Shannon Neu
    A&E Editor

[Note from A&E Editor Shannon Neu: The arts, including music, dance, theatre, visual art and other art forms have likely affected your life in some capacity, either in school or in other aspects of day-to-day life. This month, I am investigating how the lives of various members of the UNCG and Greensboro community have been impacted by the power of the arts. Each week I will feature a different individual and their stories of the role the arts have played in their lives.]

 

George Scheer is the co-founder and director of Elsewhere, the living art museum in downtown Greensboro. Built from a former thrift store owned by Scheer’s grandmother, Elsewhere is a unique place that explores the role art plays in the community by encouraging visitors to interact with the art. Through its collaborative projects and educational programs, Elsewhere works to inspire and educate members of the Greensboro community through art.

“When she [Scheer’s grandmother] passed in ‘97, I came in with a group of artists and friends — we were actually writers — and we were interested in why writers weren’t interacting more directly with artists and with political science majors and philosophers and engineers and whatever. We had this idea that we could transform the store into a place where artists and thinkers of all kinds could come and respond to this really amazing treasure of stuff,” Scheer reflected.

Elsewhere has an artist residency program as well as other programs that use the power of art to create educational experiences. One of Elsewhere’s educational programs includes QueerLab, which works with LGBTQ-identifying youth through a series of workshops and programs that the museum hosts. QueerLab produces I Don’t Do Boxes, a seasonal magazine that includes collections of stories, writings and artwork.

“Each season [of the publication] is thematic, so ‘School’s Out!’ is the first one. ‘Out Loud!’ is on music and ‘Act Out!’ is on radical performance,” Scheer explained.

“We’ve also got a series of projects in what we call our ‘CoLAB,’ or collaborative laboratory, where we bring our artists to work with all sorts of local elementary and middle schools,” Scheer continued.

CoLAB’s programs include SoundLab, which brought artist group Invisible and students from Weaver Academy together to build a mobile visual artwork and instruments made from obsolete technology; FoodLab, which took place in an after school program at Jackson Middle School and taught students about healthy eating habits and creative collaboration through culinary arts; and DanceLab, which took place at Dudley High School and focused on creating a site-specific dance for downtown Greensboro.

University groups can also bring students to the museum to participate in weekend-long immersive retreats. All of Elsewhere’s educational programs focus on facilitating learning through discovery and play.

“I think art is education,” Scheer said. “It’s a way of looking and seeing and understanding. It’s a way of thinking critically about the world.”

“It’s not about whether or not you can make a linoleum cut or do photography or draw,” Scheer continued. “I don’t think the point is to learn a technique — though that’s helpful, and I don’t think it should be abandoned — but the point is what’s being lost when schools cut art from their programs is the critical big-picture thinking capacity. It’s for students to ask questions, to challenge understanding, to challenge the world, to think about themselves and to grow in their own identities and learn to reflect on other people’s identities. That’s what art teaches. To take that out is really to handicap the kind of emotional capacity and the thinking capacity of our students.”

Growing up, Scheer participated in a variety of arts experiences. He was very active in his elementary school’s darkroom. He began taking photos and developing his own work from a very young age, and continued to do so into high school, when he began to also branch out into other areas of art. Experiences in classes such as A.P. Art History helped him gain tools to learn how to interpret works of art.

Outside of school, Scheer learned about art through frequent visits to art museums with his family. He has been immersed in art since he was a child and got an early start in terms of knowing about art and artists and thinking about different kinds of artwork.

“I would also admit to this, to say that art has maintained a continual educative role in my life in the kinds of projects that I take on, [and] the way that I think about critical social issues and significant political issues are all sort of determined in a way through an artistic basis or a visual form of thinking that propels me in some ways to try to make visible many of the hidden systems that are continually organized for our society,” Scheer said.

One of Scheer’s earliest memories of an experience with art was when he was visiting an art museum with his family. He became extremely excited about one painting in particular.

“It was [of] a teacher in a schoolhouse, and he had a stick he was bringing down on the desk to punish these kids who were sitting in these rows in a small one room schoolhouse,” Scheer recalled. “I remember being so excited about it, about the action, the way action was determined in the painting and what he was doing and the composition, everything. Whatever it was, it excited me so much that I reached up and I pointed and I touched the painting where the stick was coming down. It was sort of like this “E.T.” moment, and of course the guards came in and my family freaked out, and I got dragged out of the museum. It was sort of this traumatic experience but it has stuck with me and I think somewhere in there is the reason I created a museum that encourages people to touch and play.”

Elsewhere is closed for the winter, but it is scheduled to reopen in May.