Volume 6, Entry 17: Art Docent

Remember is an action verb

The list of things I remember clearly from kindergarten is short.

I remember making alliterative characters from construction paper and playing in the toy grocery store in the center of the classroom. Albert’s apology after switching places with his brother for a day has stuck with me, as has the way he got caught—Ms. Trost taught us American Sign Language, and he didn’t recognize his signed name. There was also the day of the shooting, only a few dozen feet from our street-facing classroom, and I remember Trost shuttering the windows and pulling the TV cart to the opposite wall so we could watch it safely while she waited for an all-clear. If you tack on crying at promotion, arguing with Katrina over the jungle gym, and The Three Piggy Opera, that about exhausts what’s recollectable.

Oh, and Art Docent. I remember Art Docent.

That grammar is how I remember it, by the way. “Art Docent” as in “We have Art Docent today”, delivered with the same cadence future teachers would say “We have Computers today” and mean we would get to play Oregon Trail in the lab with Ms. Olovson for an hour. I learned “Art Docent” as a program name, as an odd activity we sometimes did. “Art Docent” was that thing where some lady came in and showed us pictures.

Of course, I know now that the woman doing the showing was the docent, and by virtue of showing us art, she became the art docent.

If I had to guess, I’d guess we got three visits from the art docent in kindergarten. We assuredly got at least three more in first grade, but I don’t recall them in second grade. Mrs. Becker would have engineered shipping the Mona Lisa to us to bring things more to life, so maybe no one ever needed to come. I could be wrong, though.

When Art Docent happened, we all sat down and listened. I didn’t know the word “lecture” at five, six, or seven, so it’s only with hindsight that I can describe it as a lecture. But that was it: we received a lecture about several significant pieces of artwork from history. Each woman arrived in possession of transparency sheets featuring these notable works. She’d place one page onto the overhead projector, and over its rumbling hum, she’d talk to us about the artist, the piece’s history, its then-present location, and what it meant.

Seeing as the audiences she addressed were tiny children with tiny child brains, that this was a regular occurrence perplexes me. Although I acknowledge that these lectures were surely simplified appropriately for kids, I can’t imagine what the end goal of this program was for elementary schoolers. I can’t remember even one of those pieces of artwork we inspected; straining my brain, I picture large red rectangles with abstract flourishes swirled into abstraction. That’s probably not what I saw, but that’s all I have in my head from those sessions 33 years ago. Was I meant to remember the artwork? Was the program meant to spark a curiosity about the art? I couldn’t have distinguished between a Jackson Pollack and the finger painting done by Curtis before recess; I’m not sure I could now, either. “Art” was pretty essential to the program I knew as “Art Docent”, but whatever Art I saw failed to stick. At all.

In truth, I remember the art docents themselves more. I remember dark-haired women who reminded me of my mom. They wore professional attire, with creases and collars, and they spoke gently but with wide, enthusiastic eyes. I spent more time watching them, the people, the women, the ones producing the sound. That’s always been my way in classes: I watched the person talking, so trusting of them to guide me truly that I didn’t even think of the gesture as one of trust. I listened like hell to each and every art docent, none of their words sticking, but my understanding of Art growing. Art, they taught me, was a thing like Computers and Science, that was small here but evidently big out there somewhere. People loved Art so much that they put it on overhead transparencies and sent missionaries to the schools to extol its virtues. I’d squint and mouth “Whoa” when they directed me to, but then I’d return to watching the docent because a woman talking made sense to me in a way the paintings she pointed to did not.

I have so many questions about Art Docent. Who were these women? How extensive was their training? Where did the curriculum come from? Was this a district thing or a PTA thing or a specific teacher thing? Of course, I’m also dying to know the artwork they showcased. Was there anything red? Was my first glimpse of Mona Lisa or Starry Night projected onto a portable’s wall? If I knew the art, then maybe I could trace some impact it had on me; perhaps I’d pull a picture I painted with a similar composition that suggests something from Art Docent stuck.

That’s a lot of questions; that’s too many questions. And none of them is the question I have about Art Docent. It’s a question I ask all the time because it’s a question I ask myself all the time.

What’s the point?

