made: Design Education the Art of Making & 26th National Conference on the Beginning Design Student College of Arts + Architecture The University of North Carolina at Charlotte 18–21 March 2010 PROCEEDINGS 2010 made: Design Education the Art of Making & MADE: Design Education & the Art of Making examined the role of making past, present & future, both in teaching design and in the design of teaching. The conference addressed theories & practices addressing fabrication & craft in all studio disciplines, and to take measure of their value in pedagogies of beginning design. Paper presentations delivered a set of eight themes derived from the overall focus on Making. The team of moderators drove the agenda for these themes, and arranged paper presentations into specific sessions indicated by the schedule. Abstracts were reviewed in a blind peer-review process. Conference co-chairs: Jeffrey Balmer & Chris Beorkrem Keynote speakers: Simon Unwin David Leatherbarrow Offered through the Research Office for Novice Design Education, LSU, College of Art and Design, School of Architecture Copyright ©2110 School of Architecture, The University of North Carolina at Charlotte Session Topics Making Real Moderator: Greg Snyder Making Virtual Moderators: Nick Ault, David Hill Making Writing Moderators: Nora Wendl, Anne Sobiech-Munson Making Drawings Moderators: Thomas Forget, Kristi Dykema Making Pedagogy Moderator: Michael Swisher Making Connections Moderator: Janet Williams, Patrick Lucas Making Masters Moderators: José Gamez, Peter Wong Making the Survey Moderators: Emily Makas, Rachel Rossner Open Session Moderators: Jennifer Shields, Bryan Shields Paper abstract reviewers · Silvia Ajemian · Nicholas Ault · Jonathan Bell · Julia Bernert · Gail Peter Borden · Stoel Burrowes · Kristi Dykema · Thomas Forget · Jose Gamez · Laura Garafalo · Mohammad Gharipour · David Hill · Tom Leslie · Patrick Lucas · Emily Makas · Igor Marjanovic · Andrew McLellan · Mikesch Muecke · Gregory Palermo · Jorge Prado · Kiel Moe · Marek Ranis · Rachel Rossner · Bryan Shields · Jen Shields · Greg Snyder · Ann Sobiech- Munson · Michael Swisher · Sean Vance · Nora Wendl · Catherine Wetzel · Janet Williams · Peter Wong · Natalie Yates ART HISTORY AND THE ART + DESIGN STUDENT: EXPERIMENTS IN ASSESSMENT AND ASSIGNMENTS AT RMCAD Making Survey Situating art history within the context of an art and design school is a unique challenge. At the Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design in Lakewood, Colorado, the art history curriculum is designed with a dual focus. Students train within the discipline of art history by reading scholarship, conducting research, and developing their writing and critical thinking skills through a variety of assignments ranging from formal analysis to more extensive research papers. We want to prepare students to take graduate level courses within an MFA or an Art History program. At the same time, they learn to use art history as a tool for their own development as artists and designers. Through coursework they gain a rich catalog of images from which to draw, numerous examples of visual and conceptual problem solving, and practice research and writing in preparation for artist statements, grant writing, and communication with clients. In this paper, I will briefly consider the institutional context of art history at RMCAD, and then address ways the art history division seeks to create methods of assessment, writing assignments, and classroom strategies that successfully integrate this relationship between art history and art and design education. The artist Philip J. Steele founded RMCAD in Denver in 1963. As the college grew it moved to various locations in the city. Currently it is located on a 23-acre campus that once served as a tuberculosis hospital and village. It is a designated historic site, and many of the buildings are listed on the National Historic Register. Philip Steele was committed to a vision of artistic expression grounded in academic excellence. In 2000 RMCAD attained The Higher Learning Commission (HLC) accreditation, and then the National Association of Schools of Art and Design (NASAD) accreditation in 2003. RMCAD transformed from a technical school to an art and design college grounded strongly in KIKI GILDERHUS, HEAD OF ART HISTORY DEPARTMENT OF LIBERAL STUDIES, ROCKY MOUNTAIN COLLEGE OF ART + DESIGN the liberal arts, and art history emerged as an important component of the curriculum. At RMCAD students are required to take a sequence of four art history courses. This includes two surveys, Ancient to Medieval Art and Renaissance to Contemporary Art. Nonwestern art focuses on the arts of Asia, India, and Africa depending on faculty expertise, and the last course Advanced Studies in Art History offers a range of topics including Abstract Expressionism, the History of Photography, and Modern Latin American Art. When I was hired in 2006 as Head of the art history division, the sequence was in place but there was no established curriculum. Since then, with the help of a hard working and dedicated faculty, I’ve engaged in an on-going and exciting process of designing the art history