Throughout history, we have used art as a form of self-expression and entertainment. Whether it’s a piece of protest art hung on the wall of a museum, or the pottery jar you brought home to your family in elementary school.
But there’s a reason why you spent most of your time in elementary and middle school painting and sculpting and creating. Art fosters critical thinking, encourages creativity and is a form of education in itself. While a math formula only has one meaning, a sculpture can have a thousand. Even though you’re not a kid anymore, you can still reap the substantial benefits of taking an art class at Kirkwood.
Kirkwood offers a variety of art classes for students to take, and it’s not just your regular drawing and painting classes. There’s glass-blowing, sculpting, ceramics, photography, digital art, printmaking and 3-D design courses.
These classes may seem completely useless to your degree or education, especially if you feel that you’re not very artistically inclined. But art has a purpose in our lives that no other major, program or math formula can teach us: the importance of self-expression and the transformative power it has on everybody’s lives—and you don’t have to be the next Da Vinci to participate.
According to General Social Surveys conducted over the years, empirical research, and the numerous recent studies that have emerged over the past few years, participation in the arts is linked to behaviors that promote and contribute to the greater good of civil society. The Journal of Civil Society reports that any form of art participation, whether it’s personal or audience-based, is linked to increased civic engagement, social tolerance and other-regarding behavior such as compassion, empathy and selflessness.
The arts not only foster civil engagement, but also promote a special type of critical thinking and encourages outside the box thinking. A research article published in 2014 on Sage Journals found that students from multiple age groups displayed significantly stronger critical thinking behavior when analyzing a painting.
Analyzing art can challenge our beliefs and force us to think outside of the box and put ourselves into other people’s shoes. There’s no formula or definition to tell us the answer.
Creating and producing in art is also linked to beneficial brain changes. A research article published in 2014 on Plos One found that participants who were actively producing art in an art class showed increased spatial improvement to parts of their brain over students who were analyzing artwork at a museum.
This included increased functional connectivity to a part of our brains that is associated with stress resilience. Moreover, the study found that creating art reduces stress, alters thinking and behavior patterns, increases self-awareness and can even normalize your heart rate, blood pressure and lower cortisol levels.
So next time you have an elective class you need to fill, consider taking an art course.
Categories: Opinion, Staff Editorials
