Sydney Schofield

“The work of contemporary artists provides not only new art and ideas to introduce into existing curriculum, but also new strategies and approaches for making art and facilitating the artistic process with students… Their work embraces not only visual media and strategies but often includes historical or archival research, writing, scientific inquiry, engineering, and reading, among other pursuits and methods. In this way, the work of contemporary artists supports learning in the art classroom as well as across subject areas. Employing a process of inquiry, artists and teachers alike can harness the power of human curiosity.”   (Art21)

For our Contemporary Teaching Practices Final Project, Jeremy and I will be talking about the overall importance of the arts in education with a focus on contemporary art and the relationships between an art teacher and their students.

The main points that we are discussing in our presentation are Contemporary Art in education, the importance of a teacher student relationship and our own personal experiences working at the Jeremiah Burke High School. The field of contemporary art opens up so many windows for students because it allows individuals to break free from your stereotypical portrait and or land scape. Contemporary art is a lot more conceptual and meaningful. The process and the context behind a piece of art is just as important as the final product.  Educators use contemporary artists as a role model in helping students to think more in depth.

“Living artists serve as creative role models, who can inspire people of all ages to consider how ideas are developed, articulated, and realized in the contemporary world, and offer educators opportunities to support diverse learning styles. Contemporary artists address both current events and historical ideas. These references help educators and students make connections across the curriculum and support interdisciplinary and critical thinking. The integration of contemporary art into school and community learning environments enables educators to provoke curiosity and encourage dialogue about the world and the issues that affect student lives. Contemporary art is part of a cultural dialogue that concerns larger frameworks, such as personal and cultural identity, family, community, and nationality” (Art21).

“Similar to English, math, science and the other core subjects, the arts (dance, music, theater, and visual arts) are challenging subjects with rigorous content and achievement standards at the state and national levels. They require highly qualified teachers who challenge all students, not just those who are considered artistically talented, to perform works of art, create their own works, and respond to works of art and the ideas they impart.” (Ed.Gov)

Visual Arts Education provides:

-Sources of aesthetic experience

-Sources of human understanding

-Means of developing creative and flexible forms of thinking

-Means of helping students understand the appearance of art (NAEA Learning)

“As skillful educators have found, teaching students to be creative is a deliberate process, much like teaching students to be literate or to be able to solve mathematics problems. It takes more than simply handing out materials; expert teachers break down the creative process to enable students to identify the problem, gather relevant information, try out solutions, and validate those that are effective.” (NAEA Learning)

Teachers have the ability to significantly impact a student’s life and inspire them to pursue their talents and to go further in their passions. We have all had at least one teacher that has impacted us in a great way, maybe even convinced us to attend a college or go into a certain field. For our video we asked some students to tell us who in their educational past has inspired them.

Final Video

Works Cited:

“Contemporary Approaches to Teaching.” Art21. Web. 01 Dec. 2011. <http://www.art21.org/teach>.

“NAEA Learning • National Art Education Association.” Home • National Art Education Association. Web. 3 Dec. 2011. <http://www.arteducators.org/learning>.

“The Importance of Arts Education.” U.S. Department of Education. Aug. 2004. Web. 02 Dec. 2011. <http://www2.ed.gov/teachers>.

Today we started off in the classroom to research the movement of ArtScience, and the works of artists Hans Haacke and Otto Piene. I took a quote that I found interesting from the editorial “ArtScience: Integrative Collaboration to Create a Sustainable Future” that says,

“ArtScience, in sum, connects. The future of humanity and civil society depends on these connections. ArtScience is a new way to explore culture, society and human experience that integrates synesthetic experience with analytical exploration. It is knowing, analyzing, experiencing and feeling simultaneously.”

The idea of ArtScience is that it is less focused on the product, and more so on how things are perceived and experienced. It is also clarified that “ArtScience is not Art + Science or Art-and-Science or Art/Science, in which the components retain their disciplinary distinctions and compartmentalization… ArtScience transcends and integrates all disciplines or forms of knowledge.”

