History as Art, Art as History

Contemporary Art and Social Studies Education

Dipti Desai, Jessica Hamlin, Rachel Mattson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780415993753
• eBook ISBN: 9781135203788
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Art

History as Art, Art as History pioneers methods for using contemporary works of art in the social studies and art classroom to enhance an understanding of visual culture and history. The fully-illustrated interdisciplinary teaching toolkit provides an invaluable pedagogical resource—complete with theoretical background and practical suggestions for teaching U.S. history topics through close readings of both primary sources and provocative works of contemporary art.

History as Art, Art as History is an experientially grounded, practically minded pedagogical investigation meant to push teachers and students to think critically without sacrificing their ability to succeed in a standards-driven educational climate. Amid the educational debate surrounding rigid, unimaginative tests, classroom scripts, and bureaucratic mandates, this innovative book insists on an alternate set of educational priorities that promotes engagement with creative and critical thinking.

Features include:

• A thought-provoking series of framing essays and interviews with contemporary artists address the pivotal questions that arise when one attempts to think about history and contemporary visual art together.
• An 8-page, full color insert of contemporary art, plus over 50 black and white illustrations throughout.
• A Teaching Toolkit covering major themes in U.S. history provides an archive of suggested primary documents, plus discussion suggestions and activities for putting theory into practice.
• Teaching activities keyed to the social studies and art curricula and teaching standards
• Resources include annotated bibliographies for further study and lists of arts and media organizations.

This sophisticated yet accessible textbook is a must-read resource for any teacher looking to draw upon visual and historical texts in their teaching and to develop innovative curriculum and meaningful student engagement.

PART I
Reframing History and Art

CHAPTER 1
Introduction

Dipti Desai, Jessica Hamlin, Rachel Mattson

Figure 1.1 Fred Wilson, “Metalwork 1793–1880,” Mining the Museum, 1992.

In 1992, at the Maryland Historical Society in Baltimore, the artist Fred Wilson mounted an exhibit that would become something of a legend. Wilson’s installation, the aptly titled Mining the Museum, was a radical departure from conventional exhibition standards at historical museums. Bringing nothing new into the museum, Wilson’s exhibit featured items from the society’s collection—old tea sets, paintings, furniture—the typical relics of a bygone era, but presented in an unprecedented way. Wilson repositioned select objects from the archives of the Maryland Historical Society to provoke difficult questions about the histories that these objects embody, and the purpose of the institutions that preserve them. Acting as curator, historian, and artist, Wilson sought to reveal untold stories embedded in these objects, by creating surprising juxtapositions, and playing with the placement of objects within the physical space of the gallery. A case labeled “Metalwork 1793–1880” contained highly polished Repousse-style silver table settings produced for the elite of Baltimore society surrounding a pair of grim iron slave shackles produced in the same period (Figure 1.1). In other parts of the exhibit Wilson positioned otherwise pristine museum “artifacts” so that they faced the wall, rather than the viewer. These strategic interventions, presented in the context of the historical museum, set up competing and often contradictory narratives that provoked audiences to question not only how history is represented, but how it is obscured. In short, Wilson assumed the role of critical historian under the auspices of art and in the role of an artist; he transformed the possibilities for historical discourse and presented new ways to consider the role of the arts in relation to history.

In this book we ask: can the work of contemporary artists help us re-imagine the ways that we teach about history and imagine the past? Wilson’s Mining the Museum exhibit suggests that they can. And Wilson is not the only artist whose work provokes an enthusiastic response to this question. There are a great number of other contemporary artists, working in a range of media, and with a diversity of intellectual commitments, whose work suggests new ways to make sense of, and teach about, the past. Here we provide a range of contexts through which to explore how to rethink history, art, and pedagogy.

We began this project saying that this book, History as Art, Art as History: Contemporary Art and Social Studies Education, is a tiny flare of hope. In a moment when the debate about K–12 education narrows—each year, seemingly, more and more—around a rigid and unimaginative set of tests, classroom scripts, political debates, and bureaucratic mandates, this book insists on an alternate set of educational priorities—priorities that promote, above all, creative and critical thinking in history and art classrooms. We have created an experientially grounded, practically minded pedagogical investigation and toolkit meant to push teachers and students to teach, learn, and think critically and visually without sacrificing their ability to succeed in this difficult educational climate. The book brings together both cutting-edge scholarly thinking and best practices for teaching two subjects that are rarely considered coincidentally: history and contemporary art. Building on theoretical and methodological insights from both fields—and especially from contemporary artists and historians who are engaged with public and civic questions—we wrote this book in an effort to open new ways of thinking about teaching.

The book itself is the result of a several-year collaboration between three educators separated by great disciplinary divides. A textile artist turned art educator, Dipti works primarily at the university level as the Director of the Art Education program at New York University (NYU). Jessica works daily to bridge the worlds of contemporary art and public education as the Director of Education and Public Programs for Art21, Inc. a non-profit art organization. Rachel is a professionally trained historian who has worked for many years with history and social studies teachers in New York City, teaching them to think historically and teach creatively; she now works as an assistant professor at the State University of New York (SUNY) New Paltz.

