Carol Sirrine remembers your name.
Sirrine, the longtime K-12 fine-arts coordinator for Hopkins Public Schools, founded the St. Paul-based arts education organization ArtStart in 1988. Now, after an arts education career that stretches back to the 1960s, she plans to retire when ArtStart’s board names a new executive director.
As she reflected on decades of helping young people learn to think creatively, her stories had a certain specificity, particularly regarding the names of people she’s encountered and learned from. During an hour-long conversation, she referenced more than two dozen — but they’re not name-drops; Sirrine is honoring a lifetime of being inspired by big ideas, by creativity.
And it starts with her parents, Mayme and Orton Sirrine. Both were school teachers with a knack for last-minute road trips from their home in Billings, Mont., to nearby mountains and rivers and geological sites. They’d encourage their young daughter to express herself through music and art and to ask questions, to anybody who’d answer them.
“I realized what a phenomenal gift I’d been given by these two adults, and I wanted that for other kids,” she said. “I thought, why not embrace life, and the joy of life — and see it through art.”
As a student at Macalester College in the 1960s, Sirrine rented a room from Harriet Gold Allen, a concert pianist who was, by then, in her 80s. Sirrine, too, was a musician: Growing up, she played piano, violin and French horn and had performed alongside the Billings Symphony as a teenager. When she arrived at Macalester to study music and elementary education, she enrolled in piano lessons with music professor Donald Betts.
Betts turned her away.
“I thought I was a hotshot musician when I came to Minnesota,” Sirrine said, chuckling. “He told me, ‘Don’t sign up for piano — when you can learn from me, you can come back.’”
A harsh comment, yes, and also a wake-up call: By the time Betts ultimately accepted her when she re-enrolled a year later, she said, she was able to be more open-minded, more present in each moment, more humble.
And when she began teaching in Hopkins Public Schools after graduation, she found herself thinking more deeply about different and perhaps gentler ways to reach detached students of her own. The district didn’t have a codified art curriculum; maybe that would help, she mentioned to Frank Brendemuehl, the district curriculum coordinator at the time.
In response, he created a new position, the K-12 fine arts coordinator — and hired Sirrine for the role, tasking her with retooling the district’s entire approach to visual arts. Sirrine knew how to teach music to kids; she was not as confident, she said, in the kind of pedagogical theory necessary to build multi-year sequential curricula from the ground up.
So she started learning, adding to the list of names.
From Herb Kohl, the alternative schooling pioneer who also served as Sirrine’s master’s advisor at Hamline University, she learned about education justice and equity. From James Undercofler, the executive director of the Minnesota Center for Arts Education — now the Perpich Center for Arts Education — Sirrine learned about drumming up community support for art in schools.
From Margaret Hasse at the Minnesota Alliance for Arts in Education, she learned about securing grants for developing comprehensive arts programs like the one she spent years creating at Hopkins. From Wallace Kennedy, a nationally renowned Minnesota arts educator, she learned how to articulate the importance of visiting artists in schools, then a rare phenomenon. The first two guests in Sirrine’s program — renowned Black public artists Ta-Coumba Aiken and Seitu Jones.
Perhaps most important: From Margaret DiBlasio, an arts education researcher at the University of Minnesota, she learned about the theory of discipline-based art education. Its core idea is that creativity shouldn’t be limited to art class; that visual thinking must be interwoven into multiple parts of a general education program.
“I still consider her one of the women that changed my life,” Sirrine said. “Great mentorships, and seeing the parallels between music and art, dance, drama — and then being able to infuse that within academics. It just all came together for me.”
While at Hopkins, Sirrine launched ArtStart in 1988 to provide extracurricular classes, and she opened ArtScraps, the organization’s materials store and home base, in 1993. And in 2003, after 36 years with Hopkins, she retired to run ArtStart full time.
As ArtStart has grown and matured, Sirrine has deepened the organization’s focus on the environment.
Many of ArtStart’s in-school programs and summer camps are rooted in Earth science and the outdoors: once again integrating creativity with other forms of learning. They partner with the National Park Service and the Minnesota Valley National Wildlife Refuge. The materials sold at ArtScraps are all factory overstock, donated goods, or items that would otherwise be thrown away — about 50,000 pounds a year, diverted from landfills into artists’ hands.
“I may be wrong, but I see this continuum,” Sirrine said. “You have reuse here, where you’re inciting creativity, and then as you travel the arc over to the other side, you’ve got the wonder of nature — another element of creativity. So you’re combining the science and the art.”
Now, preparing to leave after 35 years, she hopes ArtStart will continue to grow. But perhaps even more strongly, she hopes policymakers will once again realize the ways creativity is central to learning.
The 1980s and ‘90s in Minnesota were “a renaissance” for public school arts education funding, she said. Independent nonprofits and extracurricular programs are important, but something is missing.
“Besides having that great leadership out in the community, there was staff-development money that was pouring in from the state, and that’s not there anymore,” she said. “I wish we could somehow rekindle that. … I think if we had the support, schools would just be popping with all sorts of wonderful art displays.”
