Renowned master puppeteer David Marquis created a non-profit organization named Marquis Studios in 1977.
Marquis’s goal was for his company to teach visual and performing arts to children in New York City public schools. Above all, he believed that each student should have an equal right to an arts education. In its first year of operation, Marquis was the company’s only artist, who taught puppetry at a handful of the city’s public schools.
Throughout the last 36 years, Marquis Studios has grown to where the organization currently boasts a staff of seven full-time employees and 40 teaching artists. They provide arts education services to more than 100 city public schools, either in the form of classes, professional development seminars for teachers, or parent and child workshops. Although it has also provided their services to parochial schools and summer camps in the five boroughs, Marquis Studios estimates that 95 percent of its work is done in public schools.
When a school contacts Marquis Studios to request art classes be taught there, a member of the administrative staff visits the school to meet with the principal and learn about curriculums and lesson plans. Sometimes the school requests that Marquis Studios teach certain classes that are featured on the organization’s marquisstudios.org/“>website. After visiting the school, the staff member returns to Marquis Studio’s main office in Brooklyn.
Reviewing the teachers’ lesson plans, the staff decides on classes for each grade that are not only age appropriate, but also enhance the curriculum. Marquis Studios refers to each class as a “residency,” where the teaching artist draws up his own lesson plan to visit the school once a week for 10 weeks to teach his craft.
For example, when a second grade class was studying India, the school requested Marquis Studios come up with a residency for Bhangra dance, a type of folk dance from the Punjab region of northern India that has been featured in films such as “Slumdog Millionaire.” Fortunately, Marquis Studios had dance instructors who were already familiar with this type of dance and were able to design a 10-week residency. Bhangra dance is now one of the most popular classes the studio offers.
The residencies are a reflection of the creativity and diversity of the studio’s teaching artists. Some of the visual arts classes include drawing, origami, architectural design, bookmaking, collage, painting, mask-making, printmaking, scientific illustration, sculpture, textile design, and quilt-making.
As for the performing arts, the names of the residencies are imaginative as well as culturally specific, which can supplement a budding mind’s knowledge of a specific geographic area: African dance, Bhangra dance, Brazilian hip hop and blues drumming, circus arts, dance on Broadway, Latin American percussion, Islamic visual arts and culture, Japanese taiko drumming, yoga, song writing, and puppetry. At the end of the residency, the class puts on a final performance in which teachers and parents are invited to attend.
According to Marquis Studio education liaison Chris Forte, the organization receives “dozens and dozens of resumes” from people interested in being teaching artists. The studio is very selective in its hiring process, and requires teachers to be experienced, have a deep background knowledge of their craft and, in some cases, have certain certifications.
One of most admired and beloved teaching artists at Marquis Studios is Galina Shishkin, who teaches puppetry and book-and-mask-making. She holds two degrees in theater — one she earned in Russia and the other she received in the U.S.
“Galina, like all the teaching artists, is very passionate about what she does,” Forte commented. “She loves teaching the children and I think that permeates all the way through the organization, and David is the one who sets the tone.”
Shishkin says she learned about puppetry from her husband, Nikolai Shishkin, who was the artistic director of the Moscow Puppet Theater. He was also managing director of Marquis Studios for 10 years. Although he passed away in 2009, his family’s involvement with the organization continues — their son Vassili is the studio’s financial manager.
The Shishkin family is an example of the familial approach to how Marquis views himself and treats his staff.
“There have been times when a school requests a class and there are no teaching artists available to teach the class,” Forte recounted. “We will not go out on the street to find someone because we have no idea who that person is and they have no experience with us, so David will actually turn the school down. I’ve been instructed to simply say, ‘Sorry, we can’t help you.’ We have lost business that way.”
All of Marquis Studios’s teaching artists have received training in New York City’s Department of Education’s Blueprint for Teaching and Learning in the Arts, which provides certain standards towards teaching the arts. They also attend training seminars at Marquis Studios, where they learn to create age-appropriate arts curriculum.
“Professional development workshops used to be a pretty decent size amount of work that we used to do. Unfortunately, it has really changed recently,” explained Forte. “Very few schools do professional development with us anymore or with any outside organization, mainly because there are usually two or three or four days that are designated on the DOE’s school calendar as professional development days.”
Instead, there has been a surge in the number of parent and child workshops that Marquis Studios offers to schools.
“A lot of the schools want to get the parents more and more engaged and involved. The parent and child workshop is a great way to do that, so we’re seeing a lot of growth with that,” Forte observed. “We used to do maybe 10 or so workshops. Now we’re doing over 100 workshops in a year.”
Forte described one workshop he observed that was designed by a teaching artist called “Your Family Treasure Box.” The class comprised of one teaching artist, 25 parents, and 25 students, who all showed up at the school at 9 am on a Saturday. The teaching artist, who brought all the art supplies and materials, taught the class for 90 minutes. The parents and children each created and decorated their own family treasure box where they could put information about their family and even stories about their family’s immigration to the U.S.
The most remarkable aspect about Marquis Studios is its devoted commitment to its “beliefs and values” statement in which it states, “We believe … that every child be taught equally … and the values that guide us are (our) social responsibility to New York City and to each school community in which we operate.”
Seventy-five percent of the students who Marquis Studio teaches live below the poverty line, while 30 percent are in District 75, which, according to the DOE “is an organization within the DOE that provides citywide educational, vocational, and behavioral support programs for students who are on the autism spectrum, have significant cognitive delays, are severely emotionally challenged, sensory impaired, or multiply disabled.”
Forte says the majority of the schools Marquis Studios works with are schools with free breakfast and lunch programs, as well as Title One schools, which receive federal funding, because of the economic conditions in the community where the school is situated. Many of these schools have District 75 students and the studio’s teaching artists assigned to these schools have experience and are certified to work with children who have certain mental, physical, or emotional disabilities.
Marquis Studios also holds a professional development workshop called “Teaching Artist Training Institute.” Developed in conjunction with PS 37 in Staten Island, the seminar shows teaching professionals how to work with students on the autism spectrum or are developmentally delayed. The program is now in its sixth year and nearly 100 participants have already completed the program.
In order to function, Marquis Studios charges a fee for its services. In the schools of wealthier communities, principals can allocate part of their budgets to pay for this fee, or the Parents Associations can raise the funds. Many of these schools already have an art teacher who teaches students on a weekly basis, so the residencies are considered supplemental to the students’ arts education.
In lower-income neighborhoods, many of the schools don’t have enough money in their budgets for an art teacher. These schools will often call Marquis Studios requesting a residency that will fulfill the arts education requirements their students need. These residencies are usually funded by foundations through grants. Some of Marquis Studio’s funding partners include Bloomberg, JP Morgan Chase, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Forte describes his visits to observe these residencies where he needs to walk through three metal detectors to enter the school and four or five security guards are patrolling the hallways. What Forte finds most moving is observing the classrooms of District 75 students.
“It’s sometimes sad to see, but, at other times, it was amazing to see how the children responded and what they were doing,” he said. “It actually brought tears to my eyes to see how the teaching artists interacted with the students and how they were able to make things, and, in some cases, the artwork that some of these students created is just amazing.”
Allison Plitt is a freelance writer who lives in Queens with her husband and daughter. She is a frequent contributor to NY Parenting Media.
