A primary purpose of schooling is to provide opportunities for children to develop positive dispositions about learning and persistence, hone academic content knowledge, and develop skills for applying content in relevant ways. To this end, instruction has focused to a large degree on literacy and math instruction. Social studies, science, and especially the arts are marginalized or removed completely from the instructional day. Concerned about how this narrowed lens may serve to undermine children's experiences and practices within the scope of the "Four Cs" of 21st-century learning--creativity, communication, critical thinking, and collaboration--one school has been exploring how artists are uniquely positioned to foster skills across these areas. At the E11 school in Colorado, artists as teachers are poised to guide learning within the four Cs, applying their background skills and experience in divergent thinking, new idea generation, and synthesis of the new and the existing in ways that are practical and personally meaningful for children. When skilled aesthetic literacy instruction and content learning are integrated across the curriculum, the four Cs are authentically interwoven in applied and experiential ways.