Alumnus helps kick off National Arts in Education Week
Eric Coolidge as Ox Lord
The Ohio Department of Education is running a series of stories to help celebrate National Arts in Education Week, Sept.11–17, 2011 and Fine Art alumnus Eric Coolidge (CCAD 2011) was a featured web story.
The department site states that in July 2010 the U.S. House of Representatives designated the second week in September to “promote and showcase the role arts education has in producing engaged, successful, college, and career-ready students.”
The story about our alumnus was crafted to showcase what art teachers can do to make an impact on a student’s life.
According to the article, Coolidge was diagnosed with dyslexia as a child and struggled throughout school. He went to Orange High School (Cuyahoga County) and participated in the Cavotta’s career-technical visual art and design program, where art was the source of his transformation and drive.
Due to his success in the program he was awarded $10,000-a-year scholarship to CCAD. While studying at the college, he said he found amazing teachers who understood him.
The teachers “mostly guided me and watched me solve my own problems because they knew then what I know now – that to be successful you need to be able to think for yourself and find your own solutions,” Coolidge said in the article.
“Life really could not be much better,” Coolidge remarks.
He now resides in Brooklyn, New York. He can be found creating furniture and other designs for high-profile clients with Arch Production and Design or working on his own personal fine art, which mostly consists of metal sculptures that in Eric’s words are “insanely sharp, unviewer friendly, awesome.”
Read the full article here.