Retiring Riverside Elementary School art teacher Ken Wilkie shows off one of his own creations, a cartoon Christmas card. (Photo by Suzette J. Lucas.)
By Jessica Talarick
Riverside Elementary School art teacher, Ken Wilkie, retires after 27 years.
Bright colored paintings and drawings line the walls of Riverside Elementary School for its annual Artists’ Showcase. Student interpretations of Van Gogh’s Starry Night and Roy Lichtenstein’s oversized graphic prints, created under the direction of art teacher Ken Wilkie, are taped to the walls for parents to admire.
Wilkie’s face lights up as he walks through his last student art gallery before retiring at the end of the school year. After 27 years of teaching at Riverside, Wilkie is hanging up his smock. He heralds the creativity of the students who made their own interpretation of famous artwork rather than an exact copy.
The unique and international student body is what attracted Wilkie to Riverside in 1986. He previously taught in Mount Laurel and Burlington Township, where he found students would imitate his examples rather than think of their own rendition.
“We’ve had kids from everywhere in the world and they bring a very different perspective on things,” Wilkie said.
He is amazed by the experience and travels of the elementary school students. Wilkie remembers teaching a lesson about the architecture of the Taj Mahal, when one 8-year-old girl raised her hand and remarked how cool it felt entering the building.
Riverside’s atmosphere is much different than the elementary school Wilkie attended in his hometown, Florence, where he only had art classes in seventh and eighth grades.
Without a creative outlet at school, he took to drawing on anything he could get his hands on at home.
As a young boy, Wilkie, his father, who is also called Ken, and his mother Leatrice, lived in his grandmother’s home. Wilkie said by the time they moved out he had covered the wallpaper with doodles.
In effort to save her walls from being completely covered in graffiti, Wilkie’s grandmother brought home used paper from the steel plant where she worked for her grandson to draw on.
When he started at Livingston College— now part of Rutgers University—he started taking the art classes he missed out on in elementary and high school. He also studied history and student-taught social studies classes.
Wilkie jumped right into teaching after graduating and hasn’t stopped since.
He married a fellow teacher named Nancy, who worked at a school in Elizabeth.
“It’s a mixed marriage. She’s from North Jersey and I’m from South Jersey,” he joked. “We barely speak the same language.”
They found middle ground in Hamilton, where they live with their 21-year-old son Mark. Mark is finishing at a school for special needs students in Cherry Hill. He is on the autistic spectrum, and his father hopes he will find work soon after graduating.
Raising a special needs son prepared Wilkie for one of the many changes Riverside school experienced during his tenure: adding classes for autistic students. Along with autism-only classes, autistic students are mainstreamed into regular education classes.
“That presents different challenges, we have to adapt lessons so they can be successful,” Wilkie said.
For the Artists’ Showcase, students in one autistic class created American flags inspired by Jasper Johns, while younger students stamped rectangles on construction paper to emulate Pablo Picasso. Wilkie said for these classes he focuses on basic concepts like shapes.
Since adding autistic classes, the school required an expansion to better suit the students’ needs, which meant moving the art classroom. Wilkie’s art classroom changed three times in the 27 years he worked at Riverside.
After teaching several years inside the school’s main building, Wilkie was moved into an exterior structure that was originally used for pre-K and kindergarten in the 1960s. Students walked under a canopy to get to the art room, which became more complicated during the cold, snowy winters when the they had to bundle up.
Wilkie said the worst winter was when Riverside had a lice epidemic. After walking to the classroom, students had to store their jackets, hats and scarves in plastic bags that were placed under their chairs. By the time all the children were settled, Wilkie had a short amount of time to get through his lesson.
Eventually, Riverside added a extension onto the school, and Wilkie’s classroom was added back to the main building.
“I was very happy eight years ago, when they built this room, and now they just walk in, and I don’t have to worry about the weather,” Wilkie said of the current art room.
While his classroom has changed, Wilkie’s favorite art project has remained the same. Every year around Halloween the fourth graders make plaster masks, which Wilkie said is the weirdest project he conducts.
“I always say to the fourth graders, 30 years from now you won’t remember any lesson you learned in elementary school, but you will remember the day they Vaselined each other’s faces and put plaster of Paris gauze on,” Wilkie said.
Students work in pairs to create molds of each others’ faces. After the masks set they decorate them with paint, glitter and yarn.
Wilkie likes the project because it does not require a high artistic skill level.
“What’s interesting about that is there’s things we do at school where some kids are better than others, this is one where no one had an advantage. It’s an even playing field,” Wilkie said.
Riverside students eagerly wait for their chance to make plaster masks and Wilkie’s other legendary art projects. He said the fourth grade students are concerned the new art teacher will not teach all the projects they saw their fifth grader friends do this year.
While Wilkie cannot guarantee his successor will carry on the masks legacy, he hopes the new teacher will learn some of the lessons he learned at Riverside. One such lesson Wilkie learned is being willing to break his own rules.
In his early years of teaching, Wilkie refused to let his students trace out of a book; however, he soon realized hand drawing is not easy for every student. He allowed students to trace out of books in their spare time and watched them grow more confident in their art skills.
“The person who comes in has to be flexible and know they don’t have all the answers. Please feel free to ask somebody else,” Wilkie said.
Wilkie is the first teacher Principal Bill Cirullo ever hired at Riverside. He said finding a successor for his friend will be a challenge.
“He can’t be replaced, that’s for sure,” Cirullo said.
The principal is working with the district’s fine arts specialist to find an art teacher who has many of the same characteristics as Wilkie.
In the meantime, the students, staff and faculty will savor the last few weeks of their art teacher, who Cirullo said will be sorely missed.
“He is a magnificent human being and a superb art teacher,” Cirullo said.
After Wilkie retires, he plans to work as a cartoonist, which he has been doing on the side of his teaching job. Wilkie’s cartoons have been printed in magazines like The Saturday Evening Post, Good Housekeeping and Women’s World.
He is looking forward to taking art classes and trying new skills during his retirement.
“I expect I’m going to venture into my own kind of art, there are different things I’ve been interested in doing, drawing and painting wise, that I just haven’t done because I don’t have time,” Wilkie said.
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Fifth graders quietly walk into the art room and gather around large paint splattered tables.
Wilkie explains they will continue working on drawings for the Remember Me project, a patchwork of two inch squares decorated with memories from their years at Riverside that will be framed and hung in the hallway.
After passing around pencils and paper, the students set to work perfecting rough drafts and asking Wilkie for his approval.
Wilkie walks around the classroom and consults with the students on their illustrations of science day, the book fair and Halloween parties. He praises the kids on their work and suggests adding detail or moving a figure.
They begin to create a colorful legacy, much like the one their beloved art teacher will leave at the school.
When the fifth graders graduate, Wilkie plans to give them self portraits they made in kindergarten.
“It’s like an exchange of art,” Wilkie said of his tradition.
While the fifth graders move on to middle school with the memories of art class, Wilkie starts the next chapter of his artistic life with fond memories of the Riverside students who made his job so fulfilling.
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