Santa Fe ArtWorks education program loses 12 teachers after instructional changes, pay cuts

For almost 25 years, Wendy Chapin asked students how Georgia O’Keeffe’s landscapes created a sense of perspective, as a way to spark their curiosity in a city full of world-class art offerings.

“They’ll go ‘color.’ Or they might say ‘lines,’ ” she said. “They’re learning by asking questions.”

It’s one of myriad questions Chapin asked as she took “generations” of youth from Santa Fe Public Schools to museums and galleries in her role as a teaching artist in the local ArtWorks program.

And it’s a question she won’t get to ask this school year.

She and all but one of the program’s roughly dozen educators working at the beginning of this year have departed the nonprofit-run program, citing instructional changes, significant pay cuts and mistrust.

The overseer of the program, Partners in Education, the nonprofit partner of Santa Fe Public Schools, has rebutted few instructional changes have taken place, the pay decreases were necessary — and an even greater number of new teaching artists had been contracted to fill the void left by former staff.

Teachers decry pay cuts, changes

ArtWorks was founded by the City of Santa Fe Arts Commission in 2001 and was brought under the Partners in Education umbrella in 2010.

The program brings students to concerts, readings, galleries and museums, oftentimes with a pre-lesson before the visit and a post-lesson afterward — an opportunity Chapin, who has been with the ArtWorks program since it began in 2001, took to equip her O’Keeffe students with paints to “blend color like she does.”

It was that expansive artistic focus many of the teachers said was put in jeopardy by a May 19 meeting in which teaching artists were told the program would be changing to instead focus on “heritage arts” of Santa Fe and on mediums such as tinwork and jewelry.

“ Those are important. I’m not saying they’re not,” she said. “But they’re not ArtWorks. … That was the whole point of the program, is that you take kids to museums, you expose them to a variety of arts. … This has nothing to do with that.”

There would be significant pay cuts, too, teachers were told. They would now be paid half the original rate — Chapin’s pay dropped from around $50 an hour to $25, she said. Hours, too, would be cut, with staff no longer tasked with creating their own teaching plans.

Chapin, alongside 10 other teaching artists, sent a letter to the Partners in Education board in late July, announcing they’d be leaving the program, citing the pay cuts, leadership and changes to programming. It called the new focus on local heritage as “limiting” and in opposition to the “comprehensive educational mission of ArtWorks.”

“We strongly believe that the ArtWorks program cannot successfully function under the current leadership,” the letter states.

“We would expect that this exodus should cause you alarm, yet we are unsure if you have paused to question the radical consequences,” they wrote, asking the board to transfer ArtWorks to another organization.

In a response obtained by The New Mexican, board Chair Keith Burks wrote the pay rate changes were driven by lost federal grant funding and that the board had been briefed on the “financial management issues” of the program for more than a year. He rejected the idea of transferring ArtWorks’ leadership from Partners in Education.

ArtWorks: We need to be sustainable

Though the loss of nearly her entire teaching staff was “disappointing,” said Sarah Amador-Guzman, executive director of the education nonprofit, she was “happy” the new hires are “ absolutely comfortable working at the pay rate that we’re offering because they understand what’s going on in this economy and in this dynamic.”

She had previously attributed the pay cuts to the loss of a $50,000 grant for the organization from the National Endowment for the Arts, which she said meant the loss of a third of ArtWorks’ funding.

However, she noted in a recent interview she started pay-cut conversations with the board shortly after she was appointed, noting she “couldn’t really justify” the wages even “before these federal cuts.”

“As a responsible leader, it’s my role to really make sure that we’re sustainable,” said Amador-Guzman, appointed after the 2023 retirement of longtime head Ruthanne Greeley.

Despite that, the program will have even more teaching artists than before, she said, noting 12 teaching artists and 3 “master artisans” have been hired. Two additional teaching artists, said educational programs director Maria Griego, are “anticipated” on top of that.

“The model is not changing,” Griego stressed, noting the new ArtWorks will even expand its programs, now offering a four-hour experience of a pre-lesson, field trip and post-lesson.

The money-saver is that “each teaching artist is not going to have the same load as the teaching artists in the past,” added Griego, accusing Chapin of spreading “false narratives” to her colleagues who “ weren’t entirely aware of what the reality was before they made this decision to sign onto this letter.”

Plus, Griego said, “of course” Georgia O’Keeffe, a “New Mexico artist,” would be included in the program.

Chapin, who had feared O’Keeffe would be cut in the transition to a heritage focus, posited the previously proposed focus was a botched gambit to secure a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization grant, which the nonprofit ended up not receiving — a theory Partners in Education did not deny.

“With the federal cuts, we’re going to always have to be searching for those grants,” said Amador-Guzman.

Teachers feel unheard

The New Mexican spoke to five departed ArtWorks teachers who, with the exception of Chapin, spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Those teachers expressed a feeling of being unheard throughout the program’s changes and being written off by leadership. One said their favorite part was bringing the students — specifically those from lower-income families — to Santa Fe’s internationally acclaimed local offerings.

Now having departed against their wishes, Chapin said a few of those teaching artists will go to the Santa Fe Opera’s ALTO program, which like ArtWorks will bring teaching artists across disciplines to teach in Santa Fe schools.

“What I’m most frightened of is that ArtWorks will tank,” Chapin said. “I just want the name back — I want ArtWorks back so that it can be live again with another organization.”