Fifth graders tour Tulsa

“It was the best experience I ever had!” exclaimed Blake Garrard.

Garrard was with 55 other students, along with a group of parent chaperones, who traveled to Oklahoma last week for the annual fifth-grade Tulsa arts tour. The group marked the seventh time Pea Ridge has undertaken the journey.

Led by local art teacher John McGee, the students were first taken on a two hour tour through the Philbrook Museum of Art, located at the former home of the Phillips family in the Tulsa community of Brookside. From there the students traveled to Tulsa Riverside Park on the banks of the Arkansas River, for lunch and recreation, before departing for the Gilcrease Museum of American Art for their afternoon tour. After their Gilcrease tour, their day was wound up by visiting the Incredible Pizza establishment for dinner and recreation.

Students who made the long trek to Tulsa had to complete a series of requirements to qualify to be eligible to go. This year’s total of 56 qualified students set a record.

“I have been leading this tour since 2005,” McGee said “and as has often been the case, the students received high praise from museum officials for their courteous and respectful conduct, as well as their knowledge of art and history. One docent remarked that our group this year was one of the most well informed ones he has had the pleasure of leading.”

Celine Frank remarked, “I had lots of fun and I learned a lot, especially about Native Americans,” Paige Wright said. “This was a great trip. It was awesome and educational as well.”

“Seeing an artwork in a book or in a reproduction is not the same as seeing it in person,” McGee explained.

“Having docents (tour guides) on hand to explain the meaning and intricacies of a particular work or groups of work is invaluable. Both the Philbrook and the Gilcrease have on their docent staffs retired teachers and university professors who have great passion for their duties and that is great for the students who visit there.”

The Philbrook Museum came into being in the 1920s when the Phillips family, of oil fame, donated their home for the first museum. It is filled with art from around the world featuring exhibits from as distant a time as ancient Egypt. Not many years later, wealthy oilman Thomas Gilcrease donated his west Tulsa home and acreage for a museum of American art which became the largest museum of American art and artifacts until the advent of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville last year.

One docent made mention of the fact that Pea Ridge school lies on the path taken by the Cherokee Indians in the infamous Trail of Tears, pointing out the artwork on display that dealt with that subject.

Some students were also surprised to learn that one of the Gilcrease Museum’s most treasured paintings, “Blackhawk and Whirling Thunder” was painted by a distant cousin to McGee, John Wesley Jarvis.

“John Wesley Jarvis was the son of the sister of Charles Wesley, my great-great-great-great grandfather. Jarvis was raised by his paternal grandparents and was apprenticed out to an artist in Boston, Mass.

He had the honor of painting presidents, generals, Indian chiefs, and other notables of his time.

“Jarvis became a great artist not because he necessarily had all this talent, but because he needed a way to make a living. He had the great fortune to be apprenticed to man with great skills to impart.”

While the trip interspersed fun activities with educational ones, students such as Holden O’Neal, Garrison Artman and Samantha Bott considered it all fun. Between Artman’s statement that he loved the museums, and O’Neal’s remark that it was so much fun, Samantha Bott summed it up best when she stated, “It was lots of fun, yet very educational.”

The last thing the students did before departing Tulsa was to eat pizza, playgames and ride the rides at the pizza establishment in south Tulsa.

“Even here, the students made us proud,” McGee concluded. “The facility manager stopped me and thanked me for having brought such cooperative and polite students. I gather he had experienced a lot of unpleasantness with a lot of the school groups who had visited there recently.”

“Hearing such unsolicited remarks from him as well as other officials we had dealt with that day made me proud to be a Blackhawk,” McGee said.