When a Sedona Red Rock High School art teacher resigned from her position at the school – it left the school and students in the lurch.

Nancy Lattanzi, city of Sedona Arts and Culture coordinator, jumped to the rescue and offered assis­tance to Sedona-Oak Creek School District Assistant Superintendent, Deana Dewitt.

Lattanzi reached out to artists participating in the city’s Artist in the Classroom program that she has been coordinating for over nine years. Lattanzi believes the program is a great resource for teachers and students and it proved to be a lifesaver.

Lattanzi’s mantra is that integrating the arts deepens understanding when difficult issues arise and incorporates bringing the community together. These situations prompt positive, empathetic discussions and encouraging students to express their beliefs.

Lattanzi reached out to three artists, including Art in the Wild painter Cannon Winkler, tasked with designing a curriculum for the seventh- through 12th-graders.

As a part of his week-long assignment, Winkler asked students how would they apply creativity to problem-solve. He discussed using freedom of expression creatively as art, dance and music.

“It’s not like I can really teach someone to be good at painting or to be good at drawing just in one week,” Winkler said. “I know a lot of students aren’t interested in being an artist. But what I can help them do, is to think about how they can apply creativity to other parts of their life.”

A self-taught visual artist, Winkler created a hand-stamping technique using animal tracks from the wild — embossing the footprints into distinct patterns onto a canvas. He discovered this method while in lockdown in South Africa’s Bushveld during the height of the 2020 pandemic. He says that he draws inspiration from nature and ancestral human artworks such as Bushmen rock art, aborig­inal dream paintings and Eastern mandalas.

“I was teaching them a little bit about what I do, showing them animal tracks from Africa and basically doing this exercise where they’re trying to name the tracks and then teaching them how to identify a cat track, the difference about a hyena track and a dog track,” Winkler said.

As Winkler opened the discussion, the students shared their feelings, thoughts and perceptions. He explained that creativity begins by taking two ideas and merging them together, creating something that didn’t exist beforehand. Using imagination gives people the ability to make the impossible possible.

“I explained to them that a very easy way to come up with a new idea is just to mix two things that didn’t exist before,” he said. “My art is a good example: Tracking and painting, normally are not two things that coexist with each other. But if you mix them together, you have some­thing completely new.”

To begin, Winkler assigned the students to sketching an animal, they would then find an partner with a different animal. The goal was to make a new sketch mixing the two together. Afterward, they had to find a third partner and do the same exercise.

“So, by the end, we had these horrible abominations, but you know, there’s a lot of fun in doing this,” he said. “I think one of my favorites was a girl who mixed, a butterfly with a cockroach with a giraffe. That was probably my favorite one.”

Before unveiling his idea, Winkler gauged students’ comfort level with dance. He showed them different forms of dance from around the world.

“I wanted them to be familiar with different styles of dance from the Bushmen of the Kalahari and Nepal and then traditional dances in Argentina, so they can get comfort­able with this idea that dancing is an expression of joy, it’s a celebration and it’s very, very human,” Winkler said. “So, it’s not about looking good or doing it right. It’s just about celebrating. It was trying to get them comfortable … they would feel OK to let go.”

Winkler created a massive dance floor in the classroom, equipped with strobe lights, a music playlist, paint and an 8-foot by 5½-foot canvas on the floor to get students to paint with their hands and feet, while trying to capture that motion of dancing in celebration.

“This is the kind of thing that the students really need to feel comfort­able with you and feel comfortable with the idea,” he said. “I didn’t want to create this environment where the whole class is watching four or five students dance and they feel uncom­fortable or they don’t really feel safe to let loose and have fun.”

Winkler asked the students if they liked to dance, with most responding that they did not.

“I got the normal kind of answers you’d expect from teenagers like they didn’t feel comfortable, the teachers were watching them the whole time, they kept the lights on,” he said. “So you get this idea that the reason they didn’t dance is that it didn’t feel like a space where they felt comfortable to, there were too many eyes on them, they were too observed it and it was too exposed.”

“Breaking them up into small groups of three to five students, together with their friends, while others were working on a sketching exercise outside of the classroom proved to be effective,” he said.

“When they came into the class­room, lights were flashing, I had them pick out their own music and it was just them and their friends in the room,” he said. “No one was going to judge them. And I think that really helped to get a lot of students feel comfortable. We had some kids doing handstands, some ballroom dancing, some square dancing, some people going absolutely wild to Britney Spears.”

Another teacher came in and played conga drums.

“To me, it looks like a giant fruit roll up,” he said. “Because you’ve got all of these micro gradients of colors. It’s very, very textured. You have some very distinct handprints and footprints on it.

“You really see where people were sliding around as they’re dancing — these swaths of purples, blues and greens all mixed together,” he said. “The end result was more chaotic looking than I had in my head. I was picturing more distinct layers. But again, that was part of the learning curve with it. I was asking the students about the mood of it — the most common answers I got is — it just looks like fun.

With a little coaxing there were some students who participated that he did not expect.

“I wanted to get them in the state of release, where they can kind of get into a flow state,” he said. “I think creativity is about letting go and letting it happen, rather than forcing it. You know, when you force it, that’s when you get things like writer’s block or you lose inspiration. And that’s why practicing creativity is tricky, because it doesn’t work like most other skills.

Winkler says that he drew on his own teenage experiences, and it was very cathartic.

“I was not a particularly extroverted kid,” he said. “I was pretty shy and didn’t feel comfortable dancing. I thought that there was a wrong way to do it.

“I think we have that a lot in our culture in the U.S., because it’s not super common that people just dance to express joy. Like you have in a lot of other cultures.”

Winkler said that the first time he danced was after high school, during a trip to Guatemala in a tiny bar on the beach.

“I would have been the only one that wasn’t dancing,” he said. “I actu­ally felt pressured to dance. And I did. I had like this amazing time. And I still remember [how it felt] today. It was such a fun to experience because nobody was caring how anybody looked, everyone was just there to move and have fun.

“That’s really where it clicked for me. I’m like, wow, you know, this is not what I thought it was. I thought I had to look good while I did it. And so even today, the music moves me but it moves me ugly, but I don’t mind.”