Art supplies scattered about, students hard at work and mentors offering pieces of advice are all daily experiences of both Contemporary Arts Memphis’ (CAM) and White Station High School’s (WSHS) art classrooms. These two places of creative learning were the subject of Khloe Brown’s (12) project for Advanced Placement (AP) research.
Brown is a University of Memphis (U of M)-bound senior, set on studying fine arts with a focus in painting. So, for her research paper, she chose to write about different learning environments for art because it was something that naturally took her interest. Her project covers how these varying environments affect the students within them, such as in a classroom, at school or at a local nonprofit studio space.
“I love art,” Brown said. “I’ve been drawing my whole life and I wanted to talk to other artists. When we were doing our preliminary research, … I came across this study where they were looking at children’s ability to do different art skills, and they found children had less repetitive works when they were introduced to different music and other arts and different sensory stimuli. And so that got me interested in how that would be applicable to teenagers.”
Brown has taken both AP Drawing and AP Art History, so she was especially familiar with art in a school setting. In addition to this knowledge, Brown chose to interview people, a total of 30 youths — 15 from WSHS and 15 from CAM — all in the span of two months to further her understanding of the two distinct experiences. Interviewing was only one of many steps in the research project; others steps included collecting 50 sources, planning the method of research, getting peer reviewed and writing the paper itself.
“I think [this project] just helped build my writing skills — which is really important when you’re marketing your art and writing artist statements,” Brown said. “But it also just helped me in general with things like being able to communicate. [I wanted] to meet deadlines, come to school, be resilient.”
The biggest complaint of people learning at school was the lack of time, as classes are only around an hour. After doing the research and weighing what she learned in interviews, Brown found that the best way to enrich art students is a blend of both focused classroom-style learning and a more free creative experience.
“I think that distributing the work and what you’re learning with Contemporary Arts Memphis and other community programs was really beneficial to students,” Brown said. “Also, Contemporary Arts Memphis helped improve confidence. So while it … didn’t highly improve specific technical abilities, it improved a lot when it came to confidence and the ability to explain certain visual concepts.”
Brown’s research demonstrates that learning can take many different shapes, and there are options in the community to further art student’s passions outside of the school. On a more personal level, she was able to learn how to conduct research on her own rather than summarizing other’s work — an element unique to AP research.
“I think [for] so much of … my art process I hated writing artist statements,” Brown said. “I hate doing things like that because I felt like I wasn’t … worthy to say it, and so I feel like AP Research really helped me realize [that] it’s important to do your own work and to say your own things because no one else can say what you have to say for you.”
