Capital City art teacher José Cuevas passes on “intuition and transferable skills”
José Cuevas says it was love and the desire for a change in scenery that prompted him to follow his future wife to the United States in 2000. He was a successful and thriving artist at the time that they met. She was a U.S. exchange student studying abroad in Granada, in southern Spain. Today, the 52-year-old visual artist and sculptor is also an art teacher at Capital City Public Charter School in Washington, D.C.’s Manor Park neighborhood, where we go to school and have been taking his art classes since 2020.
In Cuevas’ art class, one gets to see his poetic persona when he teaches about artistic lines of inquiry and brings joy to the classroom with his charisma and helpful nature. He constantly searches for ways to challenge students while showing them their potential and more. His cultivated ways of thinking regarding his art process and teaching philosophy have encouraged us to learn more about his story.
Cuevas comes from Córdoba, a small town in the south of Spain, where he’s left many traces of his artwork in public spaces and cultural institutions, such as museums and community centers. As his students, we are glad that the complexities of life led him to “cross the Atlantic,” as he says.
In this interview, we recognize Cuevas as an essential part of the Hispanic community for his dedication to his students and commitment to improving the arts. Not every teacher can magnify their students’ artistic abilities while also offering valuable life advice and lending a listening ear if necessary.
What follows is more about Cuevas, an educator who originally was not going to be one. He discusses what led up to his career as an art teacher and what he has experienced and learned along the way.
What were your reasons for becoming an art teacher?
When I finished high school, I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I was good at drawing and enjoyed art in school. I just knew that I used to do really well in things that I liked to do and not so well in things that I didn’t. So, I followed that and leaned into what I liked to spend time doing. I ended up with a blending of visual art and psychology, although I gravitated more toward visual art.
The teaching part comes with [the fact that] I had great mentors as teachers. In times of this transition, people who I’ve really respected as artists and admired [and who] guided me into taking those directions. [They told me:] “You should pursue art. You should consider teaching. You should consider sharing.”
I have such a passion for the visual arts, what I do and what the arts have offered me in my own life that I think it was just a very natural way of transitioning from my full-time [job]. I was doing full-time art when I was in Spain, mostly public art, like big monuments for plasters in bronze sculptures and stuff like that, and doing [related] exhibits. But [it was] always connected with culture, not so much for profit. [I worked for] institutions associated with cultural venues – museums or community centers, places where the issues that you can bring up are not necessarily concerns of the commercial venues of the art.
In all your years of teaching, what impact do you feel you’ve had on past and current students?
Oh, that’s a beautiful question. I was kind of fairly developed as an artist when I started teaching. So, I had some clear concepts and ideas of what I was doing with my visual art. One of those main concepts is what I call the shredded sculpture, el esculptor despojado, which is the idea that it is a very tangible experience when you’re working with materials like bronze and marble. These materials are really, really noble in the sense of how they support what you’re trying to say and do, and humbling at the same time, in the sense that they define the pace of how you do things, and the time in which you do things, [which] make you slow down. Slowing down demands a very reflective and humbling process because they are difficult materials to learn and deal with. I think that what I learned from these materials was to really listen. You always have all these ideas of things you want to do with the material and put your expertise into practice. [But] the materials always have different ideas, and [what] I learned is that it’s better to listen to them.
[I] developed this idea of it’s not me the one saying something [in] that material, it’s more the material saying something through me. I’m like a translator of sorts. I think that what I do is to transfer that model into teaching, [because] that concept is transferable, that concept [of the shredded sculpture] brought into the classroom is not so much about what I have done with the students, but what I have learned from them, what the students have done to me and the way they have impacted me. That is one of the most amazing things that has happened [to me].
With that kind of intuition and transferable skills in the art room, I have been able to fulfill my craving of being creative and an artist. Even though I am teaching, I’m a teaching artist. My students are the material. But it’s a material that I’m not trying to shape, but rather, I’m listening to [them] and they’re shaping me. So I think that is one of the most beautiful and humbling lessons I can take from my teaching years.
Is there anything you’ve altered in your teaching methods to impact students? How has that changed over the years?
It’s challenging to navigate the administrative components and all the things that don’t make sense in the educational system. Yet I still say, how can I offer the best I can in the place where I am? And still keep in mind that I am in the place where the tire hits the road, that I am the one making those decisions, and that once I close the door in my room, I can deliver the best quality of education that I can think of, and that this, this relationship stays between me and the student that I’m giving it to. There is nothing else beyond that. I can take all the pressures and nonsense that is going around and just stop it right there.
What we’re doing here is something different; we are developing these relationships and talking about what this art can do for you not just in the context of high school, the context of your AP portfolio, but in the context of your life. With a lot of mistakes being made, it becomes very clear to me that it is more important that my students keep art in their toolbox after they finish high school than they are successful in their AP portfolio or any other aspect. So, to develop that relationship with your art making and with that sort of mentorship, then you’re shaping me, I’m shaping you, these dynamics become sort of a process that I have been flushing and developing over the years.
You talked about how, despite being the teacher, you’re the one who’s being taught by your students. What have you learned that stuck out to you the most after all these years of teaching?
[It’s] very difficult to find just one lesson. I think that [what] I have really learned over the years [is] how to earn the trust and respect of the students, so that they are willing to let me in, in some way. As I was telling you, the process of working with marble [and] bronze are very slow, which at very specific times [makes you] lose sight of the direction you’re going. You might have modeled the piece in clay, then made molds, did waxes, burned the wax, then cast the bronze, and for months, you don’t have a clear sight of what that piece is. You literally lose physical sight of the piece. It’s not until the very end when you weld and put it back together, that the piece comes back with its own language and beauty.
