How much attention do you pay to the mug when you grab for your morning cup of coffee? Probably not much, especially if it’s in the morning, before you’re able to get said cup of coffee.
But what if each time you went for the mug you were reminded of helping the environment,helping enthusiastic children learn or even just helping out a giving college student.
If you purchase a mug made by the members of University of Maine art professor Connie Albertson’s AED 474 class, you will be reminded that you are assisting an effort, titled Art and Empathy. The class is required for art education students. For the class, students pick a non-profit organization and see what they can do with their artwork to help it out.
“It provides a community service experience for the students so that their hands on projects may not occur in a formal institute of learning,” Albertson said. “They have to work with the community — the idea is that you collaborate with the community and find out what their needs are and how art can be relevant.
“There’s always a service-learning project involved in this course,” Albertson continued. “This year I decided what the students needed to know was how to conduct a service-learning project, more than just going out and just teaching art. This course has been mostly dedicated to actually learning the process.”
After talking over a number of local non-profit organizations, the class decided on Hirundo Wildlife Refuge, which works to preserve 2,400 acres of wetlands throughout Maine while also providing research, outreach and education to surrounding communities.
“I think, when we chose Hirundo as our organization, the spotlight ended up being on the empathy toward environmental sustainability,” said Nicole McGwigan, a third-year art education student. “That’s the type of thing Hirundo stands for, but they haven’t had that sort of exposure.”
“The part that we’re most interested in is how Hirundo works with the surrounding schools and [that they] have different educational programs,” said Elizabeth Miller, a senior art education student. “We’re focusing on what they need for documenting [wildlife]. Our goal is to help them with their programs that help educate kids.”
To do that, Miller, McGwigan, Albertson, and art education students Hannah Berta and Abby LeBlanc are selling ceramic mugs for $10. They hope to sell hundreds in April to raise money for Hirundo.
“It’s putting a lot of meaning into the form and function of a mug,” Miller said. “This project is an example to work in this medium in a different way. It’s one of the main things we’ve focused on and learned about in art education is that we needed to go in with our arms up and fight for this cause. We’ve been learning all these ways to make meaning out of art, make it useful — more than just something aesthetically pleasing to put on a wall.”
The money raised will go to help Hirundo with tracking and recording wildlife, and it should allow the organization to provide more resources for the children when they visit.
“Specifically, they wanted three trail cameras to set up in specific locations, where they know there’s a high traffic of animals, and a digital projector and digital camera they could give to kids to go out and capture what they see,” LeBlanc said.
The four students and Albertson plan to make hundreds of mugs — over 200 have already been made. Albertson chose ceramic as the medium, but the task seemed a little daunting to the students at the start, due to their limited experience working with the material.
“If I were to use the mug I made in Ceramics 1, nobody would buy it,” LeBlanc said.
The small group of art education students had chosen mugs long before this semester started, according to Miller. It was a spin-off of the “Empty Bowls” movement to remove world hunger.
“Learning [in art education] that art is more than just for arts sake, it’s part of our culture, part of our daily interactions with the people around us,” Berta said. “We wanted something that represented that.”
While each mug is eventually hand painted by one of the students, the mugs are a collaborative effort, with no student working solely on the same mug from start to finish. According to Albertson, it takes exactly 2 hours, 47 minutes to make a mug.
“We have a hydraulic extruder to wedge big pieces of clay together to make a cylinder,” Miller said of the process. “You have to kind of guide it out of the extruder.”
This guiding technique gives each mug a unique, individualized look.
“I like that personal quality,” Miller said. “They’re all a bit different.”
The majority of the mugs are decorated with themes of the Maine wilderness — except for a jaguar-spotted mug sticking out from the back — and range from tall to stout with a variety of different handles.
“We all had our own personal styles,” Berta said. “We were just trying to get inspired by the nature theme. We just wanted to do something to remind people why they bought the mug.”
The class set up a WordPress blog to promote the mugs, display the mug-making process and share share information about the overall cause of Art and Empathy and art education. To visit the blog, go to artempathy.wordpress.com.
“While the students are learning skills that might be very useful to them as teachers of art, they’re also coming across ways to make this successful, such as integrating technology,” Albertson said.
The goal of the project is to sell around 500 mugs, between tabling in the Union and seeing if any local businesses are interested in getting involved.
The first day of tabling is April 5. Check the Art and Empathy blog for the dates that follow.