Honoring Laura Chapman

Art education has recently lost one of its most persistent and beloved champions with the passing of Laura Chapman this past August. She was an icon in the Davis family of authors and worked for more than forty years in support of art education advocacy and the development of meaningful art education curriculum, much of it through Davis Publications’ elementary textbook series. As you read the comments here, you can see how much she was admired by the people whose lives she touched, both professionally and personally.

It has been difficult to say goodbye to Laura Chapman, someone who has been in my life as muse, mentor, and friend for almost fifty years. I was honored and humbled to be recommended by Laura to continue her work and the textbook tradition with Davis Publications, first with the middle-school program, then with the elementary. I feel her presence and hear her words as I work on these projects especially, but her impact goes back to my earliest years as an art teacher.

While writing a letter to support her nomination for the 2018 Eisner Award, I searched through the many hundreds of items in her vita to find the tiny entry that had made all the difference in my life. I knew which years to search through because they corresponded to the years that I served as leader of a small curriculum committee made up of art educators teaching in the Columbus, Ohio, Diocesan school. On behalf of our group, I was asked to attend a workshop on the new state curriculum guide in art.

I found a tiny entry on page six under the heading, “Consultant: State Programs and Agencies,” in which, in 1972 and 1973, Dr. Chapman conducted training workshops for the Ohio State Department of Education to implement the new state curriculum guide in art. It appeared that at least one of these workshops was held in Columbus. I was thrilled to see it there and highlighted it. The entry takes up a mere three lines on one page of the twenty-page single-spaced vita, and yet those three lines reference a dramatic change in my own professional life and my first encounter with Laura Chapman.

I remember every one of her strategies for presenting the content and approaches represented in the new Ohio guidelines. The expanded conceptions of art and art teaching, along with the potential of engaging hands-on, game-like strategies in professional development settings, have remained constant in my own thinking and in the way I have approached curriculum, instruction, and professional development since that day.

As I went through her vita and saw hundreds of entries, some with fewer lines than the three that represent a life-changing moment for me, I was struck by how many lives have been changed by the sixty-year presence of Laura Chapman in our field. Her substantial intellect took her to the worlds of research, theory, and policy analysis, but those forays always were grounded in her deep concern for the importance of art education and for the real-life issues and concerns of art teachers. In the pages of SchoolArts, in the curriculum represented in the textbooks and resource books published by Davis, in the national standards, and in our field’s expectations for research and scholarship, I believe her presence will be felt for many years to come.

I met Laura when she joined the 1978 SchoolArts Editorial Board. I was attracted to her reserved and rather shy demeanor and intrigued when she immediately expressed to me her anxiety about recently quitting her university professorship to become the first and only independent consultant in art education.

As the acquisitions editor for Davis Publications, I approached Laura about developing our first elementary textbook series. She was just about to approach us with the same idea because she felt she could affect greater change by reaching teachers and students in K–12 classrooms than by publishing only for higher education.

So, for eighteen months, working almost 24/7, Laura focused her enormous energies on creating Discover Art, later revised as Adventures in Art in 1998. These two programs went on to guide quality curriculum development nationally and internationally to this day.

What was it like to be Laura’s publisher? Publishing is in the business of selling ideas, and Laura had lots of great ideas. Her breadth of experience ranged from hauling five-gallon buckets of water up three flights so her inner-city middle-school students could experience clay to serving as a visiting professor at the Western Australia Institute of Technology. However, no matter how prepared she was, for a small company and one author to create and produce a twelve-volume textbook series all at once was extraordinarily daunting and challenging.

Laura chose all the images for the series, wrote every word of the student and teacher editions, and designed all the pages and covers. To totally immerse herself in each lesson, she would begin by drawing in pencil all the images of the lesson, including the fine art. She often said that writing student lessons for the earliest grades was the hardest writing she ever did, comparing it to writing poetry because so few words are considered reading level appropriate.

During my thirty-seven years at Davis, Laura stood out as an author who was remarkably powerful visually, verbally, and intellectually. She also possessed unusual common sense, street wisdom, and a hilarious sense of humor; she could be delightfully self-deprecating.

She was such an important part of Davis Publications’ success that she became known internally as our “oracle.” She successfully guided me during some of the most challenging decisions I ever had to make while at Davis. We also had a lot of fun. I will always remember and appreciate Laura for setting such a high standard for herself, acting on it, and inspiring others to do the same.

I will always remember Laura with immense fondness and admiration. She supported multicultural issues, women’s rights, and all forms of social justice and human rights long before it was fashionable in art education. And then there was her intellectual honesty—searching for truth and analyzing art education was her mode of operation. She supported my research for more than three decades; she became an inspiration and dear friend. Laura’s legacy will live on as a trailblazer in art education, in the field she greatly influenced and shaped for decades.