We were lucky to catch up with Carolyn King recently and have shared our conversation below.
Carolyn, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?
I am currently working with staff, clients and care-givers to design and facilitate the creation of ten visual art pieces for installation in a loooong hallway of the administration building for United Cerebral Palsy of Southern Arizona.
This project weaves together several threads of deeply held values for me. As a young person, I studied visual art in Central Mexico. During those formative years, I experienced the power of ‘el taller’ where artists & artisans create together. This is Value #1; the foundation of our project at UCP.
After nearly a decade in Mexico, I studied and earned an M. A. in Arts & Consciousness at JFKennedy University where students explored the relationship between creativity, spirituality and studio practice. Value #2 of the UCP project is the relationship between Arts & Healing.
After completing graduate school, I returned eventually to Mexico where both my heart and creativity are most deeply rooted. Once back ‘home’, my life shifted to teaching, birthing a daughter born with significant neurological anomalies and founding a small Art Center.
Fast forward: I have been serving as a teaching-artist in Tucson for the past 24 years. This work, as a freelance, contract worker, brought me to TUSD schools, local hospitals, clinics and retirement communities. During those years, my skills and passion for creating spaces where anyone and everyone feels supported to unfold Creative Spirit were honed. Value #3 of the UCP project is my committed belief that creativity is a birthright accessible to us all. In my work as teaching-artist, participants have included children as young as 3 years old, students living with Autism, hearing impairments and a huge range of special needs as well as teens from tribal communities healing from addiction, This work has brought me to hospital playroom, Senior Centers, retirement communities and Memory Care homes.
The projects at United Cerebral Palsy are most meaningful to me because I have been given the priceless opportunity to create a ‘taller’ experience for the breadth of such a profoundly service-oriented community. Each Thursday since February, I set up a studio space in a community room on-site in Central Tucson. For the next 6 hours, staff members, clients, care-givers, family members and administrators drop in for 15 minutes to an hour to work together on whatever project we have underway. These moments are filled with both respite from the mental busy-ness of running an organization and with a comraderie that unfolds as people share space while creating. It’s sheer magic at times!
For me, personally, it is such synergy to be ‘giving back” as a special needs Mom, in this way. United Cerebral Palsy serves 1,400 people living with a range of disabilities in the Tucson community. Families like mine are elevated by services provided by organizations like this. I am also profoundly gifted to be able to serve bilingually in this project. Many of the staff, clients and care-givers are Spanish speakers. The day is filled with people connecting through both languages often simultaneously. I can barely begin to explain how meaningful this situation is on all levels for us all.
Carolyn, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
The roots of my work as a freelance teaching-artist focused on community go way back. My very first experience unfolded when I was 26 years old visiting for 9 months in the Canadian Yukon town, Dawson City. This is the historic village where Jack London wrote “Call of the Wild” and other well loved books. In the summers, Dawson City is a tourist magnet, but as soon as temperatures drop, local population plummets, too. I noticed that the local children, primarily Indigenous kids, seemed to have next to no organized activities by September. I approached the local library to ask if I could offer Arts & Crafts workshops for children there. I gratefully acknowledge that visionary librarian who gracefully invited me and my ‘crew’ into the library for classes. Suffice it to say, what the kids created humbled and impressed me deeply.
Not long after, I was living in Oakland, California where I accepted a job with Parks and Recreation. My first day on the job, I was sent up to a nearby forest preserve above Oakland with a bus filled with African American inner city kids ages 6-14 and a small box of a variety of art supplies. I share these stories because these were seminal experiences that formed my core values as a teaching-artist. When we arrived at the forest, I divided the 50 kids into teams. Each group was led by 2 of the older students. I watched in awe as the teams scattered once given a few basic supplies and the assignment to create a Totem for their ‘tribe’. Once again, I was awed by both what the students made but even more so by how they interacted.
The values that unfolded for me during these two earliest of my teaching experiences are:
1. Everyone has access to Creativity. It is a birth-right given to us all regardless of our age, ability or socio-economic reality.
