Putnam County’s Joshua Curry uses art as a gateway to open opportunities for students

Putnam County High School art teacher Joshua Curry believes cultivating a student’s creativity is important.

He told Superintendent Clay Theisinger a couple of years ago that a teacher can hand a piece of paper to a kindergartner and watch the creativity take off.

“They can draw and create and tell the most elaborate story with it,” Curry said. “Then, somewhere along the line if that creativity isn’t fostered, they’ll tend to lose it.”

Curry said that by the time students are in middle and high school, in many of his classes, the same exercise doesn’t bring out a similar result.

“I find students who say ‘I can’t draw,’ or ‘I don’t know what to do,’” Curry said. “I just think it’s very important for our society to really cultivate that imagination that we all seem to have as young children.”

This is Curry’s first year full time at Putnam County High School after teaching the past seven years at the junior high school and at Chillicothe IVC for nine years.

Curry grew up in Mossville near Chillicothe and graduated from IVC.

“He is passionate about teaching and encourages all students to put forth their best effort. He encourages risk-taking and is able to instill confidence in students’ minds.”

—  Putnam County Excellence in Education commendation for art teacher Joshua Curry

He didn’t get into art until high school. He won an award for an entry in a photography contest and then started to think about art as a career.

“I didn’t have art when I was in grade school,” Curry said. “I got to take it in high school, and I really enjoyed it. I took as many high school art classes that I could, and then winning that award for photography, it really made me think that, ‘Hey, maybe this is a route for me,’ and so I went to Northern Illinois University.”

After majoring in art studio design with an emphasis on photography, Curry worked in a photography lab. After a job teaching children in the summer at a global Scout camp, his path started to move toward teaching.

“A lot of the people on staff at the Scout camp, they were either teachers themselves or they were college students studying education,” Curry said. “And so I thought, ‘You know, that might be kind of an interesting path.’”

At NIU, Curry took quite a few ceramics courses and enjoyed creating with clay.

Curry’s route to teaching art gives him perspective, especially since he was a latecomer to having art as an influence in his life. He said he focuses on influencing and exposing all of his students to the wide-ranging world of art, whether they are interested in pursuing it as a career, are uncertain or just want to take art for fun.

“Even if a student graduates from here and doesn’t pursue a career in the arts, perhaps they pick it up as a hobby, or it’s part of a mental health break or group,” Curry said.

Curry intentionally makes the coursework and art offerings at the high school diverse. He wants students to be exposed to as much as possible, from studio work and design to photography and various crafts.

Curry said he wants students to take advantage of the opportunities afforded to them in high school, and sometimes he comes off as a little strict because of it, but it’s because he doesn’t want any of them to miss out.

“I don’t want any student to look back and say, ‘I really wish I would have done this,’” Curry said.

Curry’s colleagues describe him as an excellent role model and someone who succeeds at relationship building.

“You can truly see the respect and admiration his students have for him just by stopping by his classroom,” according to a commendation for Excellence in Education. “He is passionate about teaching and encourages all students to put forth their best effort. He encourages risk-taking and is able to instill confidence in students’ minds.”

Curry carries his relationship-building beyond students. He travels between Putnam County school district buildings and makes it a priority to build with his colleagues, according to the commendation.

Curry said he recalls talking to a student about Italian artist Caravaggio, who specialized in a technique that focused on contrast within the painting, going from a bright area that falls off to darkness.

That student graduated, and two years later, Curry found in his mailbox a postcard from her. She had seen a Caravaggio painting in a museum in Dublin while she was studying abroad, and she wrote to Curry that she saw the painting and thought of him. She thanked him for introducing the painter’s work to her.

“That’s fantastic,” Curry said. “She was studying English, so she wasn’t even studying anything with the visual arts or the fine arts, but it made an impact on her.”