*****

In 2023, April 28th fell on a Friday.

In 2018, it fell on a Saturday, so I got the call from Chantelle on Sunday, meaning I went to school on Monday, unsure of what to do or say or feel on that day or any day that would follow.

But in 2023, April 28th fell on a Friday. A school day. I began the day like I always did, walking flowers to the garden and writing a letter to Davina, but because I was in the midst of writing “Cope Floats”, the weight of the day crushed me. I needed to do something, so I talked to Bernice and tossed out the one idea I had. She listened, weighed, and seconded what became my plan. When sixth period arrived, I implemented that plan.

After going through the day’s math work, I took my class on a field trip. It was a warm, spring day, and again, a Friday, so no one had any complaints about going outside for a spell. Nobody knew where I was going, so they followed languidly, talking and laughing amongst themselves without a care in the world.

We stopped between the front office and the counselors’ building. While they shuffled into an organized glob, I stepped aside, leaving a short, narrow sidewalk exposed.

“Does anyone know where we are?”

That year, in that class, no one did. That group had lost the end of their freshman year and most of their sophomore year to COVID, so they’d spent less time on campus than any other senior class. It was a long shot that anyone would know. Advanced Placement Calculus BC students don’t tend to be intimately acquainted with the principal’s office anyhow.

It was better that they didn’t know what they were looking at. The tiny strip is innocuous; it’s tucked away, it’s obscured, it’s rarely used because the gate at the end of it is only occasionally opened. But I know the space well. I take every opportunity to pass by it that I can.

“At Laguna, there was a plaque. At our school, there is a garden,” I told them.

“A garden for the dead.”

There should have been loud cars ripping past us; the middle school was soon to get out, which meant the daily congestion had definitely already begun. Yet I remember a stillness around us. The class was big, with that formidable group of gregarious guys, but they were all collectively silent. I had every eye and every ear.

I’m not going to say what I told them. You can figure out what I told them and why we visited the Memorial Garden on April 28th. I know what I said was right because I started to cry. I know what I said landed because several of them began to cry, too.

It’s such a quaint little space. It’s shaded a lot of the time; if there were a bench, it would make a perfect reading nook for scholarly students who refuse to go home. The place is green, abundantly green, with vines sprouting and sprawling so prolifically that they threaten to grow over the plaques, but there’s metaphor in that, I’m sure, in life surrounding and blanketing the markers of death.

After I said my piece, I invited them to enter the space themselves, a few at a time. I asked them to read the names—names that could have no meaning to them—and think about what those names mean. I requested their reflection on their near futures in contrast to the three names on the office side with birthdates only a few years before theirs.

And then I walked away. I told them I’d be waiting for them at the classroom. I did peek back once, and I saw gentle shuffling, arched backs, hands held. I heard nothing but soft sniffles. That was enough. And if it wasn’t, the moist cheeks and red eyes that returned during the next ten minutes, who sat in stunned silence in the classroom until the bell, were.

I took both BC classes there last year. I’m taking all three BC classes there tomorrow, when the 28th falls on a Monday.

I have to take them. I have to show them. I have to put this space in front of them. It’s a compulsion as strong as any I have ever felt. The pull there is magnetic, is automatic, is overwhelming.

That intensity doesn’t stop the question, though. It’s there just like it is for the docents who preceded me.

What’s the point?

*****

What good comes from showing fine art to kindergartners is a fair question.

I mean, it is, isn’t it? Their brains aren’t ready to understand anything. Talk of color and tools could be helpful as a means of building vocabulary, but names won’t stick, dates definitely won’t stick, and unless a piece can be explained in terms of Bert and Ernie or Scooby Doo, good luck getting a five-year-old to engage with the theme in a piece of pointillism.

In fact, one could argue that Art Docent did more damage than good. With its format poorly suited to its audience, Art threatened to become a disinterest, something dull and rote and hands-off. At best, Art became like Science felt to me in elementary school: like a tertiary afterthought squeezed in every few weeks. No wonder Science never swept me away: despite a dynamic instructor, we only spent a few hours together during every trimester! Science didn’t seem important to me until middle school. Neither did Art.