All three of us have worked for years with teachers and students in the beleaguered New York City and New York State public school system, and, in doing that work, have grown frustrated with the ways in which disciplinary boundaries and state and national standards infringe upon the promise of compulsory public education in a democracy and undermine the creative and critical educations of the students in our city’s and our nation’s schools. We saw in this book an opportunity to model critical and investigatory education that empowers students to think beyond subject area boundaries. Dedicated to the radical promise of public education, we believe that interdisciplinary education has great, unrealized potential. It contradicts the notion that knowledge is specialized and isolated, and allows students to make connections between skills and concepts across subject areas and disciplines, and ideas more generally.

We three wrote this book over the course of four years, in an out-of-the way classroom building on the campus of NYU. Throughout this process, we have labored very hard to communicate effectively across the disciplinary and educational divides that stretch between us. This work has not been easy. Not only do we come to this work from at least two, if not more, distinct disciplinary locations, we also address ourselves herein to at least two separate groups of audiences: art teachers and history teachers. To fail to acknowledge these divisions—or at the very least, to note that they marked our collaboration, and that they mark this book—would be to misrepresent our work. The process that produced this book was not seamless. The ride was bumpy. We did not always understand each other. We did not always agree. And although we developed, as we had set out to do, a site where our ideas, and our disciplines, could meet up, this volume itself is also not seamless. Indeed, we believe there is something useful about showing the seams along which we have stitched together our ideas.

We show these “seams” in several ways within this volume. As you will notice, some chapters were co-written; others were authored individually. Some sections feature essays written in the first person; others take the form, strictly, of the traditional third person. Additionally, Chapters 2 and 4—which we have grown used to calling, informally, our “methodologies” chapters (and which we introduce in more detail below)—take on similar questions from distinct vantage points. In Chapter 2, Rachel tackles the challenge that contemporary art and “the visual” pose to history—and history pedagogical—methodologies. In Chapter 4, Dipti and Jessica deal with the challenge that “history” poses to artists and arts educators. These essays lay bare the distinct lenses through which we view this work, and the contrasting possibilities we find there. They provide two very different doorways into this work. You may enter through either or both of them.

We realize this is unconventional. But this is difficult work, and we have had to invent our methods for working, and our strategies for communicating our ideas, along the way. We believe that showing, instead of hiding, the seams where we have grafted together the divergent critical approaches that we bring to this work serves the purpose of making visual the distinctly interdisciplinary nature of this collaboration.

WHY THIS BOOK

We live in a visual culture. We no longer represent ideas, feelings, thoughts, and experiences primarily through oral and written means. Rather, multi-modal ways of representing human experience are now commonplace. Nicholas Mirzoeff (1999) reminds us “[h]uman experience is now more visual and visualized than ever before from satellite pictures to medical images of the interior of the human body” (p. 1). Our students not only are extremely familiar with visual symbols and communication, but are often the target of this messaging. Visual imagery saturates their daily existence, and they are perhaps more likely to learn about history from television, film, video games, and photographs than from reading. And while students are learning how to negotiate every aspect of contemporary existence in this increasingly visual culture, educators cannot ignore the visual nature of students’ lives, no matter what subject they teach. As Henry Giroux (1994) suggests, we have to pay attention to the sites where students are learning, however far from our idea of the “ideal” learning environment that may be, and help them to understand “how conflicts over meaning, language, and representation” relate to “larger struggle[s] over cultural authority, the role of intellectuals and artists, and the meaning of democratic public life” (p. 8). The stakes of this endeavor are high. Movies, television, videogames and other visual and entertainment-based media offer young people a steady diet of something that they might learn to call “history”—no matter how hard we protest that it is not so.

Meanwhile, research about arts-based education suggests that it holds enormous possibilities for K–12 education. Not only is arts education proven to develop the critical and creative thinking capacities of young people, reports demonstrate that students who consistently participate in arts education are more engaged and successful, and have better communication skills than other students. A Carnegie Foundation report recently found that students who “consistently participate in comprehensive, sequential, and rigorous arts programs” are four times more likely to be recognized for academic achievement and to participate in math and science fairs, and three times more likely to be elected to leadership positions within their schools or to win awards for school attendance (Heath, Stanford University, & Carnegie Foundation, 1998). Other studies have found that arts-based educational strategies improve the core skills of reading and writing and that integrating visual assessments in addition to written assessments improves student understanding of historical knowledge. One study reported “that students reveal more history knowledge when their knowledge is assessed through a combination of writing plus drawing than when it is assessed through writing alone” (DeJarnette, 1997, p. 141).

This book proposes that not only do the arts support core academic skills, they support the development of core historical literacy skills such as the ability to articulate an idea; to take a position and defend it; to critically navigate the landscapes students move through every day; to become critical investigators of both images and objects in the world; to understand the world, in both contemporary and historical context; to generate new questions about what they see; and to produce and represent historical knowledge in dynamic ways. The arts also provide students with a new language and a new set of visual tools and methods to process and articulate their ideas. Works of historically engaged art suggest that how we understand the past might be as much a visual question as it is a textual one—that is, that text is not the only medium through which to analyze and represent the past. Most significantly, teaching with works of art provides an opportunity to involve students in critically open-ended conversations: to engage in inqui...

Table of contents

• The Teaching/Learning Social Justice Series
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Series Editor Introduction
• Acknowledgements
• PART I Reframing History and Art
• PART II Investigating History and Art
• Resources
• About the Authors
• Figure Credits and Permissions
• Index