Dedicated Lives
by
Michael Scofield
(maybe head snapshot?)
A monthly column featuring talks with Santa Feans helping others. Today, James McGrath, co-founding faculty member and former dean of the Institute of American Indian Arts.
James McGrath
(photo of McGrath)
Painter, Sculptor, Ceramist, Teacher
Q: James, tell us about your teaching activities
A: Much of my work with young adults started in 1962, when I helped found the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in south Santa Fe, becoming an instructor, Art Director, and then, for two years, Dean.
Before and after the IAIA experience, I went overseas to teach, but more about that later. Fast-forward to 1982. The principal at the Hopi Hotevilla-Bacavi School in Arizonaasked me to develop an arts curriculum for ninety-seven kids. Between 1982 and 1983 I spent a year on the reservation, bringing in local artisans to help. Ever since the year 2000 I’ve taught there the last two weeks in July.
From 1996 to 2002, New Mexico’s Very Special Arts program asked five other artists and me to help physically and mentally challenged Albuquerque residents create artworks. One group drew spirals and arrows on car parts, and splashed them with bright colors. So much laughter, so childlike.
How I got involved outside of this country starts at Columbia High School in Richland, Washington, where I taught art. In 1955, representatives from the Department of Defense (DOD) Dependent Schools overseascame looking for K-through-Twelve instructors. I hadn’t much money and a great yen to travel, so I signed up. In Europe I taught health and science as subjects for art. Drawings of intestines! Clay sculptures of kidneys! Eventually I became Art Director for a hundred and eight DOD schools in Germany, France, and Italy. Later I spent another eleven years teaching for the DOD in the Far East.
Q: What life experiences have contributed to your doing this good work?
A:Stuttering since first grade had made me afraid to talk. Creating art changed my life. I realized I could go to college, not stay in Tacoma and drive trucks for a living. I became less withdrawn. I still stutter, but rarely.
My later, around-the-world travels taught me that all of us—young, old, disabled or well, wealthy, poor—have the need through art to show how we live, how we care for each other, or don’t.
The experience that inspires me to teach those with handicaps, mental or physical, is my own stuttering.
Q: Any current role models who inspire you?
A:My partner, Daniel Forest, is a massage therapist in Albuquerque. On weekends he comes here or I drive down. Both of us do ink-brush calligraphy, write poetry, garden, and hike. We cook together and sometimes dance around the kitchen. He’s a good listener and this motivates me creatively—we cross-fertilize each other.
Cynthia West, a longtime friend, and I attend pueblo dances dawn to dusk and express these experiences on paper and canvas. We also write together, as well as derive inspiration from spending time in each other’s gardens. Her openness and creative honesty energizes my own.
Q: What effect does religious or spiritual practice have on your work?
A: Every day I’m surrounded by the natural world: rocks, fruit trees, cottonwoods, magpies, hawks, foxes, raccoons, the neighbors’ horses and cows, the Santa Fe River. I live in a three-hundred-year-old, former stagecoach stop, now powered by solar energy.
I meditate, but not like most people. Every other week I practice the tea ceremony, edo senkei, which takes an hour. After seven years’ study in Japan and Okinawa, I received my certificate to teach tea. For four years I also studied flower arranging, sogetso. And once in a while I practice shodo, ink-brush calligraphy.
My environment and meditation practices give me a sense of peace, strengthen my conviction that there are important realities besides human beings. In my travels I learned about Shinto, Islam, Buddhism, the Native American way of life, Taoism, shamanism, others. In all there seems to be a base of kindness and community, which I try to bring into my teaching.
Q: What doubts and disappointments have you had to deal with?
A: My biggest past doubt is having taken so much time away from family life that after nine years of marriage from right out of college, my wife, Jean, divorced me while I was serving as Art Director in Karlsruhe, Germany. She had taken our daughters, Jain and Jeni, back to Portland, Oregon.
A major disappointment took place in the Far East on an American military base in Seoul, South Korea. The school’s principal had asked me to come up with a mural for a fifty-foot hallway wall. I picked animals from the Korean zodiac like the dragon, the monkey, the tiger. Students made stencils and used acrylics to apply the colors.
But one of the base’s Christian ministers called us blasphemous for painting Buddhist images. America was a Christian culture, he said, and ours was a Christian school. When I refused to remove the mural, the school hired painters to cover our wall in gallbladder green.
Q: How about an example of your success?
A: A seventeen-year-old Crow Indian from Lodge Grass, Montana, Kevin Red Star, was one of the first to enroll at IAIA. We were in the midst of construction—holding art classes in the bakery and storing paintings in the ovens.
Early on Kevin brought me samples of beadwork on shirts and moccasins. I told him, “Use these patterns but enlarge them in a different way, after looking into your heart and your culture and your personal DNA.”
The results were breakthroughs. He produced canvases as large as four feet by six, shields, breastplates, dancers, individuals, sometimes layering on colors so thick the paintings seemed bas-reliefs. After graduation he received a full scholarship to the San Francisco Art Institute.
This past fall a hundred-and-ninety-one page, four-color book of Kevin’s work was published.
This interview, along with twelve others, is a short version of a chapter in the forthcoming book, Dedicated Lives: Talks with Those Helping Others, by Michael Scofield, ( to be published by Santa Fe’s Sunstone Press.
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