Monica Dix believes that if you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room.
That’s why the 53-year-old artist and teacher will sometimes tack up one of her in-progress drawings where her room full of eighth-graders can see it, saying, “Okay, five things. Critique my work.”
At first, they praise her art, and tell her she’s the best artist ever.
“Then they dig in,” she said.
They always find mistakes she didn’t see, and they’re not shy about letting her know she didn’t properly measure the space between the nose and the upper lip, or that something was off about the eyes.
“It’s great for my pride,” she said.
It’s also great for her students, because it shows them not only how to look critically at the objective elements that make or break a piece of art, but it shows them what it’s like to be an artist. Sometimes you can fix a mistake, but sometimes you have to start over.
“It’s that whole ‘walk the walk.’ I let them see that,” she said.
Sometimes, a kid will point out an error she’s made, and she realizes she’s not only executed something wrong, she’s been teaching it wrong. It’s like when one person raises his hand and asks a question, and it turns out there are ten people who also had that question, but were too self-conscious to ask.
“It helps everybody,” she said.
Dix has been teaching art to teenagers at Naples Classical Academy, a charter school in Naples, Florida, since 2021. In many ways, it’s an extraordinary school, where kids leave their cell phones behind and nobody aspires to be a TikTok star. The classical curriculum, provided by Hillsdale College, tends to attract families with a certain mindset, she said.
But in other ways, they bring the same attitudes and assumptions to her class that many Americans bring to art in general. Part of the curriculum includes modern art, and every year when she introduces abstract expressionism, someone will say, “I could do that!” or “A kindergartener could do that!”
She responds, “Then why didn’t they?”
She asks her students to learn what was going on in the artist’s life and what was going on in the world. They study art on the same timeline as they study history, so they begin to make connections and understand why some artists chose to break with tradition, and why we still remember their work today.
“I come at it from a historical standpoint, from a cultural history standpoint. (These things are) worth looking at,” she said.
She also gets her students to do more than just look. If they have time, she invites them to re-create art that baffles them — for instance, the intricate, dynamic layers of drips and splashes in a Jackson Pollock action painting.
It’s harder than it looks. Her students are allowed to say whether they like or dislike a piece of art, but first they should know what they’re talking about.
Dix makes herself walk the walk, too. …
Read the rest of my latest artist profile for Our Sunday Visitor.
Image: Sunday Afternoon At the Porch House Pub by Monica Dix (image courtesy of the artist)
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Also, a note: I’m expanding the scope of this monthly artist feature! If you know of a Catholic musician, composer, dancer, or other contributor to the arts who has an interesting story to tell, let me know! Shoot an email to simchafisher at gmail dot com. Thanks!