curriculum. At RMCAD, we have two full time faculty and four adjunct instructors. The small size facilitates a spirit of experimentation and collaboration. The four-course sequence serves as a laboratory in which we can test new methods of assessment, writing assignments, and classroom strategies. When something works, it is easy to implement across the courses. One of the first projects the art history faculty tackled was constructing a better art history exam, particularly with regard to slide identifications. A typical exam consists of an array of image identifications, short answer questions, and an essay comparing and contrasting two works of art. In the survey courses, Ancient to Medieval and Renaissance to Contemporary art, the image identifications are crucial to building a visual vocabulary of significant artists, works, and styles. For the exam, students learned thirty to forty images and identified ten of them by artist, title, date, and style. Yet this particular aspect of the exam created an excessive amount of anxiety for students, especially freshmen in Ancient to Medieval Art during their first semester of college. ncdbs 2010 figure 1: Purse Cover from Sutton Hoo, 625 CE, Anglo Saxon Art Many objected outright to memorizing dates, refused to do so, and then scored poorly on the exam. This prompted us to redesign the slide identifications In the new format students learn twenty to thirty images, identify six or seven by artist, title, date, and style, and then they discuss why the image is significant. Their answer should consider medium, country or region of origin, purpose, symbolism, and meaning. Additionally they must incorporate at least two vocabulary terms into their answers. Student answers changed from simply “Artist, Title, Date, and Style” to: This was found in a medieval ship burial in England. The purse cover is an example of cloissoné, a gold frame filled with garnets and enamel with hinges at the top. In the upper register are polygons with abstract designs and four animals whose bodies create a ribbon interlace pattern. On the bottom are Swedish hawks with ducks in their mouths and men between two beasts. The artifacts found at Sutton Hoo were fine and precious, indicative of the high status of the person buried there.1 The new format includes the “hard data” of the work (artist, title, date, style) but allows for a much fuller description and discussion of the image. Students have greater flexibility in their answer, and it better demonstrates what they know. Further, student test scores improved from one semester to the next when we changed the identification format. In a sample of six sections of Ancient to Medieval Art, exam averages jumped from 68 to 75. We also noticed that most students successfully memorized the “hard data” for each image. In class 1 I’ve adapted this example from an exam written by Elyse Shillito for AH1010: Ancient to Medieval Art at Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design, December 9, 2009. evaluations, students thought the exam was harder but they preferred the new slide identification format because it moved away from rote memorization and required a more meaningful discussion of the work of art. In all of the art history courses, it is critical that students read beyond Marilyn Stokstad’s Art History, the survey textbook. I want to focus on ways we introduce research and writing within the discipline of art history. In Renaissance to Contemporary Art, students are assigned a scholarly article analysis using the electronic databases available through the library.2 Students choose a specific work like Picasso’s painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, or an artist, which is defined broadly to encompass the majors. Using electronic databases including JSTOR, Project Muse, and Academic Search Premiere, they find three scholarly articles on their topic. In many cases, they can access the full text of the article online. Students also track down the articles at research libraries in the Denver area. In the paper, students briefly summarize the articles, identifying and describing the thesis and argument made by each author. Then in the process of comparing and contrasting them, students consider the following questions: What kind of evidence do the authors use to substantiate their arguments? What theoretical framework do they use? Do the authors employ formal analysis? Do they agree or disagree with each other? What’s in the footnotes? Did you find anything interesting there? In this way, students develop expertise with electronic databases, and learn to distinguish between popular and scholarly articles. In the analysis, they examine different methods and theories in the field, and they think critically about the arguments presented. The assignment allows students to examine three views of a single piece, or to look more broadly at aspects of an artist’s work. In the best papers I’ve received, students also begin to develop an awareness of the history of art history and how the scholarship is constructed over time. The assignment prepares them for lengthier research papers in the Nonwestern and Advanced Studies courses. 