Howard Schwartzberg and Reality Art

Brooklyn based artist and educator Howard Schwartzberg, realizes the potential that art can have for improving everyday life. Like Tim Rollins, Schwartzberg was actively showing his art in galleries throughout New York City before completely devoting his practice to socially engaged art education; which he has taught for over twenty five years.

Beginning as an itinerant art teacher, Schwartzberg traveled to different locations everyday and worked with diverse populations of at-risk youth. These locations included homeless shelters, juvenile detention centers, pregnant teen centers, homes for LGBTQ youth, children’s homes, centers for students who had dropped out of high school and drug rehab facilities. He is currently teaching at a public High School in Queens.

Schwartzberg’s curriculum is called Reality Art, which is an embodiment of social and emotional learning where students gain skills necessary to achieve positive goals, express empathy for others and build positive communal relationships. This form of pedagogy is structured through experiential learning and art making that is inspired by daily life.

Schwartzberg believes that incorporating art –and thinking artistically– within other disciplines facilitates learning more fluidly. He encourages students to enter what he coined the “freespace for expression and observation.” This conceptual space centers around a collaborative learning experience involving interpreting, analyzing and making art about the world outside of the classroom. The Reality Art curriculum makes learning relevant to the students by giving them choices as to what their subject matter will be and how they will express that in their art. When appropriate, the curriculum involves leaving the classroom to document things that are connected to the subject matter, which the students have collectively chosen. Students study the place and create aesthetic responses using a variety of media including sculpture, drawing, collage, painting, creative writing and poetry. For each project, the students make an accompanying video which documents their creative process and narrates their social, emotional and cognitive experience. The program takes the students out of their familiar environments and into the world at large. It prompts them to think about communicating and solving problems flexibly in the absence of rules (see: Educating Through Art), and encourages them to explore how different materials can be used expressively. It is akin to the idea of “Social Sculpture,” Joseph Beuys’ concept of individuals utilizing artistic practices in the community for socially engaged purposes. Schwartzberg also developed a curriculum for non-art teachers, in order to bring the benefits of artistic learning into their classrooms. The concept maps for his curriculum can be explored here.

Schwartzberg’s studio practice involves a continual investigation into the objective of painting. His method of reversing a painting’s construction is informed by his experiential learning of painting’s physical and symbolic potential. He knows the history and techniques of painting and therefore understands how he can both stay true to being a painter, while expanding the way a painting can be considered. His paintings divert from the constraints of a two dimensional stretched canvas by becoming vessels and scaffolds that hold materials together in a way that represents a hybrid between painting and sculpture. Schwartzberg deconstructs, inverts and mends his paintings to engage the viewer in a discourse about what materials, processes and displays are possible within the medium. He prompts us to contemplate each painting as its own physical form with unique characteristics.

This type of artistic creation parallels the pedagogical concept of backwards design, where educational curriculum is designed by setting goals prior to choosing instructional methods and types of assessment. The educator has a concept of what they want their students to learn, but needs to find ways of breaking down this big idea into manageable instructions and tangible tasks.  It is in this regard that Schwartzberg’s studio art is inline with his teaching. Just as Schwartzberg creates scaffolding for his painting materials to be held together in a unique manner, he builds pedagogical supports based upon his students’ unique educational and personal needs.

In many cases, his experiences as a teacher are incorporated into his own studio art.

Scaffolding (2017) is a long vertical painting that rises from the floor to high up onto the wall. It is comprised of sewn together student paintings (left behind by former students), which have been flipped around so that they’re viewed from the verso. The piece reflects on Schwartzberg’s own artistic process working with materials that investigate the objectivity of painting, combined with his experience teaching in Public Schools. Scaffolding refers to instructional techniques teachers use to guide students toward both mastery and independence in the learning process. The role that the teacher plays should be more along the lines of ‘coaching’ rather than directing. Art is the perfect discipline for this type of learning, because art making involves a combination of personal experience and depiction strategies that are best achieved through experiential learning.

Scaffolding is part of Schwartzberg’s Left Behind (Student Work) series, which was created in response to the detrimental shift from public education to for-profit schools. Other works in the series have titles that also refer to experiential educational strategies such as Collaborative Learning and Think Pair Share. By turning the canvases around to reveal the verso (the side not typically seen when displayed), Schwartzberg is commenting on the ways that educational policy has turned its back on students and educators. He says: “I have personally experienced the dismantling of public education and a degrading national attitude towards teachers. It seems that questionable politics, money, big business and privatization are the new core curriculum for how a school should function, ultimately setting the stage for continued inequality and endemic discrimination.”