From this, we moved on to finding out more about Hans Haacke, a German-American artist, born in 1936 in Cologne, Germany. Haacke was a member of a group called Zero that existed from 1957-1966. Zero’s purpose was to re-harmonize man and nature and to restore art’s metaphysical dimension. They sought to organize the pictorial surface without using traditional devices (Wikipedia). Later today, we had the opportunity to visit the MIT List Visual Arts Center to see the Hans Haacke and Otto Piene exhibits. Haacke’s exhibit immediately grabs your attention with his bright white and green works of art, whether they are floating or growing out of dirt. I think we were all attracted to the playfulness of his floating white balloon, or the jellyfish-like parachute lantern that are both suspended in air by a single fan. It was said that in Hans Haacke’s work, the things that you do not see are the most important. For example, Haacke’s Condensation Cube is a Plexiglas box with nothing inside of it but condensation covering the interior. Another example is an enormous piece of white silk that billows like ocean waves on the floor of the exhibit. You cannot see the cause of the condensation, nor can you see the fans that cause the silk to move, but the invisible aspects of these pieces are what give the viewer the visual experience.

Lastly, Otto Piene is a German artist born in Bad Laasphe, Province of Westphal in 1928, also the founder of the group Zero. Piene coined the term “sky artist” in 1969 that allowed himself to use landscape and cities as the focal point of his work. He went through phases of using many different mediums in his work including fire and smoke traces. What we were able to see today was his Lichtballette (“light ballet”) in which he used light from moving torches that he projected through grids, thus extending and stimulating the viewer’s perception of space (Wikipedia). It was extremely interesting to view this exhibit because not only was the focus on the light and the projections, but the vessels that held the light were all so different in form and shape. My personal favorite was a mandala-like series of large circles on a wall made entirely of punched holes in which light would protrude, almost hypnotizing the viewer. His forms were either round or square, all of them expelling light through varying patterns and rhythms, as well as different light cycles. For some, the lights inside the vessels circled 360 degrees while the stenciled vessel remained still, while others were the opposite in which the stencil moved while the light was stationary. I found both of these exhibits to be profoundly interesting because of the ideas behind them and the intense visual experiences that they provided for the viewer.

Sources:

Root-Bernstein, Bob, Todd Siler, Adam Brown, and Kenneth Snelson. “ArtScience.” Editorial. Web. 29 Nov. 2011.

Wikipedia

For our final project for Seminar I and II, Jeremy and I decided that it would be a good idea for us to work together. We both shared similar experiences doing our field work at Jeremiah Burke High School, and therefore can bring two sets of ideas and opinions to the table for our project.

A personal interest of mine is the connection between humans – adult to adult, adult to child, and child to child. From this, Jeremy and I agreed that we both shared a similar interest of the relationships of a teacher to a student – in this case, focusing on art teachers. Through our observations, we witnessed first hand how students interact with their teacher and what they take away from their experience in their classroom and what kind of effect it has on them. Everyone, especially in art school, has at least one teacher from middle or high school that has had a significant impact on them and has inspired them to go further into their interests and passions. For our video, we plan to record both students and teachers stating the name of a teacher that has inspired them, what they have taken out of the relationship, and if their plans for their future relates back to the person that had such an impact on them.

What Jeremy and I want to reveal is how important a teacher is to a student’s future in the art world, and how contemporary art and teaching styles play a huge role in the development of a student.

This semester I had the opportunity to spend a good deal of time observing Alisa Rodney’s art classes at Jeremiah Burke High School in Dorchester. I worked with both her Junior and Senior students, ranging from the ages of 17-20. This opportunity really gave me a first hand look at what it is like to be an art teacher in an urban high school setting. Alisa Rodney is a wonderful teacher that can really push her students to go further with their projects if she knows that they are interested and have potential. Even the students that seem far less interested are still encouraged to put thought and time into their work.

Because the Burke is a “turnaround” school, it is much safer and more productive than it had used to be. I tried to gather as much information about the students as I could during my time there and I got a pretty good feel for the attitude in most of the classes. On a positive end, many of Alisa’s students were very interested in their work and tried to accomplish as much as they could in one class period. I even talked to a few students in Alisa’s more advanced class that plan on attending an art college after they graduate. They really put themselves into their artwork and would adjust their ideas or project until they were fully satisfied. On the other hand, some students were not so interested in the class projects and would rather talk to friends and goof off which is typical behavior for many high school students. I can see why working at an urban high school can be tough due to the fact that many of the students’ home lives have a big impact on their personalities and how they act outside of the home. Listening to conversations among the classroom, there are a lot of fights and physical activity among peers as well as drug/alcohol use and pregnancy. Some students feel that they can confide in Alisa and spend more time in the art classroom because that’s where they feel the most comfortable.

