SchoolArts - January 2009

Meeting Individual Needs
The Vivid Visual World of Vivienne Crews

Left: Vivienne Crews, age ten and her teacher Laurie Russell. Right: Vivienne Crews, grade five, Shapiro-Inspired 3-D Portrait.

Tracy Ellyn and Laurie Russell

Her lack of hearing notwithstanding, the visual world of Vivienne Crews is stunning, impassioned, and highly developed. This ten-year-old Miami artist, who can “see” more clearly than most, has taken home Miami’s most prestigious honors in art over the past three years. VSA Arts of Florida recently awarded Vivienne the Exemplary Participant Award for Exemplary Work in Art. VSA Arts, an affiliate of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, actively promotes arts, disability awareness, and education to more than one million people with disabilities throughout the state.

much courage and confidence to leave the comfort of this safe setting, but Vivienne was determined, and she allowed herself to be mainstreamed into a setting which was foreign to her, but was replete with all she had ever imagined in her visual life. She was now surrounded by art studios,

kilns, paints, pastels,

“As an educator, it is canvases, sketch-
my job to identify other ^books, ^museumintelligences, and then, ^trips, ^and ^gallery_openings. _Her _devel-to nurture them.” _opment _suddenlyskyrocketed. In addi-
tion to her deaf education challenges,
she has also met head-on the chal-
lenges and expectations demanded of
a student in a talent magnet program.

A New World

Vivienne, who was born with profound bilateral sensoneural hearing loss, came into Laurie Russell’s talent magnet program at South Miami K– 8 Center’s Expressive Arts Center in the third grade. Her prior school provided her with a setting designed to instruct deaf children, but it was not an arts magnet school. It took

A Rare Talent

True to her spunky, passionate nature, Vivienne approaches her art curriculum with utter conviction and initiative. “No challenge is too large,” explains Laurie Russell, lead magnet teacher and Vivienne’s art teacher. “She is continually thinking through problems in her quest for a solution. Her ideas are clear, vivid, and insightful. Besides her immense creativity, she has a patience, sensitivity, aware-

ness, and keen discipline that are truly rare.”

“Vivienne is the quintessential example of a child who has the possibility of being easily overlooked, because we have a tendency to judge young students based on verbal/math-ematical skills only,” continues Mrs. Russell. “As an educator, it is my job to identify other intelligences, and then, to nurture them.”

Over the past three years in the magnet program, Vivienne has won awards of distinction at the Miami Watercolor Society/Miami-Dade County Public Schools Annual Watercolor Exhibition at the Jackie Hinchey-Sipes Gallery at DASH for two years in a row, as well as a multitude of awards from the fine-arts department of the Dade County Youth Fair, the Magnet Art Exhibition at the School Board Administration Building, Publix, and Starbuck’s Coffee. This is quite a resumé for someone who’s not yet eleven.