Colleen Ernst did not blend in, even in 1980s Iowa City. She was imposingly tall, with brightly dyed red hair, multicolored plastic glasses and homemade earrings. I met her because my sons were in a home daycare with her son Max, named for the surrealist artist Max Ernst. She’s best known now for striking up a correspondence with Keith Haring, and hosting Haring’s visits to her art class at Horn Elementary in Iowa City.
She died this summer, during the Stanley Museum of Art’s show of Haring’s work, “To My Friends at Horn,” which featured a mural Haring painted in the school. Ernst had been retired for some time due to health problems, but was able to visit the exhibit, which included one of her self-portraits. It was just one episode in a life dedicated to teaching and art.
Ernst was born and attended public schools in Burlington, Iowa. She went to Northwestern University, originally studying music as an organ performance major.
“She really lost interest almost immediately,” her husband Bill Radl told me. “It was the early 1970s, people were having fun, it was a good time. Then she discovered art history. She took studio art classes, but that wasn’t really a primary motivation for her.”
She was fascinated by art, but also the history of how art was made and the artists that made it. Ernst stayed in Chicago after graduation, but needed to find a career to support herself, and decided she could teach art.
She came back to Iowa and got her teaching certificate at the University of Iowa. She then got a job teaching art, primarily at the local Ernest Horn Elementary School.
“She spent her entire career at Horn,” Radl said. “She also worked at other schools, because that’s how they dealt with art teachers.”
“She took Studio Art at Northwestern, so she had that experience. She got her teaching certificate, but she didn’t have a lot of preconceived notions of how to teach kids … she hadn’t made much art herself at that point,” Ernst’s husband explained. “She just went at it, teaching from her own interests. She always made teaching the history of art a part of her classes.”
Ernst’s teaching practice was also a form of performance. By wearing a white lab coat (“borrowed” from the UI medical school, where her husband worked) and calling herself “Dr. Art,” she took her place among the handful of local self-proclaimed doctors, including “Dr. Alphabet” poet David Morice and “Dr. Science” comedian Dan Coffey.
She enjoyed her students, but was less enthusiastic about having to travel between multiple schools for classes. Where most teachers have prep time built into their schedules, the art teachers in Iowa City had (and still have) drive time instead.
As she donned the lab coat and taught students about Georgia O’Keeffe, Pablo Picasso and Frida Kahlo, Ernst began to make her own work. She had painted a bit before college, but her real growth as an artist came during her teaching career. Many of her works have a child’s inspired messiness, as though her daily high-contact engagement with students gave her better access to her own “child’s mind.”
Though this child-like approach led to abstract paintings, most of her work had specific meaning, reflecting her life as a mother and teacher. Hung prominently in her living room is a painting that incorporates a straw broom and other household items, glued to a board and then painted with aggressive strokes of deep reds and blues. A comment on the household drudgery of a traditional wife, or the wild imagining of someone doing mundane chores?
A hot glue gun was as much a tool to Ernst as brushes and paints. My wife Melissa owns an Ernst work, Window On The World: a creche with a plastic baby in it, filled with shredded money from the U.S. Mint, surrounded by coins and plastic fruit, all painted black. On the back, she wrote in fat brushstrokes, “Which way is the world going? It seems like we are going down the wrong path, greed, violence. I hope someone is watching over us. I Am 40. Colleen K Ernst Iowa City IA Nov 21, 1991.”
Later in life she focused on more traditional painting, with small 8″x10” works on canvas board with acrylics. These paintings reflect her abiding love for deep, saturated colors, contrasted with pastels, like peach, sky blue and mauve. She shared with Keith Haring a love for strong lines, often outlining things in broad black for emphasis. She’d produced many hot glue artworks that blurred the boundary between painting and sculpture. Even in retirement, her works seem to be made in a hurry. Broad brushstrokes convey an urgency to capture the thing in her mind before it runs away.
Colleen Ernst lived a life of service, teaching her pupils and raising her own kids. She attacked her art with purpose and a vivid, unruly imagination. The art world in the global sense always honors a few extraordinary artists, whose work becomes ridiculously expensive. The work of someone local, someone engaged with the community, isn’t as acclaimed but is every bit as vital.
To the extent people know her, it’s for her part in Haring’s story, but Ernst herself lived a life worthy of fame. She shared Haring’s conviction that art is for everyone. Her teaching and painting realized that conviction.
Will this work become a small footnote in her beloved art history books? That matters less than the art she leaves behind and the lives of children she taught.
This article was originally published in Little Village’s November 2024 issue.