At this age, these students have a lot going on in their lives that they are learning to work out, and each student expresses themselves differently. I feel that as a future educator, this really helped in my decision to want to work with older students due to the fact that you can connect to them on a more personal level and really have a positive influence on them and their work. Working with Alisa was a great experience , and I really hope to be able to work in her classroom in the future.

On November 1st, our class had the pleasure of meeting with Mike Mittleman of Aspect Magazine who is the founder, editor and publisher for Aspect, as well as a graduate from the SIM program at MassArt. The point of Aspect is to publish multimedia works of art that allows other artists and students working in new media to view others work. Mittleman spoke a lot about what we exactly consider to be “high art”, what we consider as “kitsch”, and has a particular persona biased against political art. A memorable quote from Mike was “I’ve published a lot of work that I don’t like” and by this, he hopes that someone or a group of people will notice what may be wrong with the particular genre of whatever it was that he published. Every few years, Aspect will focus on a different location and the art that is produced by different new media artists all over the world. This year, their Fall 2011 volume was titled Export China. Mike showed us a 15 minute long piece by the artist Ma Yongfeng that showed 6 gold coy fish run through a full cycle in an open washing machine. The fish are thrown around in the washing barrel, then at the end it drains and leaves the fish out of water for enough time to make the already uncomfortable audience even more uneasy. We listened to the commentary as the video played, and the voice described the intentions of the artist and the possible point behind this whole (in my opinion) unnecessary piece. No matter what the artist was trying to show to his audience, he most certainly succeeded in making many of us upset and angry to a certain extent. But besides that, Mike Mittleman was a pleasure to speak to, especially seeing what he has done since graduating from our school.

Later, we visited the Boston Center for the Arts’ Mills Gallery where we were able to view their recent drawing show which they titled Residue, curated by Steven Holmes. Only sixteen artists were shown in this exhibit, and they really broke out of the traditional ideas that surround “drawing” in the art world. The definition of the word “residue” means “A small amount of something that remains after the main part has gone or been taken or used.” All of the artists work chosen for this show revolved around something left behind, whether literal, physical, or abstract. The first piece I noticed when I first entered the gallery was Jillian Clark’s “Charming the Multiples” which was three walls covered from top to bottom in straight blue and lavender snap-chalk lines. This was one of the more literal pieces in regards to the fact that the artist was actually leaving behind both chalk marks and residue on the walls, and the remaining dust from the snap lines that lined the floor of each wall. Another piece that I found incredibly interesting was a pedestal with stacks and stacks of photo paper, each paper having a drawing of various size, medium and content. The artist wanted her piece to be interactive which is why it was placed on a pedestal as opposed to hung on a wall in a traditional manner. Because of this, the viewer had to actually pick up the papers and look through them, except there were hundreds and hundreds of papers making it impossible to look through all of them at once. It was later explained that for this piece, the artist drew a piece of her body, whether large or microscopic, on each piece of paper until the weight of the stacks of paper equaled 180lbs – the artists’ body weight. During the period of drawing, if she lost any weight then she would take away drawings, and if she gained weight she would add drawings. The artists was using her body as residue and leaving herself behind through hundreds and hundreds of drawings of her anatomy. Some other pieces included a video camera attached to the bottom of a shopping cart that strolled strategically through a Target, mapping out on a separate screen where the shopping cart had been. Another was a looped video of a man that walks in a 360 degree circle around a camera in the middle of a desert. At first the viewer begins to question what about the piece relates to residue – is he making marks with his feet in the dirt? Is it the eventual wearing away of the ground as he walks over it again and again? Then the viewer realized that the drawing is with his shadow that also makes a 360 degree circle around his feet as he walks; the man is creating residue using his body and the sun. I found the Mills Gallery to be extremely interesting and would even love to find out more about eventually becoming a member of the staff there.

