Bio
Randy Shepherd is a practitioner of ancestral arts, primitive technologies, and living skills. Since he was a child he has sought to understand the place of humans in nature. This curiosity led to his lifelong study of the life ways and arts by which our stone age ancestors sustained themselves and created vibrant cultures all around the Earth with only the materials that could be gathered in their local environments.
For the past twenty-five years, Randy has lived in a remote mountain holler near Oneida, KY where he has honed his skills as a homesteader, beekeeper, herbalist, and primitive artist. Though the years he has come to believe that humans beings are artists by nature, and that communication, cooperation, and self expression are survival skills that are vital to our well being. Randy loves to share his knowledge and experience with others and has worked with children in a wide variety of settings for over twenty years. He has been working as a teaching artist through Partners For Rural Impact since 2021, was a fellow in the 2024-2025 Appalachian Teaching Artist Fellowship, and is a Community Scholar. Though his work as a teaching artist, Randy hopes to help others engage their natural curiosity to look deeper into nature and themselves where they will find a lifetime of learning awaits.
Potential Residency Project
The Art of Language
Description: Artist introduces project with story about observing vandalism of cave art. He introduces prehistoric technologies and leads students in an exploration of the symbols used by ancestral people in diverse cultures. Students learn to grind pigments from natural materials and create their own symbol representing themselves, their families, their community, or some other aspect of their lives symbolically. Students understand the power of symbols in self-expression and communication but also develop a deeper appreciation of the value of phonetic written language.
Outline:
Day One: Artist introduces the project and the idea of using symbols for self-expression and communication. He discusses Ancestorial lifeways and technologies and shares images of symbols from diverse ancient cultures, explaining the historic, cultural, and place-based aspects of the images. Students interact with the symbols, discussing possible interpretations of the symbols.
Day Two: Artist leads students in exploring community, cooperation, communication, and how symbolic thought, language, and story allow us to achieve these vital aspects of Human life as we know it. Students begin to consider and discuss what they might express symbolically about themselves, their family, their community, their place, etc.
Day Three: Artist tells a story to the class and leads them in depicting the story in symbols.
Day Four: Students work in small groups to grind rocks and produce pigments. They use scrap paper to begin experimenting with creating images with the pigments. Students use the pigments they have prepared, and additional pigments supplied by artist to paint personally meaningful images on watercolor paper.
Day Five: Students work in small groups to share the symbols they have created, sharing as much or as little as they choose about the meaning behind the symbols. Students give their symbolic paintings titles (can be on the front or back of the paper). Each student paints an image on a large class poster of symbols to be displayed.
Learning Targets:
o I can recognize that diverse cultures throughout history utilized symbols for self-expression, representing tribal identity, and communication.
o I can discuss possible interpretations of ancient symbolic art with my peers in a manner that is inclusive of differing perspectives.
o I can collaborate with my peers to interpret a spoken story symbolically.
o I can create pigments using natural materials.
o I can create and discuss a symbol that has personal meaning.
o I can appreciate the value of a phonetic system of writing.
Curriculum Standards (to be refined by grade level and course content) Reading and Writing: Literacy Practices
1. Recognize that text is anything that communicates a message.
2. Employ, develop and refine schema to understand and create text.
3. View literacy experiences as transactional, interdisciplinary and transformational.
4. Utilize receptive and expressive language arts to better understand self, others and the world.
5. Collaborate with others to create new meaning.
6. Engage in specialized, discipline-specific literacy practices.
Visual Art: Anchor Standards
Anchor Standard 1: Generate and conceptualize artistic ideas and work. Anchor Standard 2: Organize and develop artistic ideas and work.
Anchor Standard 3: Refine and complete artistic work.
Anchor Standard 6: Convey meaning through the presentation of artistic work.
Anchor Standard 8: Interpret intent and meaning in artistic work.
Anchor Standard 10: Synthesize and relate knowledge and personal experiences to make art.
Anchor Standard 11: Relate artistic ideas and works with societal, cultural and historical context to deepen understanding.
Social Studies (to be refined by grade level and course content in collaboration with teacher)
Grades 4 and 5 and 8 focus on Native American symbology
Grades 6 focus on symbology of emerging civilizations throughout the ancient world.
Grade 7 focus on symbology of diverse cultures 600-1600
High School World History focus on symbology of diverse world cultures beginning in 1300 and exploring cultural roots of these traditions.
High School World History focus on symbology of diverse cultures in the United States beginning in 1600 and exploring cultural roots of these traditions.
Social and Emotional Learning Relation Skills
Practicing teamwork and collaborative problem-solving
Special Needs or Accommodations
Activities will be presented in diverse modalities (spoken, visual, and kinesthetic) to ensure that students with diverse learning styles and modalities have opportunities to connect to the materials.
The goals for the project will be clearly stated and reiterated each day along with revisiting what was accomplished the preceding day and defining the learning target for the day.
Activities will be presented in a step-by-step format.
One-on-one and/or hand-over-hand assistance will be provided as appropriate, always ensuring that student maintains creative decision making.
Artist will work with teacher and classroom aides to make other accommodations required.
Resources, Materials, Equipment, Set-up
Artist will provide resources and materials for the residency. For follow up activities, teachers can reference these websites: INVESTIGATING ROCK ART – Database – PROJECT ARCHAEOLOGY ky_rock_and_cave_art_images_and_keys.pdf (kentuckyarchaeologicalsurvey.org)
Assessment
Assessment will be formative. Artist and teacher will assess student progress toward learning targets through observation and interaction with individual students and students working in small groups. If desired, artist will assist teacher in developing daily exit slips and/or a summative assessment relevant to the grade level and course content.