Young Artist Looks Beyond Her Canvas to Her Community

Graduate student Kristine Donnelly is both a practicing artist earning a Master of Fine Arts degree and a community educator teaching art to children while earning a Master of Art Education.

Graduate student Kristine Donnelly is a better practicing artist because of her long-term work as an art educator and a better art educator because of her work as a practicing artist.

Donnelly, 27, of Delhi, of the University of Cincinnati's top-ranked College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning, is a painter who becomes energized for her creative efforts by going into the community to educate children in the fine arts.
Kristine Donnelly
Kristine Donnelly with some of the children she's worked with.

Currently, Donnelly is a visiting artist at the Cincinnati Art Museum overseeing an art-education program for children there. It's work that grew out of her service via Americorps in which she previously worked in an after-school art program in Baltimore.

Eventually, she would like to begin a pilot program where she trains middle-school students to be docents. "A summer program that trains fourth- and fifth-graders to be docents takes place at Cincinnati's Westin Gallery already. I plan to 'shadow' that program this summer and then begin my own program by spring of 2009 where these young students can serve as docents to their peers in the University of Cincinnati's galleries," said Donnelly.

She added that she learns just as much - and perhaps even more - from the children she's been working with as she is able to teach them. Donnelly explained, "It's amazing to watch children approach and solve a problem. They can break down very complex challenges into simple solutions and do so, quite often, better than adults do."
Kristine Donnelly


And most importantly, Donnelly's work as an art educator - and editorial assistant with the Journal of Art Education (the most influential and prestigious journal in the art-education field) - provides her balance in pursuing her own work as a fine artist.

"My skills as an artist and an art educator grow together. Each energizes the other. I love making art, and I loving working with children. I need more than the solitary experience of making art. The community engagement is needed to feed me and my work. But then, the solitary time in front of the canvas also feeds into my creativity in working with the community," she stated.

In pursuing her community-art efforts and her research and publication endeavors with the Journal of Art Education, Donnelly is partnering with Flavia Bastos, associate professor of art education, who will assume her role as the journal's editor in January 2009.
Sod couch
An installation art piece, a couch of sod, made by UC's Kristine Donnelly and local students for the Civic Garden Center.

Said Bastos, "Kristine is truly doing work on the professional level in all that she does. We have presented together on community-based art during a program at the Ohio Art Education Association, and she will be featured in an upcoming textbook on service learning."

Donnelly is included in that text, Living Sociology: Social Problems and Service, written by a faculty member at Worcester State College in Massachusetts because of her outstanding work with children in community-based art programs.