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Equity Coach’s Art Chosen for Benton Gallery
September 14, 2022 – The next time you visit the Benton Convention Center, take some time to go upstairs and check out the paintings on display. Among a diverse array of beautiful pieces, you may notice a few under the name of Mark Maxwell, an Equity Coach with Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools.
Maxwell has been working with the district for eight years, but in his time away from work, he enjoys making art based on the things that inspire him. The three pieces that the Benton accepted for their gallery, all of them acrylic paintings, include “Rona: The Reopening”, which he made when COVID-19 restrictions around the country finally began to loosen, “A Third of One”, which draws on his experience with the different sides of personal perception, and “Blue Ridge”, which was inspired by his travels through Western North Carolina and the Blue Ridge Mountains. While the subjects may seem disconnected, they all tie back to Maxwell’s belief in finding the artistic side of any lived experience.
“It’s things that are organic, it’s things that often times seem very simple,” Maxwell said. “Art can be anywhere if you know how to look for it.”
That attentive and thoughtful philosophy for creating art also guides Maxwell as an educator. As an equity coach, his job is to teach other educators to look at their students as whole people, factoring in their cultures, languages, emotions, personal histories and more to see how those students will learn best. Just like every idea is best expressed through a different style of artistic representation, every student flourishes under different teaching styles, and it’s up to the district to give them every opportunity to grow and learn in the way that best suits them.
“I always think about if there’s an alternate way for students to show us what they know,” Maxwell said. “When we look at our students as being one-dimensional in how they learn, we’re losing the depth of their talents.”
This week is National Arts in Education Week, when schools around the nation reflect on the impact of the arts on academic culture and celebrate the benefits the arts bring to students and their communities. Maxwell hopes that teachers will remember that value all throughout the school year. After all, education isn’t just about memorizing facts and passing tests – it’s about understanding and appreciating the world around you, and art can be just the inspiration that a student needs to take a closer look at the world.
“Art is so interwoven into everything we do,” Maxwell said. “The more we’re able to expose our students to art and music and poetry and all of these other works, the better off they’ll be.”