Expanding the canvas Art-education website a new resource for teachers By: Jen Zoratti Posted: 6:00 AM CDT Monday, Oct. 27, 2025

When Dawn Knight began her career as an art educator 25 years ago, she realized that there were really no resources available for teachers related to contemporary artists.

“Like, I can find 500 books about Van Gogh, or Monet or Picasso, and maybe one or two books about Frida Kahlo, but there was not a single book for teachers or even a web resource for teachers that is about teaching with contemporary art,” says Knight, an art education specialist at Mentoring Artists for Women’s Art (MAWA), the president of the Manitoba Association of Art Educators, a Winnipeg high school teacher and a visual artist herself. (In other words, she’s got plenty of skin in the game.)

And so, Knight, along with fellow MAWA art-education specialist Yvette Cenerini, built one.

Art Alive (artalive.mawa.ca) is a new art-education website featuring works by contemporary local artists, including Inuit carver Goota Ashoona, Métis beadwork artist Jennine Krauchi, Paraguay-via-Winnipeg print maker Miriam Rudolph and others.

“These are all resources around women and gender-diverse artists because that’s particularly what we support at MAWA, making sure that women and gender-diverse artists are supported in their practice,” Knight says.

Though anyone can use it, Art Alive is designed for use in K-12 classrooms. The resources on offer — available free of charge — include teaching modules, artist videos, tutorials, process videos and discussion prompts. A French version of the site will be coming in 2026.

And it’s not just for art class; Art Alive can be used in all subject areas.

“All of the artworks are interdisciplinary, meaning that teachers in a science class can find science artworks that they can introduce into their science class to talk about things like ecology or biology or neuroscience. There are pieces in here that are about history. There are pieces that connect to heritage and families,” Knight says.

One of the project’s goals is to lessen the lesson-planning burden on teachers, especially those who might not come from an art background or aren’t as connected with contemporary art, she says.

“What we’ve tried to do is select artworks that connect already with other subject areas that teachers are tasked with teaching, to make it easy for them to use them in the classroom and introduce kids to contemporary women and gender diverse artists.”

Launched earlier this month, Art Alive was created on the success of Resilience: 50 Indigenous Art Cards and Teaching Guide, an education publication based on the national billboard exhibition curated by Lee-Ann Martin.

“It was so well-liked that people in other provinces have ordered packages to be able to introduce the works of these Indigenous women artists into their classrooms,” Knight says.

“It’s really hard for teachers to find what they need to be able to teach kids about artists that are living and working today.”

And that’s another key goal of the project: to show students that art isn’t just centuries-old paintings from the European canon by long-dead men on museum walls. Art is now. It’s a current, living part of our world, made by all kinds of people.

“I think the great thing about this is that kids and teachers that are looking at these artists’ works are going to be able to find artists that are like them. We have artists in this collection from a variety of cultural and racial communities. We have neurodiverse artists, we have queer artists, artists living with disabilities,” Knight says.

Art Alive is also aimed at inspiring students to create original art.

“Instead of having students do imitative works — where, for example, we look at Van Gogh’s Sunflowers and then we all paint Van Gogh’s Sunflowers — to look at an artwork and then create their own work influenced by that artist’s ideas,” she says.

Thinking critically and creatively are important skills to foster and preserve, especially in the era of emerging artificial intelligence. As a high school teacher, Knight has seen challenges with both first-hand.

“Because of the access to technology since they were little, (students) struggle with coming up with their own ideas. It’s so easy to just go, ‘We’re talking about the idea of power, so I’m just going to look up artworks about power and copy something off the internet.’ This enables them to think about those big ideas and actually work through a creative process that’s a lot more authentic.”

Students will also be able to hear from artists themselves, describing why and how they created their work, which goes a long way in demystifying the artistic and creative process.

So far, Art Alive features 50 artists and the plan is that it will continue to grow, provided MAWA can access continued funding to pay additional artists, Knight says.

Teachers can continue to check back as the site continues to expand.

Art Alive has been labour of love for the past three years, Knight says. She’s excited it’s finally out in the world.

“This project is, by far, the thing I am most proud of doing in my whole career.”

jen.zoratti@freepress.mb.ca