GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (WOOD) — Teachers have always been an integral piece of artist Teresa Dunn’s life.
Growing up, her parents were educators, giving her a firsthand experience of the impact they had on their students. Last year, her daughter, then a seventh grader at East Lansing middle school, had two STEM teachers make a seismic impact.
“She had two incredible women teachers in science and math, which are fields that generally girls are not expected to go into, or their confidence starts to drop at those ages. And I saw how brilliant teachers they were and how much they inspire all the children and especially my daughter, to want to strive to be the best she could be in science and math and she really excelled and blossomed in her classes,” Dunn said.
The two teachers fit right in to a project Dunn was working on at the time about impactful women.
“For the last couple of years, I’ve been working on a project called ‘A Long Line of Women’ and as a Mexican-American woman, those stories are really important to me,” she said. “Of people of color, especially those of women, immigrants and people with multicultural identities. I’ve been making paintings for the last couple of years that focus on elevating those voices.”
The extension of that project is “Brown Girl Club,” an ArtPrize entry in the 2D category displayed at Grand Rapids City Hall.
Dunn’s piece is comprised of two portraits that stand about 6 feet tall. Both pay homage to the backgrounds of the two teachers who supported her daughter.
“I did a portrait of her science teacher ML Konett, who is Filipino American and I wanted to celebrate her successes and her story as a woman of color,” Dunn said. “And then also her seventh grade math teacher Jackie Alcazar, who is a Mexican American and an immigrant to this country and I wanted to celebrate both of their stories and learn a little bit more about what they were proud of as a person and as a teacher, so that’s how these two paintings and this project developed.”
Several details, like the lab materials in Konett’s portrait, are striking standout features. Other elements in the portraits are a bit more subtle but powerful in their own right, like in Alcazar’s portrait.
“She talked to me about her family and being one of eight siblings and so … the formula for getting the square root of an octagon, with eight sides and put eight monarch butterflies hovering around her,” Dunn said. “So thinking about both her family background and things that are important to her as a person, but also what’s important to her as a teacher and kind of blending those elements together.”
Dunn recalled her daughter coming home from school at the start of the year and excitedly mentioning both teachers. Soon after, she saw her daughter, who was already an excellent student, making more strides.
“It was fairly early on,” she said. “When my daughter comes home from school, we usually decompress and have a snack and talk about her days and I kept hearing these names pop up of Ms. Konett and Ms. Alcazar and just the way that she would talk about them and how they ran their classroom and the kind of projects they were doing.”
But she said she was cautious to approach the teachers about participating in her work.
“I was seeing her grades and the testing really skyrocket from previous years and so it was fairly early on in the year, but it took me a while before I gained the courage to ask them if they wanted to participate,” she said. “One, because I didn’t want to make my daughter uncomfortable and two, I just wanted to see my daughter and her teachers and their relationship unfold.”
For Dunn, getting to know both teachers while she worked was a formative experience.
A professor at Michigan State University, Dunn recognizes the impact of educators — and draws inspiration from them:
“Sometimes as a brown woman, as a Mexican American woman myself, growing up I sometimes struggled and sometimes as an adult continue to struggle with my racial ambiguity, with my sense of identity and being, so to have their example for me was really inspiring.”
