Meera Ramanathan of San Diego knew from an early age she wanted to be an artist.

The youngest of three girls and growing up in the bustling, bayside city of Chennai, India, she showed an early inclination toward creativity. She tells me about one of her earliest artistic memories of using fabric scraps and yarn to fashion doll clothes and creating cards for family members.

“One of the things I would do with my mom was chop okra,” Ramanathan recalls, of preparing the seed pod fruit for meals. “One day when I was helping her, she was throwing away the tops and I said, ‘you know what, I’m going to dip this in paint and see what happens.’ It made these beautiful marks.”

She goes on to recount how her parents ended up displaying the okra art piece she made proudly showing it off to anyone who stopped by their home. Hearing her recall the story, it’s easy to see it as something of a fateful moment in Ramanathan’s life. She agrees that other parents might have steered their daughter toward more practical pursuits, but adds that having such a supportive environment growing up is something that has continued to inform her all these years later.

“It gave me that validation, that something I made actually makes a difference,” Ramanathan says. “That’s what fostered my love for visual art. The joy of creating something with my hands.”

These days, Ramanathan is a visual artist herself, with a distinguished and studied career in fine art that includes working in a variety of media including painting, collage, pottery and even glass-blowing. Her work has been displayed in a number of local galleries and libraries. Most recently, she has been working on a series of canvases that incorporates elements of collage and hand-stitched embroidery and weaving.

Still, it’s difficult to see how Ramanathan even has time for her own practice these days, especially after telling me about all she puts into her day job as the Project Resource Teacher for Visual Art at the Zamorano Fine Arts Academy, a public elementary school in the Bay Terraces area of Southeast San Diego.

“I see the whole school, 4-year-olds to 11-year-olds, and I absolutely love it because I just want to pass on that same validation,” she says. “It can be something so simple, but when we get that validation, it just sticks with us.”

Teaching wasn’t immediately on Ramanathan’s mind when she first moved to the U.S. in 2004. Fresh off getting her master’s degree in India, she moved to San Diego after getting married, and was focused on her own art practice before becoming a preschool teacher.

“It was beautiful and I loved it, but I just wasn’t using much of my art background,” Ramanathan recalls.

She went back to school at San Diego State University in 2016 to get her teaching credential. When she got the position at Zamorano Fine Arts Academy in 2020, she says the adjustment to teaching children was jarring at first, but  she soon began feeling more comfortable incorporating her own ideas.

“I’ve always been comfortable in a class full of kids, but it took me about a year to really get comfortable with who I was as an arts educator,” says Ramanathan. “When you’re an immigrant like me, there’s this sense that there’s a push for artists who are White old men and who are Western. I’ve always admired those artists that we were taught, but I was always like, ‘Is that it? Why can’t we focus on what’s happening right now?’”

She dove into teaching her students about contemporary and non-Western forms of art, as well as methods of traditional folk art practices such as Kolam, an ancient Indian art practice using geometrical line drawings.

“That first year I was very apprehensive about how it was going to be taken,” Ramanathan reflects on the first time she had students work on a Kolam installation. “I’m very grateful I work in a district that’s open to educators bringing in art from other parts of the world, and not just for the sake of checking off that multicultural box. It’s about digging deep and teaching the kids why this is important and why it was done.”

Another concept she incorporated into her classes is the educational concept of Social-Emotional Learning (SEL), which places an emphasis on self-awareness, social skills and empathy.

“I’m interested in how the students can talk about the art and have a really rich discussion on what I have shown them,” Ramanathan says. “They’re getting a chance not only to express themselves through their own art, but also through literacy. It’s not just about making something pretty. It’s also about observing something within an artwork that no one else does.”

She also teaches her students some of the more nuanced aspects of what it means to create art, such as the use of software programs like Tinkercad and 3-D printing, which the students used to create intricately designed chess pieces.

“When I first started, I knew nothing about digital art and it was a challenge I gave myself,” she said. “There are so many advantages to it. Some students might not have the ability to get the same supplies I have in the classroom, but they go home with a Chromebook (computer). So if I can have them work and be creative at home on their Chromebook. How great is that?”

More unexpected lesson plans have also included curating and displaying the students’ work in informal exhibitions, coffee shops and  public libraries.

She even started a podcast (“Elementary Art Talk Podcast”) where she discusses famous works of art with her fifth-grade students. Launched in 2022 it’s now 26 episodes in.

The audience for such a podcast might seem fringe or hyper-specific on the surface, but it’s a charming listen. It has become yet another passion project for Ramanathan and a way to teach children about a cultural medium that might benefit them later in life.

“We’re just digging into the artwork and it’s been really nice,” says Ramanathan, explaining that the intimate format gives students the opportunity to “open up” more than in the classroom. “It gives me a chance to really hear what the students have to say, the connections they’re making to their own lives. Getting them to open up more about what they see.”

And while she hasn’t been at her job so long that she’s had a former student contact her to tell her what a profound influence she had on their life, she has received a number of letters from parents and other educators commending the impacts she’s had on their lives.

“It’s really nice and it makes a difference, because yes, you’re a teacher and you’re putting your heart and soul into it, but when you’re validated and rewarded for it, it does make a difference,” she says.

Naturally, there will always be concerns over things like district budgets and the job insecurities that come with working as a teacher, but Ramanathan says he rarely dwells in those intangibles. Rather, she says she just wants to keep instilling that spirit of validation into her students, just like the kind she felt when she was a child.

“What would worrying do,” she asks, before adding, “When those kids are walking into my room, I just make sure they have the best experience.”

MEET THE ARTIST:

Meera Ramanathan

Born: Chennai, India

Fun Fact: Ramanathan has won a number of awards for her teaching including the Outstanding Elementary Visual Art Educator award by the California Art Education Association and the VAPA Foundation’s Artistic Innovation award.

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