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Photo Courtesy of Ellen Hark
South Orange Middle School teacher Ellen Hark instructs her students on how to recycle to make art.
SOUTH ORANGE, NJ — South Orange Middle School art teacher Ellen Hark will retire this year after 30 years in the SOMA school district of showing students how to find inspiration in the most surprising places.
Hark, a third-generation teacher, always knew that she was meant to enter the field of education like her mother and grandmother before her. She also knew that she would have to forge her own path as an art teacher, because art classes were a rarity to which she was not often exposed while growing up in the Philadelphia School District.
“Being a teacher was the thing to do in my family,” Hark said in an interview with the News-Record. “I couldn’t imagine doing or being anything else.”
Hark and her husband moved to Maplewood after he took a job in New York City and they needed to find a home that provided both a reasonable commute for him and a suitable environment to raise their growing family. The Harks found Maplewood to fit the bill in many ways, and were impressed by how welcoming and friendly their neighbors were, and how much pride the residents took in their community.
Hark began teaching art in the school district, and quickly realized that she would have to be resourceful after being given a $200 budget for 1,000 students.
Thus began her lifelong love affair with finding new purpose for things that others have tossed aside, a trait in her students’ art projects that is well-known and much admired. Hark uses everything from discarded pizza boxes to old pairs of jeans to cardboard boxes and popsicle sticks to inspire her students’ creativity and thought process, always with stunning results.
“My claim to fame is to make something out of nothing,” she said. “Now students are excited making amazing cityscapes out of cardboard and popsicle sticks.”
Hark said that she finds inspiration in the most ordinary items, like the time she saw a pile of pizza boxes about to be thrown away and scooped them up for her class to make “personal pizzas” where students decorated both the inside and outside of the box with whatever appealed to them.
This same logic applied when the show “Project Runway” inspired Hark and her classes to try their hand at clothing design, painting scenes on family members’ old jeans.
“One of the things I encourage my students to do is express themselves personally,” Hark said. “I never have two students make the same project in the same way.”
Although Hark, who is a breast cancer survivor, mainly worked in ceramic and paint outside of school, she also found that, after she finished her last cancer treatment, she wanted to try something new.
After taking a class at the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey in Summit, as well as a weekend class with award-winning mosaic mural artist Isaiah Zagar in Philadelphia, Hark discovered a new artistic passion: mosaic.
As always, she brought this new knowledge back and set to work finding ways to challenge herself and her students to stretch their abilities and challenge themselves.
And challenge themselves they did: Hark says that some of the proudest accomplishments in her career are the three permanent mosaic installations in the school that represent the students and their experiences. The mosaics feature everything from broken clarinets and flutes, to broken locks from when students forgot their combinations.
“I’m constantly learning from them. They are brilliant and have such a sense of humor,” she said. “When I look around my classroom and see them in the zone, they are working and thinking and sharing.”
She also took her love of repurposing old objects into the community, and shared her inspirations with an even larger audience.
Hark, a member of Congregation Beth-El in South Orange, said that another synagogue member knew that she was an artist and approached her for help in finding inexpensive art to decorate the corridors.
“I told them that I would just make it myself,” she said.
Hark set to work creating four permanent installations for the temple, each featuring keepsakes and souvenirs that congregants donated to her from personal trips to Israel.
Hark and her students have also been an integral piece of the Maplewood South Orange Interfaith Holocaust Remembrance Service; for the past five years, her students have provided the artwork that adorns the walls in the chosen venue.
“I became involved in providing artwork to the services after a parent who was the child of a survivor approached me for ideas,” Hark said. “Prior to that, the services featured student essays and never had art in them. Each year I challenged myself to think of a new and meaningful project for each grade to do for the service.”
Hark’s dedication to her students is evident in the many ways she is involved in bringing art to life for them on a daily basis.
“I’ve known Ellen for over a decade and I still see a glimmer in her eye when she talks about her students. She is committed to promoting art in the community as well as in our school,” fellow teacher Linda Abella told the News-Record. “Our halls are filled with mosaics that she made with her art club and she showcases different student artists every month in our display cases. I am always excited to tell Ellen when I notice a student with an interest in art because I know she will nurture that spark into a flame. She is the best of what a teacher is and she will be sorely missed at South Orange Middle School when she retires.”
Hark said that, although she will miss her students and teaching, she is excited about what the future holds for her, including spending more time with her growing number of grandchildren and learning new art forms.
“I’m finally going to move up past the eighth grade,” she said. “Like Peter Pan, I won’t grow up, but it’s time to fly.”