Ms. Hasmik Shiroyan teaches many art classes at Glendale High School. She has been teaching for seventeen years, including two years at Rosemont Middle School and now fifteen years at Glendale High School. At Rosemont, she taught art classes to both seventh and eighth graders. But she ultimately knew she wanted to teach at the high school level. Currently at GHS, she teaches a wide range of classes, including Mural Making and Curating, Drawing/Painting 1-6, AP 2D Design and AP Drawing and Painting.
Ms. Shiroyan has always been an artist. “I actually did my bachelor’s [degree] in Fine Arts and my master’s [degree] in Art Education,” she said. “So I was always inspired to create, and I loved talking about it and working with people who also love [art].”
BUT, Ms. Shiroyan revealed that she had a different life path than teaching when she was in college. “I studied Art History, actually,” she said. “I wanted to maybe teach college-level Art History, but then when I started actually producing [my own] art, I fell in love with the production of it… So I decided I want to teach younger people and high school was it.”
If she weren’t teaching art, Ms. Shiroyan would be making art, but she might even be curating and working in a gallery one day. Since she has previously worked at the Getty, you might find her back there in the future.
But for now, Ms. Shiroyan is happy to be teaching. “My favorite part is after teaching for a little [while], kids get it and they produce work they feel [thankful] for giving [them] the tools,” she said. “That’s the best part.”
Ms. Shiroyan’s non-AP classes focus on teaching students the skills they need and providing them with the tools to learn how to produce creative work. But, her AP Art students are allowed to “independently work [and] to use their own creative ideas.” They even have “no projects,” because “it’s more student-led.” This way, her students have more power and have more room for exploration.
Ms. Shiroyan has one piece of advice that she hopes all of her students will take away from her class. “Their voices count,” she said. “Art is not just about…your technical skills; it’s about your ideas. All artists become artists so that they can take their ideas and turn them into [something physical in order] to have a voice.”
Ms. Shiroyan always tries to work one-on-one with students. She also gives beneficial feedback very efficiently, while also creating a great student-teacher bond.
Ms. Shiroyan and her fellow art teachers organize an event every year in January called VAPA Night. This event is totally free and presents work done by students, including sculpture, 2D Art and even music. The entire GHS community is invited to come, and Ms. Shiroyan and her department are trying to make this event happen twice a year instead of only once.
Ms. Shiroyan stresses that even though some art classes are electives, they are still academic classes. “[Art is] such a foundation to everything else: to creativity, to open up doors for people who maybe are not so strong in…academics,” she said.
Even though art hasn’t been funded very well in the past by the state, Proposition 28 is coming into action in California, so the arts will be more supported financially than ever before. “At the moment, to be quite honest, I am very happy that we are using Prop-28 money,” Ms. Shiroyan stated. “So I can’t really complain about the budget. It is no longer an issue. I think that the state has worked hard to put something together [to support the arts].”
Mural making has been a passion of Ms. Shiroyan’s for a while, and she officially made it into a class this year. She shared a story from ten years ago when the Glendale Police Department asked her students to paint a mural at a senior living facility. “There was a big wall surface…and it was always being tagged,” she recalled. “I took a team during summer, and we put something so beautiful and large-scale. It was one of the most memorable [things] for those students and me.”
Our Mural Making and Curating class is an awesome experience for those who want to work together with a team to create something on a big scale and make the world a more colorful and beautiful place. If you are interested, please consider joining this class next year, and contact Ms. Shiroyan at [email protected].
