Cultivating creative minds: The impact of arts education

Monique Blom (MEd'10) is a multifaceted interdisciplinary artist, activist, consultant and arts educator whose creative journey unfolds amidst Canada's wildwood landscapes.

Blom graduated from the University of Saskatchewan in 2010 with a Master of Education degree. She was recently honored with the 2024 USSU Excellence in Teaching award for her work as a sessional lecturer in the College of Education.

The College of Education visited Blom at her home and art studio near Blaine Lake, Sask., to talk about her path to art and art education, her time as a USask student and her passion for teaching.

It was by pure accident. I grew up in a small town and thought about becoming a professional beach volleyball player.  I ended up discovering color and pattern and I couldn't get enough of it. And it was very difficult to think about a career or future in art. 

I moved to the city, to Saskatoon where I took an art class for the first time and I had an art teacher who just blew my mind. She handed me a book on Salvador Dali and said, “I think you might like this person.” I started looking at surrealism and started looking deeper into the idea of expressing yourself. I never was great with words. If I could have just spoken through visual language and people could fill in the words, that was kind of my superpower. 

I didn't know you could be an artist. Being from a small town, you kind of grew up to be a teacher, nurse or a social worker. Coming to the city and learning that there's something called an artist; it seemed romantic, but completely impossible.  

I have about four ways of practicing right now. I perform and make paintings, sculptures and installations.  

I love performance for the immediacy of audience participation. It's a beautiful way to engage when you're looking at a piece of art. There's this kind of observer looking in, but with performance there's an equal playing field. Two people come together and an audience comes and it's here right now. It's this experience of us having a conversation where creating objects and creating environments becomes about your experience. And then we can talk about it after.

I really love the idea of teaching. Teaching was the one place that I could find a voice. Otherwise I just didn't like speaking. [But] teaching fell aside because I got accepted to an art college in Calgary. 

I ran away from the world after graduating with my Bachelors of Fine Arts and lived in Mexico, New York and a whole bunch of places all over the world looking for this place called home and looking for this notion of home, and kind of like looking for a group of artists that I could share language with and I ended up coming back to Saskatoon. 

I had five years of pure exploration. I would just go with people who wanted to be artists their whole life. I never understood what that was because it wasn't my reality. I just knew I had to create and I knew that that was my way of navigating the world of pattern, design and color. All of those things made sense all of a sudden in that world. It was like everybody spoke about language and it was just an innate language. Self-expression was everything. 

When I worked throughout the world, I was able to do artist residencies and would often end up in schools. I loved that piece of art because it's sharing. Sharing art with kids is the most pure form. You learn the most from them. They're the best teachers.  

In that experience, I started seeing the same thing in cities. There weren’t tons of art education [opportunities] early on. I ended up back in Saskatoon and I have this wild notion that what if we started an art school here?

I was working at the Mendel Art Gallery at the time and I was invited by a woman named Alexandra Bartok to go and look at a master's degree in education, and I thought it was quite exciting. 

It was [Professor] Bob Regnier who said, “If you really want to start this art school, why don't you come and do a master's and we'll see where it takes you.” I didn't think I'd get in. And then I did, which was awesome. The master's program is so open and it allows you to explore.  

Bob and Professor Shaun Murphy mentored me. There was a list of faculty that mentored me to really look at what it was that I wanted to teach. It wasn't so much about teaching art. It was a transformative learning experience through creative process. How can we take anything creative and not just in art, but in engineering and math? How can we take that way of thinking and bring it into our learning models.  

After graduating, I was able to work throughout the system and in classrooms again, trying out different things. When I graduated, I thought, “Okay, this is good, I don't ever want to start a school [with the complexity of] logistics of administration.” 

I started teaching art education at the university [through] Professor Jay Wilson [who] phoned me and asked, “Would you be interested in doing this?” I said, “Not in your life, because I can’t teach adults.” I was so scared to teach adults. He said, “I'd really like you to try one class.” 

I taught my first class and I realized that all I ever wanted to do is teach future teachers how to teach art. Not skill-based necessarily, but mind-based. Many years later, I still get the same excitement every single time I come into that classroom because it's a new group of students, often who are coming from rural or up north, and they may have arts education in terms of skill-based [learning] but t's the way in which they're thinking about creativity that I really like to challenge.  

We need a human being model that is based on physical well-being, spiritual well-being, emotional well-being, intellectual well-being and art creativity. I think we get a holistic person. When you can equip people, the language or the skill sets to look at that and apply it cross-disciplinary; there isn't a world of Phys. Ed., Health or Art, it's all one in the same. 

I took away relationship, 100%. I learned in all of my post-secondary education how to form relationships and how other people can help you clarify what you're trying to say. And that's what I do with my students. And I think that that's so much of why I love working within the college is that it's about bridging possibility for people. 

There's no need for recognition, you don't get into teaching for that. I think that question would be better to ask the students. For them to take time out of what is already a consuming life to know that a moment like this exists, I still don't really have words for it. But this was an honor. 

It means that, yes, I’ve done a good job, but more importantly, I’ve touched them in some way or we've shifted their way of thinking.  

It's student driven, I can't say thank you enough to my students because they're the ones that we serve. My students say thank you all the time, it's enough.  Going to class is enough. And I know that that sounds like as cliche as possible, but it's when you create a classroom environment and you actually see your students for the people they are, that's enough of a reward to last a lifetime.  

I do wish that every single student that I have gets one of these just so they can feel what I felt when I found out it was, you know, it's just pure gratitude. 

In my painting practice, it's all experiments and materiality. What I'm doing right now is working in conjunction with AI. I'll sit down and write out my idea to prompt it. I’ll get an image from that image and I'm able to start a conversation or a dialog. We just have this dialog that goes back and forth, and then it gets to a point where I'm happy with that. I take it out, print it out, collage it into a painting. I ask what the painting wants and the paint, the paper, the glazes, the pigment, and the pattern all emerges from its own being. 

Relationship. Kindness. Love. Hope. Beauty. That's what we need. I think that if we can inspire every student and every college on the notion that they can bring beauty to the world, if we can learn and share knowledge out of a place of hope and love and kindness, relationships can be built. 

The piece that keeps me coming back year after year is the hope that the students that I get to work with are going to go across the colleges and share that knowledge and inspire others and ask others the right questions.  

I grew up in a time where it was very much about the individual, about ego. And I don’t see that in the generations that are coming now. I see community and I see advocacy and I see hope in a way that speaks to why a university exists within a city and within a province and within the world. It's to create possibility and beauty and to be truthful in its nature. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Article originally published at https://news.usask.ca