planning, and there’s experimentation. Sometimes things don’t go as expected—sometimes those are happy accidents and sometimes not, but then you have to use additional creativity to figure out if there’s a way you can fix, incorporate, or work around it. Making art can require patience, and resilience and persistence.” She laughs, remembering a project that required a lot of steps and preparation before getting to the final product: “I had a second-grade student whose feet I had been holding to the fire on the preparation for different stages of a more complex project, and the next day he said to me, ‘Mrs. H! Practice is not a waste of time!’ So, I think there are definitely larger things being learned in the creation of art than just how the picture looks at the end of the day.”