Spring Conference 2020
Our spring 2020 UAEA Conference at Hurricane High School was a great success! We had huge numbers of participants (about 50 more than last year), a great number of vendors, and a fabulous selection of presentations and workshops.
We started off the conference on Thursday with the Throw Down at the Tilted Kiln, and the Paint Out and Shoot Out in Springdale. We had dozens of educators come out to listen to Roland Lee give a demo about watercolor painting and Claire White teach about panoramic photography. The weather was beautiful and it was enjoyable to be surrounded by beautiful scenery and make art. There was also a great turnout at the “Warp and Weft” Evening 4 Educators at Dixie State University Thursday evening.
We kicked off the conference on Friday by introducing the theme, “LEAP: Loving Experimentation, Abandoning Perfection.” UAEA has been trying to promote using art education as a way to promote positive mental health. LEAP follows the 2019 theme “Art for Life” to try to unify art teachers to use art classrooms to teach social and emotional well-being in addition to art skills. Our keynote speaker, Michael Bingham, truly embraced this theme when he decided to make his address an experiment, having another randomly arrange his slides and responding to them in the moment. He inspired art teachers to make their classrooms a place of joy and to embrace trying new things. Other highlights Friday morning included recognizing our 2020 Award Winners, especially Carrie Wilson as Art Educator of the Year and James Rees as Lifetime Achievement Award winners. Teachers had the opportunity to network and connect with others in their content area in the PLC breakout sessions and get new ideas at the Share Fair.
UAEA brought two master artists to teach classes: Jane de Groff, who taught Friday afternoon about Shibori indigo dyeing techniques, and Ruth Nichols, who taught Saturday morning about Watercolor techniques. We had a large number of hands-on workshops this year- so many that we added two more sessions per hour and extended our Friday breakout workshops until 6 p.m. Workshops included a variety of topics from learning new artistic techniques to reaching out to multicultural students and students with trauma.
Saturday morning, UAEA partnered with Engage Utah, who was also having a conference about how the arts promote well-being, by livestreaming the keynote address of Dr. Jeremy Nobel, founder of the Unloneliness Project and the Foundation for Art and Healing. He talked about how art can help people have mindfulness and enjoy the moment, be creative while making art, and also respond and share to connect with others. 65 members participated in the livestream session and many others attended his address at Dixie State in person. We also had a NAEA past-president special guest, Kim Defibaugh, who taught a session about how to go from Advocacy to Activism. There were many fabulous workshops in a wide range of artistic styles, media, and topics.
It was also wonderful to see so many artists donate work to the Catherine Ford Scholarship. This year we had two student winners: Aubrey Burton from Springville High School ($1000) and Jasmine Felt from Juab High School ($500). We were able to continue to raise more money to support this scholarship from the sales of artwork donated.
It was wonderful to see people connect with friends, experiment with more artistic content, and learn best teaching pedagogy. The weather was friendly to those traveling to and from the conference. With the help of our fabulous Pre-service students, the conference was cleaned up and completed in a quick and efficient way. The conference was truly a chance to recharge the batteries to finish out the school year.
Thank you to all of the many board members who donated their time to make the conference happen. Thank you to all of the presenters for the PLC breakouts, Share Fair, and workshops. Thank you to all who came and shared your enthusiasm and passion for art education. It was a great conference!