That right there’s the truth, but it also provides an impetus for the program in question. Art Docent, haphazardly timed and unmemorable though it was, did achieve something: it exposed us all to the concept of Art. That Art held tertiary status alongside Science exposes a glaring flaw in the elementary education I received prior to standardization in 2000, but that shouldn’t obscure an important fact: we did have a Science teacher. We did experiments with her and talked about the solar system with her, and we did it all surrounded by a ring of terrariums with fish and reptiles and flora that had been cultivated by her. It was a beautiful classroom. I disliked Science, especially as we got older, but we had Science, so I was aware of the bare bones basics of Science. Too little of something important is far better than none of it.

That’s the attitude I should take toward Art Docent, too. With those sharply-dressed women and their expensive overhead transparencies, we learned that Art was a thing. Whether we recalled the artwork later needn’t be the point: the exposure mattered. If even one kid in every class went wide-eyed looking at a Picasso or Rembrandt, suddenly planting the seed for a future passion, wasn’t that worth the trouble? The other children learn in their developing brain that Art is a thing worthy of sharply-dressed adults and expensive resources. Words and terms and tools drop into our ears, maybe to stay or maybe to fade, but they’re dropped in. When I judge Art Docent as an Art History class (and from one-third of a century’s distance), I misapply goals for twenty-somethings to children prone to swallowing Legos.

I can imagine someone at the school district spearheading this effort.

“Our students don’t get exposed to the arts,” that champion of the humanities would lament. “We need to make time for Art.”

“But who will train the teachers?” a skeptic would ask, naturally, maybe from legit concern or maybe to hide fiduciary apprehension behind additional pedagogical preparation.

“Art docents,” another someone would say. “We could train art docents to travel around and present these lessons.”

“Brilliant!” someone would say. “We can tap into our communities. Maybe they’ll volunteer!”

“I like it,” the secret stingy skeptic would say.

And so there would be a program that would simulate brief visits to the world’s finest Art museum. That way, these small children, most of whom would not see Art at home or visit Art on family trips, would at least know that Art was out there. Art Docent would provide culture, and a little culture would be better than no culture.

Art Docent wasn’t meant to lay the foundation for future Art History courses. Its goals were far humbler:

To make adolescents aware that Art merits a history in the first place.

*****

I was a senior in high school when I found the plaque.

I TA’d for a Science class in the second and fourth quarters of twelfth grade, and that Science class did a research project requiring a library visit. Although I recently learned there may have been more than a plaque, that plaque left me spellbound. I was sitting at a round table with David, the freshman I talked to regularly that year, when I glanced over my right shoulder and saw it hanging on a single nail on a support column. The design matched what I would eventually choose for the Mathletes MVP plaque.

I only recognized one name on the plaque: Pia. Pia had been a year older than I, but she took her own life as a ninth grader, before I arrived on campus. I never knew Pia, yet I instantly knew from her name what that plaque was because Pia had been in Concert Choir when she died. Mr. Souliere composed a song for her. The group sang it at their spring concert.

I knew this because Souliere told us about it. Even though most of the Concert Choir featured returning members—sophomores from Pia’s class, juniors and seniors who sang with her and then sang for her—he told us about that song. It didn’t register with me when he did, when I was fourteen, and it didn’t when he told us again when I was fifteen and then sixteen in Vocal Ensemble. That story didn’t change how I felt about Souliere—I looked up to him as much as I did any person—and it didn’t help me know Pia any more than glancing at her eighth grade yearbook photo does now, but it planted a seed in me because I recognized her name on the plaque.

That plaque looked so woeful, so sterile and stately and small, and it bothered me that such a thing was how the school would remember Pia. I thought about that plaque when Sarah Lekven died, too—I wrote about it explicitly during the aftermath, about the tragedy of becoming one more name on it.

Because Souliere talked to us about Pia, I understood a context I couldn’t have otherwise. His words connected me to a person I would never know and could never know, and he made me aware of something greater than myself, greater than our class, and greater than the music we performed together. But he also embedded an idea in my head, an idea that I’m not sure he intended to, but that found me all the same.

