Every teacher deserves an apple on National Teacher Day.If this teacher's style appears a bit wooden, it might be because she is a white pine carving from the Smithsonian American Art Museum folk art collection!
An Apple for the Teacher?
Every teacher deserves an apple on National Teacher Day.If this teacher's style appears a bit wooden, it might be because she is a white pine carving from the Smithsonian American Art Museum folk art collection!
The teacher explains a math lesson to two well-dressed students in this schoolroom tableau. Her serious expression and the pupils' clenched fists suggest that all is not well in this carefully carved scenario.
Artist Lavern Kelley, who lives on a farm in rural New York, had begun working on the scene before he was one of the first folk artists named as an artist in residence by New York state in 1986, which he described as "the biggest thing that ever happened to me."
Source: Lynda Hartigan. Contemporary Folk Art: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum (exhibition text, Smithsonian American Art Museum, 1999).
Pictured: Lavern Kelley, born 1928, Classroom with Three Figures, 1979, 1984–87, painted white pine, plywood, brass, and plastic, 36 3/8 x 30 1/8 x 45 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Herbert Waide Hemphill, Jr.