After eight years of art outreach to grade schools for Art Spark Texas, Jan Meeks remembers breakthrough moments that brought home her mission as a teaching artist. “One of my favorites … was at [Austin’s] Zavala Elementary School kindergarten class,” she says. “We were working on a giant mural laid out in the hallway.” 

Throughout the term, Jan had been collecting the small art projects the kids had been making. These were going on the mural. “I had an idea of making snow,” she says. “The kids used squirt bottles of glue to cover the mural. Then we took bricks of styrofoam and rubbed them together, and all the little pieces of styrofoam came down and stuck to the glue.”

One small boy with Downs Syndrome stood in the “snowstorm.” “It was flying everywhere and he threw his head back, opened his arms, closed his eyes and stuck out his tongue like he was catching flakes. It made it all worthwhile to see him. I knew then I was [knocking] down boundaries.

“Art Spark programs are life-changing for everyone,” Jan says. “What I was doing is not only teaching the kids, but teaching the teachers how to use art — and that is probably the toughest part. Kids are a blank slate; they’re easy to teach. It’s the teachers and getting them to realize that there is not a right and wrong. You may want it to look one way, but it’s going to come out looking totally different. And that’s OK.

“There was an Arts Spark arts book that we could pull out for curriculum and ideas,” she says. She continues handing out Art Spark Texas materials whenever somebody asks for resources.

Jan says her Art Spark experience also benefited herself. “I began to value myself a bit more by putting into action what I am truly capable of. It just hit home,” she says. “Working with people with disabilities or kids in general, I realized that what I was doing was more powerful than I ever thought, because not everyone can do it. By doing so with Art Spark, it kind of reinforced what I was already doing and it gave me more self-confidence that I was doing things right, that everything that I thought was for me, was beneficial to somebody else.

“I would work with Art Spark Texas again in a heartbeat.”