There’s a question I never thought to ask when I was doing visiting artist residencies early in my career: what happens after I leave?
I found out when I spent the next three decades on the other side — teaching in international schools across Hong Kong, Beijing, Mumbai, and Casablanca, inheriting programs, reshaping them, and eventually building a curriculum from scratch at HKUGA College in Hong Kong. From that vantage point, the impact of a visiting artist looks very different than it does from the front of a residency.
Some things transfer. Some things evaporate. The difference is almost never about the quality of the visiting artist’s work.
What I noticed, consistently, is that the residencies that left something lasting weren’t necessarily the ones where the students worked with the artist on a project in the artist’s style. They were the ones where the visiting artist understood something about how the school’s art program worked — what the teacher was trying to build, where the students were in their development, what questions the curriculum was already asking. When a residency connects to that context, it amplifies something already in motion. When it doesn’t, it’s a parenthesis — memorable, maybe, but disconnected from everything before and after it.
The most useful thing I brought back from nearly 30 years in classrooms wasn’t a project or a technique. It was a clearer picture of what art coordinators are actually hoping for when they book a visiting artist, and what they’re quietly frustrated by when it doesn’t land. They want students energized. They want something that connects to what they’re teaching, not something that competes with it. They want the classroom teacher to inherit something useful — not just a finished product on the wall, but a way of approaching a problem that students can return to.
I’ve written and presented about this — on analytical writing in the art room, on critical analysis, on what it takes to build a program that actually develops thinking. Those conversations came directly from being inside schools long enough to see what works.
That’s a different design brief than most visiting artists are working from.
When I design a residency now, I start with a conversation about what the school is trying to do — not just in the art room, but more broadly. What does the school value? What are students already thinking about? Where does the art coordinator feel the program needs energy or new direction? The project grows from those answers. The thinking framework I bring — built through the years of developing curriculum and implementing it in the art classroom — gives students a way of working that connects to what the classroom teacher can continue developing after I leave.
From this vantage point the experience is more satisfying for the students, teachers, the school and for me. Because after thirty years in classrooms, I know exactly what I always wanted from a visiting artist — and it wasn’t what most of them brought.