If I had to resume all the lessons that I have learned from the students that have graduated, I mean, I have been at Capital City for a very long time, but the students that have graduated from Capital City, coming back to me, and coming back as adult friends, you know, having colleagues that are teaching at Capital City or students that have pursued art and come back to me, it’s like, “Hey, Mr. Cuevas? Can we see you, can we make art together?,” you know, and collaborating with them is sort of that vision that I lost sight of, and then seeing it coming back in this beautiful work of art that is always more than what you have put in.
But since you’ve been teaching at Capital City for so long, how has that impacted your method of teaching? Do you think it would have been different if you had gone somewhere else?
Definitely, every place will change the variables and I have taught at a few different places. One of the things that I keep close to my heart is that I have been able to transfer my skills as a visual artist into what I do in the classroom.
It was always clear to me the guiding question [of] how can I be an artist in the classroom? [This question] it’s not about the teaching, but about how I can bring this higher level of understanding, sensitivity and skills into my practice as a teacher so I don’t neglect and deny my own creative process, my way of being and my authenticity?
But at the end of the day, I think it’s your capacity to force those connections into your authenticity.
Do you have a different goal now, regarding your career as an artist?
I’m not sure if I have a different goal, but I have a clear understanding that I gain a lot of my energy and inspiration from being with the students in the art room. I also see in the context of education how many things prevent that from happening to teachers and art teachers. So I’m looking for something in between, [that is], how I could mentor teachers or programs in a way that will allow for more liberty for the teachers to understand that what matters really is the relationship with the students. If you don’t start with that, everything else is irrelevant. I don’t think it’s that important if a student knows how to draw a little bit better or worse at the end of the four years. If the relationship with the teachers they have becomes meaningful, that’s ultimately what they will still spend time doing. I think my career will maybe go in that direction, since I have done a little bit of that. I was mentoring [in] the old Corcoran School of the Arts & Design postgraduate program. There are a lot of student teachers that I’ve been mentoring or teaching around the city and that they also still are coming back and [say], “Hey, Mr. Cuevas, can we reconnect? Can we talk about what you’re doing? Can I talk to you about what I’m doing?”
What is your most fulfilling moment in your career? Could it be related to students? Or can it be related to education or your own artistic career?
Again, it is very difficult to choose one. I’m very touched by acts or people that do things that are not selfish. I made a monument in my hometown, the only monument that I have in the capital of my hometown in Córdoba, which is a monument to organ donors. At the entrance of the building of the transplant transport part of the hospital, [which] is called Reina Sofia. I made a monument there. I was commissioned to make a monument to the organ donors, who are the people who donate organs for transplants. While doing my research for the monument, I learned that the politics of organ donations are different in every place. But in Spain specifically, you are not allowed to know the person who donates the organ, or you are not allowed to know who is receiving the organ. There is a conflict of interest there; some policies are related to organ traffic. So, those connections are not intentionally made.
In that sense of anonymity, I found that these people who are approached and asked, probably in the most difficult times in their lives, “Can you donate the organ so somebody else can live?”, they say yes. What I learned through the families that donated those organs is that they found some kind of purpose in that, that it seems like, somehow, the death of a loved one meant something; it means that there’s somebody else who could live. Such a beautiful concept triggered my making of the monument and the anonymity. There was a very untouched place there, and the person who donated the organ was full of hope. The people who received it were full of gratitude, but there was no place to deposit it. I said the monument I’m making is this place where you can meet somebody who has not done that for you but who has done that. Interestingly enough, that place became a sanctuary. People go and pray and put flowers there. It’s such a moving thing that I decided that I didn’t want to sign that money. I didn’t want to put my name on this; it is something that I have been given. So, I think that’s one of my most humbling moments.
What is a good motivational tool for young artists to instill confidence in their abilities, skills and journey?
Authenticity. Your authenticity should be at the front. It is that you try to strive and thrive to who you are, to your true self. You have a benefit as an artist that no other people have, which is that your creativity is where your soul resides. There is your true self right there in your art-making.
Listen to that, listen to that authenticity, whatever comes from that place, it is touching on a human spirit, it’s touching on the human level and the human connection. So, it will touch people. And, when you touch people, they reciprocate that way of being taught to you. Ultimately, that’s what we aim for in life, breaking off that individualization that is so tangible, specifically in this country. We’re so siloed and individualized that we don’t know how to reach out to others and see them as soulmates. It is just through your thoughts, your soul, through your creativity, through your confidence that you are going to be able to be one with the other, to communicate and to really touch people’s emotions and understand that that person will need to be held.
You mentioned at the beginning that you had mentors who helped guide you in the direction of art. Were these artists in your family or your community? Can you tell us a little more?
I think teachers mainly in the sense of art teachers. Interestingly enough, they were art teachers, not just art teachers; they were friends. Growing up in Spain, my father had a fresh fruit and vegetable store. So I used to spend most of the weekends in the afternoon selling vegetables. Some of those teachers used to come to my parents’ fruit store, so I didn’t know them in other contexts, just beyond being my clay modeling teacher, my painting teacher, but they were also part of the family, sort of clients and friends. I think that hybridity brings other layers to relationships that I think are important. I think that as long as we continue labeling things, as teachers we are kind of not doing very well. It’s like we’re not helping things, right? Well, I understand that in the context of teaching. I’m supposed to be teaching you something and you’re supposed to be learning it, but what is sort of like a way of describing the nature of a relationship, that has to be a little more layered. And in that complexity of the layering is where the meaning really resides. There are these layers of meaning that, through more complex interactions, can go beyond the teacher-student relationship or mentor-mentee relationship. So it is more human to human, more of a creative self to creative self, soul to soul, human experience to human experience — a conversation.
This story has been lightly edited for clarity and concision.
– Story by Joycelin Salmeron and Estrellita Soto
– Copy edited by Jordan Luz
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Good job daddy