The Art of John Michaels & Darren Murray:
an exhibition of the collaboration between a teacher and his autistic student
In 2003, graduate student and teaching fellow John Michaels
began a special-education art teaching practicum at the Queens, NY
School for Career Development Alternate Assessment Program.
Among Michaels’s students was 17-year-old Darren Murray.
Murray was nonverbal and had been diagnosed with Autism Spectrum
Disorder (ASD) as a child in his home country of Jamaica. His mother
had relocated with him to the U.S. where, at age ten, Murray started
attending schools for special-needs children.
As Michaels got to know his students, he found that Murray had a
tendency to mimic others’ gestures. The teacher was determined
to engage this student -- and the student responded by imitating
Michaels’s face-to-face actions. Michaels wondered if Murray’s
imitative behavior might transfer to artmaking.
He set up two adjacent drawing tables with paper and graphite pencils;
out of Murray’s line of sight he placed a picture of an old man from a
National Geographic magazine.
Michaels sat at the desk next to Murray and picked up a pencil.
Murray followed his action almost simultaneously. Michaels sketched
the portrait on his paper. Murray followed Michaels’s hand-arm
movements on his own paper until Michaels had a finished drawing
of the old man, and Murray had something similar. Without the
reference picture and solely by hand-arm imitation, Murray had
made his first portrait.
Over the next to years Michaels worked intensively with Murray,
producing dozens of graphite and colored-pencil drawings side-by-side.
A selection of their drawings is hanging here. Because the original
images were out of his view, we believe he made the artwork with
an “unknowing hand.”
Because ASD affects approximately 1 in 100 people, the exhibition
also includes text that addresses the findings of ongoing, aggressive
neurobiological research of the manifestations and causes of ASD.
