Mark Nichols

Artist Bio

Mark Nichols had been a performing and workshop artist with Urban Gateways for over 30 years. He has also performed with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, at Taste of Chicago, Summerfest in Milwaukee, and for the Ravinia Children's Program. Mark has also appeared on The Bozo Show at WGN and The Magic Door on CBS for which "Mark Nichols' Puppet Place" won two Emmies for outstanding accomplishment in children's programming. He has done commerical work for the McDonald's Corporation where "Mark Nichols' Puppet Place" was given two Golden Camera awards at the National Industrial Films Awards. He has also done work for Beatrix Foods and an in-house training tape for Argonne National Laboratories. Mark has done puppet workshops with special needs children and spent a summer working at the Association House Community Center in the Wicker-Humbolt Park neighborhoods in Chicago.

Artist Statement

I have always been fascinated by the arts. When I was young I studied every book on drawing and painting technique that I could find. I also developed an interest in pottery. I used to dig up clay in our backyard and build boxes and sculptures that I tried, rather unsuccessfully, to fire in our basement furnace. As a teenager I studied the lapidary and metalworking arts at the Chicago Park District field house at Austin Town Hall. In college at Northeastern State University I studied theater and ceramics. After college I ran the ceramic department at the Jane Addams Community Center in the Lakeview neighborhood of Chicago for thirteen years. About this time I met Mr. Raymond Nelson, the creator of Puppet Place Theater. I knew instantly that I wanted to become a puppeteer. It combined all my favorite arts: acting, set design and construction, music, sculpture, and puppet making. We performed for adults and children for over twenty years at the Victory Gardens Theater and our own storefront theater in Lincoln Park. In the 1970s we started working with Urban Gateways where I have been a touring and workshop artist ever since. Becoming a performing and teaching artist combined the two things I love most in life: acting and working with children. I find that children easily relate to puppets and love to play with them. It's a wonderful way to introduce children to the theater arts. Children enjoy learning how to mae and perform with puppets. Since the child acts through the puppet is helps them to overcome performance anxiety. While working the puppet from behind a stage curtain the child is less self-conscious and more relaxed. This helps promote social skills while interacting with fellow classmates in a production. Puppet performances are also a wonderful opportunity for practicing creative writing, set construction, and backdrop painting.

Educational Philosophy

Our educational system has largely focused on teaching only the analytical-reasoning aspects of learning. I believe that there is a great necessity to bring balance by emphasizing the intuitive-spontaneous functions of the child's mind as well. Creative arts activities can enplane the effectiveness of teaching by helping the child's mind to be both relaxed and alert. The arts promote social skills. I believe that a classroom should provide an environment not only to learn the necessary facts and figures we will need to function in an adult world, but also should be a safe place to develop the social skills we need to interact with each other. There is in all of us a need to communicate our views and ideas, our special reality. The way children feel about themselves can have a positive or negative effect on the way they learn. I believe that the self-confidence and joy that comes out of completing an art project can have a lasting beneficial effect on how a child learns other subjects. Also, a successful art experience can stimulate an interest in exploring other art forms and help children realize that the arts are not an activity reserved for a talented elite but are accessible to everyone. This applies not only to my chosen art form, puppetry, but to all artistic expressions. Art is the most enduring record of a civilization, valued because it preserves the living heart of a human culture.