Overall a pretty solid day. We started off meeting at the MFA for our student tours which was nice and organized. Our group started off in the Contemporary Wing and made our way down to the American wing. The challenge with my particular group was the lack of energy and open-mindedness presented by one or two out of our five students. One of the students claimed that he didn’t like art at all and persistently held onto that statement even as we tried to point out interesting qualities or ideas behind some of the pieces that we saw. Our group discussions on some pieces and at the end of the exhibits flopped a little bit even as we pushed the students to give us a little more on how they felt about the work. Overall, the MFA tour went fine and even showed me as a future educator that I need to work on ways to push students with a lack of interest into finding interesting qualities and appreciation for various things that they will be presented with throughout their life.

Later, we met with our students from the Boston Arts Academy to walk them through the Shahzia Sikander exhibit in the Bakalar Gallery. I thought that this was a really great experience for both our class and the BAA students because we both had the opportunity to learn about one another as artists of different ages and to give them a first-hand opinion on what it’s like to attend an art college. Before the gallery, I had the chance to meet individually with my student Althea who is a very driven (and very stylish) senior that is interested in sculpture and other mediums. Her work revolves a lot around her interests which include environmental issues, the rights of people, women, freedoms, and the work of other artists. In the Shahzia Sikander exhibit, she was especially drawn to a piece in a series of drawings that reads “Stalemate” in which there is a pentagon shape surrounded by a chaotic mix of paint blotches and lines of all different colors. What Althea found interesting was the amount of disorder that was happening all around the pentagon, while inside of the shape was nothing but organized and carefully drawn lines and circles. It was very interesting to hear someone else point out small details on a piece that I have already seen but may not have picked up on when viewing it the first time.

I really enjoyed meeting with Emily Putnam at the Mobius gallery because listening to her describe her work and the inspirations and ideas behind it really opened up my eyes to a whole new understanding of performance art. I have never really developed an appreciation for performance art simply because I have not had the opportunity to talk to a performance artist and have them describe their purpose and intentions while viewing their work, so it was awesome to see some of what Emily has done! She is very interested in the movement of the body and what she can create with certain motions and actions with all different kinds of materials. Emily has pieces where she may wear an entire outfit of a specific color for a period of time, spread paint around on the floor that she’s on, jump from one place to another, or trace her body in chalk. She is very active within her work and her body creates a very strong presence.

Later that day, we visited the Harvard Art Museum which I loved because of the variety of works and artists in a very small exhibit. The pieces that we focused mainly on were works of art that possessed bodily characteristics or had the intention of presenting the form of a body in an unconventional (or conventional) manner. One of my favorite pieces that we saw was a wood cut print by Leonard Baskin called “Hydrogen Man”.

This really grabbed my attention first of all because of the style. I personally am very interested in different ways to present the human body in art. You can’t quite tell whether this figure is a skeleton, or a muscular diagram, or even whether or not it is a full human figure due to the abstraction of the body. It it very distorted and inaccurate, and that only adds to the almost creepy feel of this piece.

Another piece that also struck my interest was Robert Gober’s “Untitled” which he created out of plaster, beeswax, human hair, leather, cotton, enamel paint, and aluminum pull tabs.
At first I found this piece to be pretty funny on the surface simply because of the comical shape of the legs and the fact that they were sticking out of a massive sink. But after discussing it with our exhibit guide, the ideas behind this piece began to sound a little more melancholy. We discussed the fact that the legs had to be the legs of children due to the size of the small shoes and socks, and how the legs were sticking out of the sink, but would not physically be able to pull their feet back into it. At first the legs look unnatural and fake due to the material in which they are made out of and the impossible shape, but when you look closer you see that the artist actually put human hairs all over each of the legs making them more lifelike. As the viewer you then try to figure out the artists’ true intentions behind his piece and try to relate it to your own body.

For our visit to the MFA next week, Curtis, Chloe and I are starting out in the Contemporary Wing first then bringing the group to the American Wing after. Before we enter the museum’s exhibits, our first step will be to address the rules and regulations of the museum and to encourage the group to show respect and maturity during the visit.

For each of the exhibits, we will give a brief overview of the history of the work within it just to give the students some background information before they enter. The students will have about 20 minutes in each exhibit, and they will have about 15 minutes or so to pick a piece that they would either like to draw (in whatever style they choose) or take notes on what they personally feel is important about that particular piece. Once their time is up, we will gather as a group and talk first about what they noticed as a whole throughout the entire exhibit. Then, we will open up the discussion to individual students that would like to share what they drew or took notes on, urging the students to really look deeper into the artwork and to really explain their ideas in depth. We want these students to look past the surface of the artwork and past the “I like it” or “I don’t like it” mindset when viewing art and have them focus more on the ideas behind the work.

