Art Alive

For the past two summers, MAWA Art Education Specialists Yvette Cenerini and Dawn Knight have been hard at work on the creation of art education tools featuring artworks by contemporary women and non-binary Manitoba artists.

In August, MAWA and the Manitoba Association of Art Educators, one of our partners on this massive project, hosted a “think tank” with seven educators K-12 to review the first six modules. The response was overwhelmingly positive. They said the resources were “game-changing,” “unlike anything else available,” “highly usable” and “revolutionary.” And they all wanted more.

This fall, MAWA began work on the fully bilingual (Eng/Fr) Art Alive website, where the modules will be freely available. It will be completed later this winter. Our short-term goal is to post 10 detailed modules and, in response to the teachers’ feedback, add another 20-40 artwork images without teaching prompts, to let the educators use the images as jumping-off points for activities of their own invention.

Of course our ambitions with this project continue to grow. MAWA would like to print the art images and distribute them in a boxed set, not unlike MAWA’s popular art education publication Resilience: 50 Indigenous Art Cards and Teaching Guide.

Teachers need contemporary resources that help them to address the issues of here and now, and students need homegrown artist role models that let them know that art is contemporary, vibrant and being practised all around them. For too long, students in our province have only had dead, male European role models. We know that contemporary art made by women and gender diverse artists in Manitoba is powerful, and will inspire future generations.