Souliere remembered Pia. He actively and presently remembered Pia. Whoever she was, she was gone, but she wasn’t gone from him. She would never be his student again—and she was only his student for a short, short time—and yet there her name was, every quarter, right before a pregnant pause and a timely throat clear.

I didn’t understand what any of those signals meant at fifteen and sixteen because I wasn’t ready: I hadn’t lost anyone to suicide, and I hadn’t had serious thoughts about being gone myself just yet. But I understand it now, and I think that understanding began when I looked at the plaque, tucked away in the library, and compared it to Souliere’s writing a song, and also Souliere’s bringing her name up. It occurred to me right then that a plaque isn’t the same as holding onto a person, of saying her name out loud and sharing a little bit about her, of remembering and demonstrating, even if only with a sigh and a gulp, the profundity of that loss. Because Souliere said something—and each time, it really was a tiny something—he set me on a path toward understanding two somethings:

01) Someone remembers.

02) Someone hurts.

I didn’t know Pia, so I could never understand anything that led to her death. Even if I had, as I have others, a decision like hers is a radical break from logic such that even those closest few grieve with only contrived stories to make sense of it. Stories comfort the living in a hollow facsimile of those who have died. I don’t know what any of them were thinking. Not Pia. Not Katelyn. Not Joe. Not Uncle John.

But I know what I was thinking on my darkest of dark nights. I know what was in my head, and I understand why it was there, and I know that I’ve heard gradients of the same from others in crisis over the last ten years as well. And I’ve always been left with yet another question:

Why did I reach out to someone?

The simple answer is that I wanted someone to talk me out of the illogical thing that felt necessary, to shake me back to my senses, to convince me that I mattered to even one person. But that doesn’t make sense because I had only reached that point because I believed with such unimpeachable, concrete, and cavernously sincere conviction that nobody did.

So why did I reach out? What force nudged me in a different direction than the one every signal pointed toward? Where did that fateful final line of code come from that overrode just enough of the malicious virus in my brain to run a life-saving scan?

You’d think I could answer that, considering how much I think about what I think, but I can’t. I can’t answer that. But maybe it was Souliere. Maybe it was “Pia’s Song”. Maybe it was the way light reflected off the corners of his eyes each time the subject surfaced that slowly accumulated into a garbled string of characters in a dangerous executable one night. Maybe Souliere’s remembering killed something in me before that something could claim the verb for itself.

And so I walked my class over to the Memorial Garden. And so I said her name, and then their names. And so I remembered out loud. Only a few veterans of tragedy would get my message, would truly fathom the feeling I acknowledged, but all would get exposed. Whether my meaning went over their heads or not, they would gain experience with that brand of remembering, the visceral, haunting, voice in the wind, double-take when a student with her haircut passes by kind of remembering. They would have evidence that someone will remember and someone will hurt.

I’d like to think that’s more than sufficient cause to docent.

*****

As much fun as it is to imagine boardroom strategy sessions in 1991 by a school district about to balloon like the community it serves, I have no actual insight. I’ve sat on several interview panels, attended curriculum steering sessions, and even participated in a focus group or two, but I was five when Art Docent became a thing at my elementary school. I have individuals I could inquire with to pan for the golden truth about why the program came to be, but I prefer to leave the factual nuggets undiscovered. I’m in no rush, and I don’t desire to become rich.

The guise of creative non-fiction grants me license to explore why. I’m not digging for gold in gold country but rooting around for anything shiny I can find. I didn’t know when I started writing what I would find; my plan involved Art Docent, my Memorial Garden tour, and…that’s it. That’s all. I didn’t have any other plan. The rest is what my brain found walking along that trail.

What I find interesting about the dirt I’ve rifled through is how much it assigns purpose to other people. The title of this piece will be, without question, “Art Docent”, which is not a program but a person. An art docent is a person who talks to kids about Art. That is, the title of this piece is not honoring a program but a person—or at least a role that can be assumed by a willing person.