2. Collaboration is THE most amazing way to support each other to find the thread of Creativity that connects us all.
3. Creativity is not dependent on fancy or expensive materials.
There are more than these three values, of course, but these are The Keys to my work as a facilitator for community-based collaborations. In the decades that followed those two early experiences, I have worked as a ‘Creativity Midwife’ with community members ages 3-93 in a huge range of settings. My clients include children and adults living with disabilities, seniors in several different settings, school-aged kids, teens, and families. This work has been done in schools, clinics, museums, hospitals, Retirement Communities, Senior Centers, churches and privately in my own studio setting. The work has taken me across the border to Mexico as well as to several states including California, Washington, Virginia and New Mexico.
Currently, I am serving the community at United Cerebral Palsy in Tucson. Each week, I set up a studio environment for staff members, administrators, Day Program clients and their care-givers to drop-in to contribute their creative energies to collaborative projects. We are making large scale art works that are being installed on ten walls at the UCP Admin. building down a long hallway. I am beyond thrilled and proud of the work we are doing together. Each person who drops by contributes his or her own spin on what we are creating together. The finished works so far have far exceeded any expectation any of had going into the 6 month-long process. It is my hope to be able to reach younger teaching-artists to share what we have learned working this way together so that these types of projects continue to unfold all over ! The best part of these projects is that community members get to share time, conversations and creative energies in this supportive, informal, deeply nurturing format while interweaving their energies to create things of beauty to be shared by everyone who walks these hallways. The feeling of shared purpose and alignment is palpable and enduring through these works.
What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?
The goal or mission of my work as a teaching-artist is to support Creative Spirit to thrive in the lives of as many diverse types of people as possible. In our overly commodity-driven world, so many people deeply believe that Creativity and art-making are only for the chosen talented few among us. I can’t even begin to tally the number of adults I have met in my life-time who say things like “Oh, I can’t even draw a straight line, I couldn’t possibly be an artist.” I have heard countless variations on a story about how, between the ages of 7-12, most people were shot down by someone in their life about their possible artistic abilities. All it takes is for a teacher, a relative or a peer to tell a young child that his or her creative expression isn’t ‘right’ or ‘good enough’ for that youngster to shut down to the voice of his or own creative spirit calling.
I founded Heart to Hand Studio to be of service to the universal truth that Creativity lives within us all. It’s a funny reality that most people somehow feel that we ‘should’ all be able to draw or paint without guidance or we just aren’t cut out to be artists. Whenever this line of reasoning is spoken, I always ask the person, “Well, do you speak Chinese (or Russian etc.)?” When the answer is “no’, I respond that visual art is a language and can be taught, just like any other language.It is my privilege, my calling and my business to guide absolutely anyone who has the desire to ‘speak’ through art materials.
Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?
I founded “Corazon del Arte” in a small art colony-city in Central Mexico in 1992. The impetus to create the center was that I had birthed my daughter who came into this world with neurological differences. I needed to earn a living while still remaining close to her. Originally, the center was dedicated to children. I offered Summer and Afterschool Art programing. Immediately, parents, Moms, Grandmas, aunts and older siblings began to ask for classes for themselves. The first pivot was from a children-only focus to expanding the classes to adults and teens.
After a seven year long run of a very successful small business, I shut the school down to move my daughter up with me to the United States in search of Special Education and doctor’s services for her special needs. The next pivot was that I took my years of teaching and small-business experience to the Tucson Museum of Art where I worked in their Education Department. This was a huge adjustment, of course. I had been running my own small school for many years and then shifted gears to be a cog in a much larger wheel. I am grateful for the depth and breadth of learning I received there and when I left, I had served as the Director of Education for this regional art museum.
But in reality, I am a studio-practitioner. I missed the hands-on aspect of being with clients in the studio environment. Pivot number 3 was to leave the museum world and become a freelance teaching-artist in schools and other sites all over town. I can proudly say I have worked with well over 3,000 children in TUSD schools in addition to serving adults in many different settings over the years as well.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.hearttohandstudio.com
- Instagram: @Hearttohandstudio
- Facebook: Carolyn King
Image Credits
Carolyn King