2 This assignment is a modified version designed by Dr. Laura Gelfand at the University of Akron. 361 In the upper division courses, faculty experimented with research papers that combine an element of professional practice. In the Nonwestern Art course of fall 2009, students chose an aspect of Chinese, Japanese, or Indian art to research, and then they created a visual proect.3 Additionally they composed a paper in the form of an extended artist statement with research presented on their chosen work of art or aesthetic concept. The paper required minimally five sources, two scholarly articles, two books, and at least one reputable website. For example, one student chose to interpret a Ming Dynasty silk painting.4 She ordered raw silk from China and then experimented with paint manufactured specifically for the material. For her artist statement, she researched and then discussed her work in relation to Yin Hong’s late 15th century hanging scroll Hundred Birds Admiring the Peacocks. The assignment pairing a visual project with a well-researched artist statement achieves a number of goals. Students research and write within the discipline of art history, but synthesize and apply that research to their own art making. They practice formal analysis and work towards writing a better artist statement, one that articulates their approach to materials, process, content, and concept in order to educate the viewer. The research and writing becomes personal and practical, a skill they can develop to better succeed as artists and designers after college. Another way to emphasize the connection between writing and art is through the use of artist statements. During the semester I assign three or four artist statements, and while students write responses to these readings, I really like to have students read them out loud in class. This started in my Modern Latin American art course during a discussion of Brazilian avant-garde artists of the 1920s. In order to understand Tarsila do Amaral’s painting Abaporú [Figure 2], which translates as “man eats,” students read Oswald de Andrade’s Anthropophagite Manifesto. De Andrade was 3 Two faculty members, Phil Gerace and Neely Patton, designed the visual project / artist statement project. 4 Student Katie Maxwell made the silk painting of a peacock for AH2010: Nonwestern Art at Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design, Fall 2009. 362 figure 2: Tarsila do Amaral a poet and married to Tarsila. In his manifesto, de Andrade establishes the relationship between Latin American and European Modernism using the idea of anthropophagy or cannibalism. He argues that Brazilian artists should cannibalize European art forms the way indigenous people cannibalized the first explorers. For examples, he writes: Only anthropophagy unites us. Socially. Economically. Philosophically. The world’s only law. The disguised expression of all individualisms, of all collectivisms. Of all religions. Of all peace treaties. Tupy or not Tupy, that is the question. Down with the all catechisms. And down with the mother of the Gracchi. The only thing that interests me are those that are not mine. The laws of men. The laws of the anthropophagites.5 The manifesto is funny and rhetorically extreme. He makes numerous references to European literature and history. The line “Tupy or not Tupy, that is the question” replaces Hamlet’s “To be or not be” with name of the Tupí-Guaraní, a tribe of Indians from the Amazon basin said to practice cannibalism. Reading this dense, difficult text out loud, students could hear how de Andrade intended the manifesto to sound. They appreciated the humor and began to understand the way he 5 Patrick Frank, ed., Readings in Latin American Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 24. ncdbs 2010 employed the strategy of anthropophagy in his own writing. In the discussion that followed, they were full of questions and insights about his source material, and the relationship between the manifesto and Tarsila’s depiction of a Brazilian Indian. Most students have not read out loud since they were children. Later, some told me that they felt a little selfconscious, but that it was a lot of fun. The act of reading out loud transforms the words into vital ideas, and now I use this strategy in all of my classes, asking students to read excerpts from Michelangelo’s letters, the Futurist Manifesto, or the poetry of Kurt Schwitters. It shakes up the energy of lecture and allows students to think about artists in their capacity as writers. The challenge of integrating art history with art and design education shapes the art history curriculum at RMCAD. We design the methods of assessment, writing assignments, and classroom strategies for each course with a dual focus. We strive to train students within balance the academic discipline of art history while teaching them to use art history within their own creative process. In this way art history is an integral part of a well-rounded artist and designer. Works Cited Frank, Patrick, ed. Readings in Latin American Art. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. 363
© Copyright 2026 Paperzz