As art goes, Laurence Minetti is an original.
He’s a high school art teacher in the Bronx, an abstract painter, a professional scribe and a face painter for hire. He’s a husband and a dad. He’s a muralist.
Minetti, a member of the United Federation of Teachers who teaches at the Collegiate Institute for Math and Science, has his paint-stained hands in art projects here, there and everywhere.
You can hear the lift in his voice when he talks about changing people’s faces into pirates, butterflies or zebras at block parties, Halloween parties and festivals, where he lifts his brush to people’s cheeks and foreheads and leaves them in brilliant blues and black and white hues. (www.dynamicfacepainting.com)
“Kids, adults — we have a lot of fun. It’s a way for me to utilize my talents,” he said.
When he teaches his students, he is just as hands on. He has his students bring their charcoal, pen and ink and acrylic paintings out into the school hallways and lay them on the floor. Students present their work and talk about technique.
“We have our own little gallery walk,” he said.
The colorful marks he’s left through his work in classrooms, hallways and on street corners have been noticed by the prestigious Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.
Just before school got out this June, and before he began teaching summer school, Minetti received a phone call from the New York City chancellor of education. Lincoln Center Education — the education division of the Lincoln Center, in partnership with the New York City Department of Education, rang him up to announce he was being honored with the Lincoln Center Arts Teacher Award. It’s only the second such award ever awarded, and it’s part of the “Big Apple Awards,” a citywide teacher recognition program for full-time teachers in public schools.
The art award comes with a $3,500 classroom grant, which Minetti is pondering using for a class kiln.
As if that weren’t big enough, his wife Michelle was honored the same month at Gracie Mansion as Bronx UFT Secretary of the Year.
“I’m still flying high,” Minetti said.
His Lincoln Center award was presented to a teacher for making a difference in students’ lives and “going above and beyond the role of educator.”
“Above” is not hard to picture: Minetti and his students stand on ladders and paint murals in schools around the city. They work in schools and earn money by beautifying other campuses, using themes based on that particular school. At CIMS, the logo is the wolf, and Minetti and his gang of mini-Minettis painted a 40-foot long and eight-foot-high fantasy wolf scene.
That’s definitely above.
“Beyond” is believable as well: Minetti’s students created artful posters and stood at the intersection of a busy road hoisting signs that said “DON’T TEXT AND DRIVE.” They were joined by a throng of 100 students, and local TV and newspaper reporters showed up to cover the event. On Earth Day, they made T-shirts and banners to get out the word about keeping the environment clean.
Their art goes beyond the classroom.
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The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.—Aristotle
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Each year, Minetti’s students create posters for the Making Strides breast cancer fundraising walks, for which NYSUT is a flagship sponsor, and they bring them along to add more pink to the Orchard Park walk. They also design and sell T-shirts for the event, raising money for the walk and the women and men whose health and lives depend on finding a cure for breast cancer.
Minetti has trained his colleagues in how to wind art into the Common Core curriculum and into social justice action.
“More inter-disciplinary collaboration is very important,” said Rose Cunningham, a CIMS global studies teacher and fellow UFT member who assigned her students to collect sand from Orchard Beach and create a pyramid and dessert while studying Egypt.
Having students deal actively with current events — through art and global studies classes — is “one of the ways we partner up,” said of Minetti. One example is when CIMS students made art posters for the “Bring Back Our Girls” campaign to help plead for the return of the female Nigerian students kidnapped from their school and still missing.
Minetti also has his students keep a journal and talk about their art pieces and the process of creating them. He’s pretty comfortable with the art of writing himself: As a scribe, he does hand lettering at businesses around the city on walls. That type of precision work is a bit of a holler from his abstract painting, but then again, Minetti clearly defies definition.
Students went outside with the posters, and again, TV news reporters showed up. “People came up and asked the children about it, and they knew the facts,” Cunningham said.
The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.— Pablo Picasso
-- Liza Frenette