The Art of Usefulness and the Labor of Love: From Art Making to Teaching
Xiao Guo
→MA TLAD 2025 / BFA TX 2024
Images courtesy the author.Two years ago, in a textiles pattern design class, I created a set of pedagogical tools—not as useful objects, but as art objects with usefulness in mind. They were not intended to be used, but I imagined teaching with them. This year, I had the opportunity to actually teach and design teaching materials for elementary students. These include worksheets, instructions, toolkits, and samples. After the lessons, I photographed, scanned, and digitized them with the same level of attention I would pay to documenting artworks.
I do not see these materials as art, but I do want to preserve them carefully. They are products of creative and loving labor. In this way, they are not less than art. If anything, I made them with more love, purpose, and imagination than art I’ve made in the past. My worksheets consider how they can be best used by the students; lesson plans carefully structure how the 45-minute class time will be spent. My toolkit assembles the supplies nicely to be distributed to every student. I am not interested in usefulness in a capitalist way or functionality in a minimalist way. Rather I am interested in usefulness rooted in the care for the people we are serving.
These teaching materials were used and then returned to their dormant states. They exist now as files of documents, slides, supply lists, and purchase requests in the teaching folder of my computer—and as physical toolkit samples in my drawer. They are the remains of the last lesson and the blueprints for the next. They are scripts for how our time and materials are used. They are ephemeral, but reproducible, with a fixed set of instructions that makes them available to be downloaded, printed, structured, assembled, and delivered again. Lesson plans, syllabi, curriculum, and teaching materials are the loving personal archive of every educator. The teaching folders on our computers are personal digitizations of our collections, always ready to be excavated and reactivated. The usefulness of art education materials lies in the overlap between utilitarian purposes and knowledge of artistic methods—for we, as art educators, are not creating art, but rather the conditions for art to be made.
Xiao Guo wants to see art books and posters circulating freely.