Learning about Shahzia Sikander and her work was both eye-opening and inspiring. I knew very little about the culture of this artist, and by viewing and and learning the details behind her artwork she gives a taste of her background and beliefs through her beautiful pieces. Sikander was born in 1969 in Lahore, Pakistan where she first attended the National College of Arts in Lahore. There, she studied architecture, later moving to the US and received her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1955. She was discovered by many museums earning herself solo exhibitions in major cities such as Miami, San Diego, New York City, Washington, Kansas City and more.

Sikander explains that as a fairly quiet child, art provided an outlet for self-expression. She began her early artistic career with portriature, drawing siblings and cousins in her large family, and claimed that she used them to “…perhaps gain acquaintance or win affection; it was like a tool of communication” (Andersen). Today, she specializes in Indian and Persian-style miniature painting. Sikander managed to bring her style of miniature painting into the world of contemporary art by blending culture and traditional technique with modern expression.

Shahzia Sikander’s particular style for many pieces that involve overlapping and her use of both bright and muted colors really grabbed my attention due to my own similar artistic interests. I had the pleasure of viewing her “The exploding company man and other abstractions” exhibit in the Bakalar Gallery on campus where I stood in front of an animation of hers called “The Last Post”, inspired by her interest in the colonial history of the sub-continent and British opium trade with China (Jenkins). It was beautifully organized, constantly in motion, and on a large enough screen that it draws the viewer in and emerses them. Included in this work is an East India Company man that is seen as the “protagonist” in many of her other pieces. The size of this piece definitely had a big impact on the experience of the audience. If she had made the piece displayed on a smaller screen, the experience would be completely different; it would still be just as visually enticing, but less physically moving to the viewer. Sikander originally began to create her animations due to a restricted amount of time she once had to produce an exhibition.

“…I decided to work with just one painting, and use that to develop an animation.  As I was drawing, I scanned the various stages of the painting. I worked on the scanned layers in Photoshop and ended up threading them to suggest a narrative” (Andersen).

(San Francisco Art Institute, 2011)

This was just one work of out of many that really jumped out at me due to Sikander’s ability to successfully combine all aspects of a piece – color, shape, medium and content – into a well thought out work of art that possesses both cultural depth and personal expression.

Works Cited:

Andersen, Kurt, Shahzia Sikander, and Robert Storr. Cultural and Creative Migrations. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Public Library, 2007. Print.

Jenkins, Sikkema. “Art21 . Home Page | PBS.” PBS: Public Broadcasting Service. Web. 8 Oct. 2011. <http://www.pbs.org/art21>.

“San Francisco Art Institute.” Shows / E-flux. 22 Apr. 2011. Web. 8 Oct. 2011. <http://e-flux.com>.

Our class trip to Jeremiah Burke High School and Dorchester Academy was quite the experience. It really gave us a first hand view of an urban turn-around school and the students that attend it. While there were more of us than there were students which was a little overwhelming, I got to spend some time talking to some of the Juniors and Seniors about what kind of things they were working on in class and even a little bit about their lives outside of school while they “gooped” newspaper pieces onto blown up balloons. One quiet student was very talented at graffiti style drawing and said that he liked to work on projects on his own, but wasn’t all that interested in assigned projects in school. Other students were very outgoing and were very eager to open up and talk about their work. Last week I had the pleasure to begin my own fieldwork observation with Ms. Rodney and her students, and I’m already getting a sense of students’ personalities as well as their interest (or lack there of) in expressing themselves artistically.

I am really thrilled that I got to meet a lady like Chandra Oritz at Dorchester Academy who is so passionate about what she loves and her driving desire to share it with kids that could use it the most is inspiring. She single-handedly organized an art program for the Academy because the school had no art courses available to their students. Now, they can make music, create 2D work, take part in theater, and express themselves creatively. In my opinion, a school without an art program is simply depriving their students of a different kind of mental stimulation that you can’t get from math and science. These students (and ALL students for that matter) need at least a few periods for art built into their schedules every week. In elementary school, children had recess as an opportunity to go blow off some steam. However, high school students have more natural emotional issues and stresses that they need to work out, and the only way to do this is to provide them with the materials that they need to use their hands and their minds to express and create.