I’m writing about a particular person, yet everything I discussed about Art Docent’s purpose has removed said docent from the equation. Yes, Art Docent was surely about Art and cultural awareness, about explicitly exposing young people to humanities they might otherwise miss in an Internet-free early-nineties, but couldn’t it also be about the art docent herself? I don’t know who those art docents were who came to our classrooms and pointed at rectangles on clunky scholastic machines, but maybe they were mothers of students with passions for Art who yearned for an avenue to contribute. Instead of cutting paper or administering reading tests at laughably low tables, they spread their knowledge to others and found purpose in their area of interest. Perhaps Art Docent was as much about involving intelligent, artistically-aware people in their growing educational community as the millennials sitting criss-cross applesauce on the carpet while they spoke. Perhaps Art Docent represented more than a one-way transfer of knowledge. Couldn’t it have been an olive branch to women in the community? I have to imagine it engendered connection for them, and with them; I’m certain it left each art docent feeling like their expertise mattered.

Or maybe this is more of my fiction. It could be, I’ll grant you, but I’d bet I’ve stumbled into some element of truth there. My schools always found ways to use my multi-degreed mom, from designing handbooks and organizing audits to asking her to write Beach Boys parody songs for Mare Week. I suspect the leaders back then understood the power of an engaged and included community.

I also suspect this because it’s convenient for my thesis. This entire rumination equates me with an art docent of death, of remembrance, of memorial, and I want it to be okay for me to confess that being a docent serves me, too. The Memorial Garden calls to me, not in some sinister way like I’m hearing ghosts, but with an urgent, pleading call to remember. The students who knew Katelyn are long gone; so are their younger siblings. With every retirement, so are her teachers, and with promotions, only one administrator who might have bumped into her remains. Her voice is quieter in my head now, less vivid than three years ago, and even her desk at school, the one I always picture her in, has been claimed by another student. I’m not going to forget Katelyn Vo, but it accelerates my heart rate when I realize that the world around me already seemingly has. It makes my forgetting feel more terrifyingly plausible, too.

What I want is to climb the bleachers and hear her call out my name. That’s what I want; that’s what I’d give anything for. I want her voice to be so unremarkable that I don’t give it a second thought. I want to go back to those times when goodbyes and goodnights didn’t leave me straining to hold onto each person’s timbre and cadence just in case. That’s what I want most: Katelyn to be unremarkably alive, to be another name I remember warmly among so many. If only her name were one I could momentarily forget. If only her face weren’t smiling back at me from a t-shirt. If only her life didn’t blind me like the late April sun. But we have all lost Katelyn Vo. I can’t have what I want, and that isn’t even tragic compared to the family and friends who can’t have her bouncing with life and unremarkably repeating their names tomorrow.

What I want second most, then, under the sour cilantro circumstances of now, is to say her name, to plant it in more heads. I want to be a benevolent virus who Sharpie scribbles the name Katelyn Vo under a cupboard in some shadowy corner of the hearts of these new people I love just like I did her. If I can remember Pia, whom I didn’t know, they can remember Katelyn, and then some part of her will endure just a little bit longer. And maybe they will, too, endure because of my invoking Katelyn in the same way I did because Souliere invoked Pia. Is that how it works? Who cares! It might work! It might. But that’s almost beside the point because saying her name matters to me. I hope it’s good for them, but it is vital for me. It serves me. That counts because I count. I’m confident it counts.

Michael Edward shared this line in the comment section of “Juanita Verde”:

The value of a piece of art is not in the art itself, but rather in what it did to the artists through the act of creating it.

I love his sentiment, and I love how apt it is for what I do, but please allow me a humble adjustment for my present purpose.

The value of Art Docent is not in the Art itself, but rather in what it did to the art docent through the act of presenting it.

Someone remembers. Someone hurts. This is true of a lot of someones, and one such someone is me. I’ll keep doing this until I have a mountain of overhead transparencies. I’ll pull out a few every April and point to the rectangles of Katelyn.

And then I’ll make more. I’ll make more until I’m dead, too.

---

I don’t think I can express in words the peace that writing about Katelyn brings me. Granted, that’s more or less what I’m doing in this piece, but I love that these essays prove that I’m actively remembering her. Several years ago, I wrote about the importance of leaving proof that she is remembered for her parents, whom I’m told still visit the Memorial Garden, but I’m also proving something to myself each year. The planning for this piece began last May. I think that’s become one more way to hold onto her.