Art Education at the Intersection of Creativity

Art Education at the intersection of creativity: Integrating art to develop multiple perspectives for identifying and solving social dilemmas in the 21st century.

Cathy Smilan, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, USA

Georgia Kakourou-Chroni, Coumantaros Gallery, Greece

Ricardo Reis, APECV, Portugal

Teresa Torres de Eça, APECV, Portugal

Engaging Creative Thinking through Museum Exhibits

• The Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach Florida Partnership with Conniston Middle School

• IB program in inner city community

• Mr. Shutzman’s 6th Grade Critical Thinking Class

• Exhibit of William Kentridge’s Art

concepts of political injustice/Apartheid

Class Discussion

• What is creativity?

• Student responses varied and included:– Doing something that no one else has done.– Everyone is creative, some people just don’t

use their creativity.– Not all artists are creative– You can learn to be an artist, but you can’t

learn to be creative. You just are creative.– The creative process is in the making and the

viewing of art.

When asked about Museum Experience

• Students responded:– Attend museum exhibits with classes– Attend museum exhibits with family– Never attended the Norton Museum (live

within 2 miles of the museum. School 1 mile from museum)

– Attend other museums with family

Why do artists make art?

• Students responded:– To express themselves; I don’t think art is

made for the viewer– I don’t think the artist is responsible for

anything– To share what they see with the world– To describe what they see

Thinking about Kentridge-purpose and presentation

– He doesn’t just make pictures to describe what he sees.

– William Kentridge dances, changes his work, makes things out of other objects.

– We can only take in a small percentage of what we see…[like in real life]. William Kentridge shows so much in his work and you have to decide what to see.

Palimpsest

– The artist uses different materials and visual techniques to translate and communicate his ideas

– He retells history, erases and rewrites

– You can never completely erase, you just have to build on what is and change it.

– He uses image and mirrors to project. He

makes distorted images and they only seem real when they are projected.

Public art as educational resource

• The Coumantaros Gallery, the National Gallery of Greece

• APECV, Portugal

“The Neoclassical City”, in Coumantaros Gallery.

• Meaning

• Protection

workshops in which children made visual and oral records

of neoclassical buildings

• Gallery seminars on neoclassicism for parents

• “Engraving the city”

• “Water-colouring the city”

• " Square"

Exhibitions

• exhibition of neoclassical building designs in collaboration with the National Greek Archives.

• exhibition of student and artists’ works.

• Student’s proposals for using the endangered buildings, were published in local newspapers and presented to local authorities.

Drawing Pousão Arts, Education and Communities

• Portuguese Visual Art Teachers Association APECV / Museu Nacional Soares dos Reis

• September 2009 and February 2010

• need to foster links between schools and local museums.

• Awareness of local culture

• Need to revise studio art and history of arts teaching practices

• E-learning training course for art teachers,

• seminars,• students’ visits to the

museum,• students’ studio work

carried out in schools• exhibition of students’

work.• The topic of the work

was the study of a Portuguese nineteenth century painter, Henrique Pousão.

• Pousão was the starting point to enable students to construct their own narratives.

possible ‘gazes’.

• Considering the gaze focuses attention upon us, the viewer and our relationship with what they see. We are invited by images to see in a particular way, but we also come to them with already existing relationships to what we see.

• The gaze is therefore a crucial way in which to understand ourselves as individuals and as a society.

• It offers a significantly different orientation that teachers used to have , which tended to focus on art production and art criticism without necessarily considering what we ourselves bring to the image.

spotlight on the viewer, and our context

Intertextuality

• Audiences make associations with imagery according to their own interests and knowledge

• viewers were invited to built their own narratives or histories connecting their personal knowledge with the knowledge acquired in the museum and school by means of connecting nodes.

Teachers and students were invited to connect images and ideas irrespective of historical categories like high and low, the past and the present, our own and other cultures, student interest and teacher requirements.

• students ‘visual narratives were valued as art works displayed in the same museum where the commemorative exhibitions had taken place.

Their voices mattered

and in the ‘opening’ many students’ families come to validate them.