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From Canvas to Composition: Connecting Art to Academic Inquiry
May 7, 2024
by Katie McClendon, Adjunct Faculty, English (CLS), Instructional Designer, Distance & Alternative Education
It’s May, the season when we move into the sweet possibility of fall. This is one of my favorite months because it’s when I get to dream about the ways I might build and create content for my students in August. This is when I get to be my most curious, creative, and academic–all the things I love most about teaching. My partner once asked a friend why she decided to become a professor since it’s hard for her to stand in front of a class and lecture. She replied that being a professor meant she was always learning, following her curiosities, and then sharing that information and those discoveries with her students. This is one of the things that drives me to teach as well and a primary reason I applied for the Global Gender & Women’s Studies Faculty Learning Community.
Once a month over the previous academic year, I joined an interdisciplinary group of ACC faculty members to listen to experts and learn about different topics related to gender and global studies. The goal was to integrate this content into our curriculum and broaden the scope of learning for our students. We were introduced to other faculty and given insight into what types of projects had developed from the FLC in the past. Then we began the great work of learning. That semester, I also joined the Liberal Arts Gateway, a year-long venture aimed at providing faculty resources and support to develop courses that put students at the forefront of learning by creating engaging, challenging, and inclusive content.
The Global Educators Network (GEN) kicked off the monthly learning sessions, introducing us to a wealth of resources. During this presentation, I learned about author and activist, Samina Ali, and her online project titled “Muslima: Muslim Women’s Art & Voices”. While I wasn’t yet sure how to use this information, I knew it would be a great resource for my Liberal Arts Gateway course. It offered curated pieces demonstrating how art can make viewers question our perception of symbols and stereotypes. One exhibit Ali includes on her site is called “The Hijab/Veil Series” by Boushra Almutawakel from Yemen. It’s a series of photographs depicting Barbie dolls dressed in hijabs that “explores the many ways to look at the hijab, and how it affects the identity of and assumptions about the women who wear it” (“Hijab Veil Series”). With the recent Barbie movie still in the pop culture atmosphere, I thought this might be a great entry into a conversation with students.
I developed a unit to teach students how to analyze persuasive arguments presented by artists and develop their own responses through writing. I identified several artists and exhibitions we could examine in class, and started to see a common focus on exploration or questioning in each artist’s statements. In I Am… Contemporary Women Artists of Africa, artist Wangechi Mutu is quoted as saying, “That Art is a means to reflect and question our co-existence within the unfathomable, magnificence of nature…” (I Am…). This is reflected in her piece, Tree Woman (2016), which uses paper pulp, soil, wood, rock, and steel as sculptural elements to create a life-sized figure of a woman in heels. The figure is built inside out with the most solid form at the center, topped with soil marking her body the way arteries and veins might in an anatomy drawing, and sticks delineating the structure of her skeleton on the surface. I thought about how this image could lead to questions about female strength, about the symbols of femininity, and about how women are primarily depicted in relationship to nature.
I moved on to other art exhibits. Inspired by a poem by Genny Lim, which questions similarities between Asian American women, Wonder Women, curated by Kathy Huang, displays work by artists collectively “responding to themes of wonder, self, and identity through figuration” (par. 2). The depth and breadth of images presented in this exhibit encourages the viewer to consider how complex identity can be and to question whether or not a larger category can hold the multi-faceted definitions of such a diverse group of people.
In her Soldaderas exhibition, artist Nao Bustamente “asks us to consider how the soldadera and her archive open up our understanding of our own histories, and our futures” (Doyle par. 4). By examining what remains, as well as what has disappeared, we are encouraged to consider the curation of history as a narrative and the ways in which those in power determine the story that future generations receive.
Each of these exhibitions and pieces approaches a question that cannot be answered simply, requiring a variety of responses from the artist in an attempt to make meaning. My hope is that this will give my students the opportunity to practice wrestling with multiple and sometimes conflicting ideas simultaneously, a trait I believe all successful scholars must possess.
References
Smithsonian National Museum of African Art. “I Am . . . Contemporary Women Artists of Africa” Exhibit Information, 2024, https://africa.si.edu/exhibitions/current-exhibitions/i-am/
Arrizón, Alicia. “My Love Affairs with Soldaderas” PBS SoCal, 2015, June 4, https://www.pbssocal.org/shows/artbound/my-love-affairs-with-soldaderas
Women I.. “The Hijab / Veil Series | IMOW Muslima” Muslima: Muslim Women’s Art & Voices, 2023, https://muslima.globalfundforwomen.org/content/hijab-veil-series
Deitch, Jeffrey. “Wonder Women, Curated by Kathy Huang” Jeffrey Deitch Gallery, 7 May 2022, https://www.deitch.com/new-york/exhibitions/wonder-women-curated-by-kathy-huang