Community High School

Crafting the Life of an Artist

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At a Jefferson Airplane concert in Lansing, Michigan, Kris Hermanson met her husband. A commitment that would last more than thirty-six years began against a backdrop of psychedelic rock. Hermanson was studying hard at the University of Michigan, and found out he was a fellow student was enough to close the deal. A combination of hard work and found gain has made Hermanson’s long career stand out. 

Hermanson grew up in a small town called Owasso, not far from Lansing. “Not every household had a lot of art books, but I was lucky,” said Hermanson. Community’s art teacher formed her aspirations as an eleven year-old when she walked in the studio of the professional artist her father had hired to paint their portraits. To her, “it was like magic.”

In 6th grade Hermanson’s sincerity in art grew. She first drew from the grand masters of classical art such as Renoir. When she was 15, she attended one of Ann Arbor’s first art fairs. The atmosphere was electrifying and creative. She saw people “immersed in art.”

Her art education continued after high school as well. Despite her childhood in a middle-upper class household, her father instilled the value of work ethic early, “My father was like ‘alright kids, get up and clean the house’ ... we had a cottage in the summer: The whole cottage had to be cleaned before we were allowed to go out.” Hermanson attended Flint Jr. College Art School for a couple of years, before she went to the University Of Michigan School Of Art to receive a bachelor’s degree in fine arts. She added to that collection a master’s degree in painting while she taught at Community High School.

When she first entered art school, Hermanson’s art reflected events and pressures around her. “The Vietnam War was just over and there was just this social upheaval. Feminism, gay rights, anti-racists… I was very anti-racist, hated racism, hated sexism, all the –isms, and so I painted it all. And I did very political paintings, mostly feminist works that were really edgy and huge.” At the U of M, she settled down and learned advanced technical skills which she employed in “this kind of surrealist landscape architecture thing, showing no people whatsoever. But the work still served as a metaphor for what was going in society at the time.”

At first, Hermanson never thought that she would teach art, and definitely not at the high school level. When she taught life drawing – where students drew the human body, at Eastern Michigan University in 1979, a friend who taught art at Community asked Hermanson to come and visit, “just see what kind of school it is.” Her friend, Elaine Headly, taught there along with the first CHS art teacher, Gretchen Whitman. Hermanson agreed to the visit and her life changed because of it. 

The first impression was a good one. “I walked through the doors and it was almost like a blast of this incredible feeling when I walked in. It was not like a school was supposed to be.” From the cold and sterile atmosphere she found in her high school, here “was just this incredible feeling of freedom and some kind of vibe, a very creative vibe that was just unmistakable. I mean you’d be comatose if you didn’t feel it.” Headly told her about the kinds of kids that came here, the ones that walked barefoot in class and brought their dogs to school, and the philosophy of CHS: “students taking charge of their own education.” Hermanson, whose age group was at the “tail-end of the hippy movement,” saw in the students the same sort of interest in “free societies and creative energy.” “This,” she said, “was right. … This just knocked me out.”

She decided to become Headly’s assistant and was able to start right away. She held night classes with Headly for advanced students and taught life drawing with the help of nude models from the U of M art school. She helped create theater sets, and stayed until ten at night to finish them. Hermanson’s actions displayed her excitement, “I was just geeked about this school,” she said.

Headly convinced Hermanson to receive teaching certification to teach formally. She went back to U of M while continuing her work at Community and even spent summers to finish her certification. Since both of the art positions were filled, Hermanson had to wait until Gretchen Whitman retired before she could be formally hired in 1985. But just as her passion for Community was indulged, budgetary problems in the school district made her teach K-12 art at four schools for three years. “That was just fabulous.”

For Hermanson, teaching art first meant to teach them how to “see as an artist sees.” From there, “I’m trying to get kids to be able to express themselves the way they want to … I really believe in developing the individual artist.”

Hermanson’s education continued when she received her master’s degree in painting and design. She spent eight weeks in Florence, Italy studying the Italian landscape and the masters. “I started doing these really huge paintings that were reflective of Caravaggio’s style, but yet they had a modern twist. … I used graffiti with it, some different imagery that’s relevant to now. It was a synthesis of now and looking back.”

At Community, Hermanson fit right in. She created “Junk to Art,” a contemporary class inspired by the work of Tyree Guyton from Detroit. With Headly she helped plan prom for seven years. She took pleasure in camping at Crooked Lake and just being at school with her colleagues and students. “The staff has always been so admirable and just the best I’ve ever seen, that I could even imagine,” she said. Sometimes after long days of teaching and working on costuming and makeup for the theater group, “we’d [the teachers] go out and have parties afterwards.  I mean, we had staff meetings at the Blind Pig for Pete’s sake.”

She enjoyed the partying, but Hermanson maintained her standard of hard work.  “I discovered that if you don’t have a good work ethic, you’re not gonna succeed in anything.” It is a value that she has passed on to her students.  “Every kid I’ve had do that [work hard] in Advanced Art has always gotten into arts schools, any art school in the country… I’ve never had a kid turned down, from a good school… I will say that I feel proud of that.”

The decision to retire was not easy.  She says it has taken two years.

Hermanson says she cannot fully explain what she will miss most.  It is “the kids and the excitement, you know, seeing someone do something that they hadn’t done before and they were really excited by it.” She added that she enjoyed “the freedom to invent the curriculum,” and the sense of trust she feels at Community.

Despite the superlatives, Hermanson admits that there are some things she will not miss.  She will postpone her 5:30 wake-up time.  Hermanson is also glad to shed the anxiety that came with secretarial work she had to fill.

She will retire to her hundred-year-old house with a studio on the third floor. She will not stop working, and plans to install heating in her studio to replace the space heaters. She will probably do some volunteering and visit her son in Costa Rica. But most importantly, Hermanson will have more time to devote to her own art. 

She already spends time on her own pieces, but it is not consistent. For this year’s annual faculty art show, Hermanson did not know what to paint. She had decided to retire, she was tired, and her studio was cold. “I just decided I’m just going to take one day… and I’ll pick this day in the future ... and I’m going to paint whatever happens on that day.” On that day her husband got struck by a garbage truck, and totaled his car. She sat on her couch, and hugged her English bull terrier Sadie. Her mind was in a fog.  “I painted the car accident and I painted the crumpled up car, and the dog on the couch, and sort of combined them into a mixed media drawing. ... You don’t always have to do these blockbuster paintings …It can be a simple thing, like a day in your life.”

Hermanson is ready to take her art to the next level.  She says she will be poor because of it, but as Hermanson knows and teaches, hard work pays off.