As Assistant Director at the Art Gallery of South Australia, Lisa Slade is often confronted with people who look at an abstract painting and say “my kid could have painted that.”
Her response? “Go on then. I call their bluff.” Lisa isn’t bluffing either. With the Gallery’s START programme, thousands of children will be getting the opportunity to flex their creative muscles.
START boasts a wide variety of activities for budding young artists. “We turn the gallery into a kind of festival space. You can take part in guided tours designed for young ones, and art making workshops. There are all sorts of theatrical and musical performances, some of which are interactive. We really value the kinaesthetic, for instance, which is why we have performance and theatre, for example we'll be using a circus skills workshop.
“Learning through doing is significant, learning through seeing is significant, and learning through hearing is significant. So we try to cover all of those bases, which is what good teaching is ultimately about. It's very much about that idea of taking art to as many people as possible, and art being a transformative experience.”Lisa believes children bring a vital and unique perspective to the art they create. “You look at the drawings of a three-year-old, they're really quite special. A lot of modernist artists, like Picasso and Matisse, made comments about the genius of childhood, how in those early years, we are unencumbered by artifice and self-consciousness. We can have a truly creative experience. Creative expression is the first language of a three-year-old. Our programme, START, is in a sense trying to open up that creativity, but also sow the seeds of a creative life.”
START owes its funding to the charitable donations of the Balnaves and James & Diana Ramsay Foundations, and Lisa strongly approves of their generosity. “I absolutely applaud it. I would like to encourage more wealthy Australians to donate, particularly to the arts. The Ramsay Foundation is a case in point, they now support all of our under-12 programmes, they’re really committed to an art-led life for young people. I think that is a commendable way to allocate your funds.“Funding for the arts from government sources has not increased significantly in a considerable length of time, so with our ambitions expanding, we've needed to expand our capacity to deliver. Private philanthropy has been the way we've been able to do that.”
Indeed, Lisa has strong words for those myopic bigwigs who scorn the arts as unimportant. “We know from research the world over that the capacity to problem solve and the capacity for creative thinking are foundational skills that essentially underpin everything. We're not of the persuasion that everybody who comes to START will end up being part of the art world, but we do know that the skills that are developed in creative problem solving and creative thinking are skills that are foundational, and much sought-after skills in the workplace, and also in the world more generally. We believe that a culture led in the creative, immersive experience for young ones is a great way to make fantastic citizens.“We believe it's an opportunity to become part of a rich, diverse, engaged cultural experience.”
START is held on the first Sunday of every month at the Art Gallery of South Australia.
