By Dorie Spangler | Council on Culture & Arts
Functional art, also known as utilitarian art, is defined as art that serves a purpose beyond its expressive or decorative value. Furniture, pottery, and hand-crafted clothing are just some examples of functional art: items that exhibit artistic finesse while also fulfilling a practical need.
For Janine Falah, the Visual Arts Teacher at Fairview Middle School, functional art is a key part of the curriculum. She wants her students to know that art isn’t superfluous–that even if you are not naturally inclined towards art, you can appreciate its daily value, and even partake in its creation. “I want you to feel like art can be a part of your everyday life. It doesn’t have to be just something we do in class” she says.
Falah also emphasizes to her students that, for those who do take an interest in art, they can incorporate it into their careers. “You don’t have to think of art as just a hobby or a plaything. If you are really good and you want to take it to the next level, I want to expose you to things that are real world.”
For these reasons, Falah decided that a unit on screen-printing would be the perfect fit for her FY26 COCA Arts Education Grant project. Having studied photography and graphic design at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University (FAMU), and Fiber Arts and Film at Savannah College of Art and Design, Falah is well-versed in the practical applications of art.
“Screen-printing is a skill that the students can learn, and they honestly don’t need a whole lot of money to do it. They can be creative and feel like they’ve done something worthy, like creating a product.”
With funds from her Arts Education Grant, Falah was able to purchase screen-printing kits and a sink attachment (which helps clean and prepare the screens). A popular method of printing ink onto surfaces, screen-printing is used to transfer designs onto anything, from posters and t-shirts to bags and greeting cards. The process involves a mesh screen, stencil, and a squeegee to push the ink through the screen.
As screen-printing is a lengthy, and somewhat challenging process, Falah had to be methodical about her lesson plans. She chose to work on the students’ foundational skills before building up to the final goal of the project: to screenprint custom designs onto shoes that the students could take home and wear.
The first step of screen-printing is “burning the screen,” in other words, creating the stencil. This requires coating the mesh screen in photo emulsion, drying it in the dark, placing an ink design transparency over it, exposing it to a UV (ultraviolet) light source, and washing out the unhardened parts.
Falah then showed her students how to use stencils to layout their designs: “Designs inside screens are really just stencils that we’re pulling ink through to create something that’s uniform,” she explains, “so that’s what we started off from–a paper stencil.”
Then comes the most important step of the process: the transfer. Falah emphasizes the importance of repetition during this phase, as muscle memory plays a large role in producing successful screenprints.
“When they did the reproductive prints, they did them so many times to the point where they looked really good. I needed them to know the motion; when you’re pushing the ink through the stencil, you’ve got to give it pressure.”
With a strong understanding of the physical movement required to push the ink evenly through the screen and onto the paper, students were ready to move onto decorating shoes. Though shoes present their own challenges as textured, three-dimensional objects, Falah’s students were prepared, as they had taken part in every step of the process, from burning the screens to creating their own designs:
“I had a lot of students that pushed themselves and came up with a lot of good ideas. And when they saw their designs on the shoe they were like, ‘oh, my gosh, Miss Falah, this is amazing.’”
In challenging her students with complex, yet rewarding artistic projects, Falah offers her students significant opportunities to build confidence, and what she refers to as “artistic stamina.” “It’s perseverance,” she explains, “I need you to persevere past not knowing what to do.”
By giving her students smaller tasks that work up to larger, more substantial aspects of a project, Falah shows them how to break down obstacles into achievable goals: “I always tell kids, look, being creative is being a problem solver.”
This focus on interdisciplinary skillsets has always been a part of Janine Falah’s educational practice. She loves to teach her students about color theory, as it applies to science and physics, and illustration, as it connects to storytelling and language arts. Her lessons on screen-printing have been a fitting addition to this classroom philosophy. She explains that the critical thinking, determination, and technical prowess honed through activities like screen-printing are applicable to other subject matters, and to life in general:
“Art education builds creative thinkers – it unlocks not only expression, it unlocks skills.”
Learn more about COCA’s Arts Education Grants on our website, or email Dorie Spangler at dorie@tallahasseearts.org.
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