Hiromi Katayama had been in the U.S. for less than a year, studying for an MFA in art at Edinboro University in Pennsylvania, when she happened upon a cherry blossom tree near her studio. She’d been questioning the decision to leave her native Japan.
Katayama says her education in the arts in Japan was very different from her education here. There, she says, an instructor would tell her what to do and she did it, while here in the States she was being encouraged to talk about her art and how it was an expression of who she is. She was grappling with that.
But that cherry blossom tree sparked something in Katayama. Homesickness, yes. But something more – something that would lead her to Carmelle Nickens and the Rural Arts Collaborative.
The cherry blossom is an iconic symbol of Japanese culture, she explained, and the sight of it encouraged her to embrace what was most familiar to her, and to share it with the world.
The Rural Arts Collaborative, or RAC, would prove the perfect opportunity to do so. Founded in 2012 by Nickens, the collaborative places “teaching artists” in semester-long residencies in schools throughout rural southwestern Pennsylvania and northern West Virginia. They employ a collaborative, project-based learning model, meaning: no lesson plans.
RAC is not about replacing school-based art teachers. “That’s not the case; that was never the case,” Nickens said. “What we want to do is work with teachers who themselves are very creative and are willing to go outside of the box of their own lesson plans and work with professional artists to give the kids a really unique art experience.”
In most cases, as in Katayama’s classes, this experience entails cultural immersion.
Within the Curricula
Nickens grew up in a richly artistic environment.
“My mother taught art in elementary school,” she said, “and she was one of the most creative people I’ve ever known,” a gifted charcoal sketcher and pianist. “There was always music in our house.”
Nickens was a dancer. But a terrible fall put an end to any ambitions of a career in dance. So she ventured elsewhere in the arts, double-majoring in art history and English literature at the University of Pittsburgh, with a minor in Russian literature.
Art history had captured her heart. She earned a master’s in library and archival sciences and worked in archives at the Carnegie Library and the University of Pittsburgh’s Hillman Library. She then entered the nonprofit world as a fundraiser and grant writer, including for the Urban League.
While at the Urban League, she saw kids coming to afterschool arts programs and was inspired to incorporate more robust arts programs into the school day.
She approached the Claude Worthington Benedum Foundation. They agreed to fund RAC’s first project, in Washington County, Pennsylvania, and then stayed on as a primary supporter. RAC has continued to bring in grants, large and small, from myriad sources. It operates through a fiscal agent, the Fayette County Cultural Trust.
The World at Large
“Project-based learning gives that creative license for kids to really express themselves in so many ways,” Nickens said. It opens worlds.
RAC students often have a clear vision of the art they want to create. And sometimes that vision requires special permission – permission, for example, to paint a mural on the school itself as opposed to a canvas. Nickens stresses the importance of buy-in to the program from the top down: superintendent, principal, teacher.
A person who’s been fully on board from the get-go is Scott Martin, superintendent of the Bentworth School District in rural southwestern Pennsylvania. RAC, Martin said, has not only offered entree to his students to the world of art but to the outside world in general.
Katayama said it’s not uncommon for students in her class to have never traveled beyond their community. They’re eager to learn of other cultures.
Katayama, Martin said, “worked with our students on projects using pigments and methods that she had brought back from Japan. While using these resources and methods, she also immersed them into Japanese culture through stories and experiences.”
“I open up the class to ask any questions they might have,” Katayama said. About food, for example. “They ask me, ‘How do you make sushi?’ And, ‘Do you guys have McDonald’s in Japan?’ I show them an example of a Japanese breakfast, and they’re, like, ‘What! You eat fish for breakfast?’”
Katayama “fueled a passion” in the students,” Martin said. The installation they created – which features thousands of origami cranes – was selected by Pittsburgh International Airport’s art advisory committee to hang in the airport through the fall of 2018. It was then returned to the school.
Ellen Rossi is president of the EQT Foundation, a RAC funder. She underscores a further benefit of the program: career potential. Not only do students “get to express themselves in a different way,” Rossi said, “but they also see somebody on a career path – that you can do this as a job.”
A ‘Hunk’ of American History’
Sam Turich is another RAC mainstay. He’s a writer, director, actor (named the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s 2023 Performer of the Year), and head of education for Bricolage Production Company. Bricolage and RAC were launched around the same time and have thrived in tandem.
Turich and his colleagues help students produce 1940s-style radio plays. The first year of the Bricolage/RAC collaboration, for an eighth-grade social studies class in Washington County, the theme was the Civil War. Those first-year productions were so successful that the theme has been reprised again and again, with five or six original radio plays produced each year.
The students spend weeks researching any aspect of the Civil War that interests them and that they think will make a good story, Turich said. One of the best-received plays was the story of two brothers who flee the potato famine in Ireland and end up on opposite sides in the war, facing each other on the battlefield at Antietam.
“Just watching the kids string together that whole hunk of American history like that – it’s amazing to see them do it,” Turich said.
There’s also a social justice component to RAC’s mission. Nickens said after the murder of George Floyd, “we felt we needed a forum to talk about social justice through the eyes of artists” and to demonstrate how art can help mitigate misconceptions, misinformation, and hostilities.
“So many superintendents, teachers, and principals thought it was a really good idea to get artists together so they could talk to students about what art means from a social justice aspect,” she said. “It means inclusion. It means diversity.”
“We want students to be aware that art is a form of expression,” Nickens said, “and that it’s okay to express yourself differently.”
A Perfect Knot
Nickens’ mantra for RAC goes like this: “Not every student is going to be an artist, but RAC gives students a new way of thinking, seeing, being, and doing, through the lens of the arts.”
And, of course, the teaching artists are likewise learning from their students.
“Oh my gosh, I’ve learned so many things,” Katayama said. For example, when she and her students used fishing wire to assemble cranes and her angling-savvy students taught her how to tie a perfect knot. “I’ve learned about fishing culture, hunting cultures, all of these things that they’re familiar with that I’ve never experienced.”
“So it’s a really good cultural exchange for me as well.”
Nickens is now transitioning into retirement. Turich will be her successor.
Ellen Rossi is inspired by what Nickens has brought to the region’s rural communities: “She has such a passion for the arts herself, and just really understood what was missing in these communities,” and it’s dovetailed into other projects – an art trail in Mon Valley, for example.
“Her heart is fully within this program,” Rossi attests.
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