Glenna Stearman Park, Teaching Art Around the World

Glenna Stearman Park, 1960

Glenna Stearman Park has taught art classes from pre-school to graduate school.  Her undergraduate training earned a BFA from Wichita State University, including an intervening year at the Philadelphia College of Art.  She also earned 30 additional hours at universities in Colorado, Texas and California as well as a California secondary teaching credential. One day of substitute teaching made her decide “NO WAY IN HELL” would she ever teach in public school!  So Glenna and her husband Joel moved on to graduate school at UC San Diego.  With three boys under 7,  Glenna earned the MFA, which included one year of teaching undergraduate painting at UCSD, while Joel earned his PhD in Engineering.

Upon graduation, they moved to Texas where Joel took his first job, and Glenna taught various art courses in junior colleges.  She then ran the art studio at Bexar County Jail for two years.  The art produced by the inmates in the San Antonio jail was almost exclusively religious.  The Virgin of Guadalupe was drawn on handkerchiefs and bed sheets with colored pencils and ballpoint pen and also tattooed on the residents’ arms and backs.  Richard Avedon photographed the tattoos for a book, and the Whitney Museum included the handkerchiefs and sheets in an exhibition at a jail on the waterfront in NY City. Glenna never got used to going through locked passages with guards.  Fortunately, the inmate-students were so glad to get out of the tanks that they always behaved.  An inmate created the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe in colored pencil on handkerchief as a gift for a favorite teacher.

Creating her own art while teaching, Glenna was one of the guest curators for the first exhibition of women’s art in Sao Paulo, Brazil, at the Museum of the University of Sao Paulo in 1980.  She lectured and met with artists and collectors there and was invited back a few years later for a small group show at the gallery of the Sao Paulo City Library.  After living a few years in San Antonio, Glenna was invited to teach at Saint Mary’s Hall, a small private school for girls in grades 1-12.  At the same time she joined the Jump Start Performance Art Company where she did set design, costume design, writing and acting for 10 years. Also during those years, Glenna exhibited her drawings, paintings, and sculptures in galleries in LA, Dallas, Austin, San Antonio, Houston, Little Rock, Memphis, New York, and Toronto.  She also wrote freelance art reviews for newspapers in San Francisco, Atlanta, Dallas, and San Antonio.  All together in San Antonio, Glenna spent about 20 years in varied art activities and teaching as well as raising three boys with her husband Joel.  At right, “Somalia Dinner Party,” mat glaze on red tile, to commemorate starvation in Somalia, 1991-93.  Featured at St. Mary’s Hall.

Through a grant from the Holt Foundation, Saint Mary’s Hall paid Glenna’s way to international exhibitions and art world meetings and classes.  Every other summer, the Holt Foundation grants supported Glenna’s studies in Italy, France, Portugal, and New Hampshire.  They also sent her to the Sundance Film Festival for three different years as she developed a high school film course.  Her students were disturbed that she taught them a more intellectually vigorous way of seeing movies—but she bribed them with popcorn.

During a sabbatical in 1995, Glenna was awarded a residency at the McDowell Art Colony in New Hampshire.  During these years Glenna’s classes were often featured on a local PBS program called ArtBeat.  Her high school students even showed their work in local galleries, and Glenna curated major exhibitions at The Blue Star art space. (The politically controversial “Loaded” show opened at The Blue Star with a bomb threat, and a British contemporary art audience flew in to Texas to see the show.) Glenna participated in high profile art discussions in San Antonio and other cities.  In 1995, she was the co-organizer of the Women’s Caucus for Art national meeting in San Antonio that drew hundreds of national artists to Texas.  At left, “San Antonio Light,” acrylic painting about the language of war time, 4’x5’ (1989). Glenna wrote all the copy for her paintings about journalism.

 In the summer of 1996, Glenna and Joel moved to Taejon, Korea, where he was a visiting scientist for the Korean government. Glenna discovered the silk market and purchased a full color pallet of silk fabric to use in her art.  She gave a guest lecture at one of the universities, but spent most of her time teaching conversational English to university and other private students.  She also substituted in literature and religion classes at a private American high school.  The students were delighted to read from a play when she made them trade genders and pitch their voices either very high or low.  In the religion class the teacher left a Bible verse for the class to memorize.  Glenna had everyone stand up and walk as they memorized and then told them she would direct them like a choir.  They learned the verse quickly and had a merry time altering the rhythm and volume as a chorus.

Returning to the US in 1998, Joel and Glenna landed in Memphis where he did submarine research and she started writing again as an art critic.   She was invited to teach a writing course for graduate students at the Memphis College of Art.  Over a period of five years she taught various graduate art seminar classes, contemporary art history, thesis writing and performance art.  When Joel was transferred to Washington in 2004 for surface ship design testing,  Glenna started teaching painting and patch work hand sewing to grade school and middle school children during the Norwood School summer program and after care in the winter.  Glenna had gone from pre-school through graduate school and back again to younger students. At right, “All  the News That’s Fit to Paint,” a still life,  gouache on watercolor paper, 1987.

Glenna’s body of work was so eclectic that she incorporated her own art into the lesson plans with the students. Basically, she taught skills in various media plus the conceptual reason for making things.  She was the art teacher when the school was small enough that she taught all grade levels and had to remember what she taught each age group because she did not want to repeat herself.  The children made copies of primitive mud huts and cliff dwellings, and then pressed them into the woods on campus.  They took friends on short hikes to see one another’s work.  They celebrated when the animal shelter keeper brought a 3-foot iguana to class and let him sit on a rock all day t0 watch the kids draw and paint while barely moving his head.  Two opera singers walked around the art studio singing while high school students made abstracted marks representing the singers and the music.  First graders filled their pockets with biscuits from the dining hall and sprinkled the food on the lawn in the gardens. Sparrows hopped around for the feast.  A flute player created a hush over the students as they worked on abstract oil pastel drawings.  Over the years, Glenna repeated the media but changed the why and what the students made. Many of her students earned college degrees in art history and studio art. Her students learned that art had a very open definition.  At left, “Tree Branch Woman,” acrylic on twigs.   The St. Mary’s school campus had woods on the grounds where my students and I often found creative ways to use found materials to make art.  The Tree Branch Woman is an example.  It was made from sticks picked up that resembled a person.

Editor’s Note:  The credit as author of this story belongs to Glenna, even though she has written in third person.