Visual Inquiry - Volume 2, Issue 3, 2013

Frances Euphemia Thompson (c. 1896–1992) taught art education at what is now Tennessee State University in Nashville, from summer 1922 until her retirement in 1969. She was appointed Professor in 1944 and Professor Emerita in 1974. The Tennessee Department of Education published Art in the Elementary Schools: A Manual for Teachers, based on her bachelor’s thesis from Massachusetts School of Art, to help classroom teachers, chiefly in rural African American communities, carry out a functional art programme. I am a White art educator, working in the twenty-first century, carrying the ‘invisible knapsack’ of White privilege. The contents of that knapsack shape my interpretation of Thompson’s art learning and teaching. As an art educator doing historical research, I carry other invisible knapsacks: assumptions about art education, what history is and can be. These values and beliefs contribute to the paradox of historical interpretation. How and under what circumstances did Thompson’s identity as an African American art educator matter in her professional contributions? In order to answer this question and interpret the life experience of African American art educator from the last century, I must unpack my invisible knapsacks. I will compare my White privilege with Thompson’s experiences in the segregated south, and discuss challenges of using culturally and historically appropriate language.

This article proposes the application of three primary tenets of critical multicultural education to assist art educators in re-conceptualizing myopic histories of art education currently dominating the field. Traditionally, voices of those from non-dominant groups have rested on the outskirts of most American art education historical narratives. Critical multicultural education provides an alternative framework as it examines the subjugation of certain non-dominant cultural knowledge and voices. Critical multicultural education re-directs investigations of power as it relates to culture construction and maintenance, knowledge creation and culture fluidity. The objective of this article is to challenge art educators to re-evaluate firmly established historical ‘truths’, and encourage them to recognize a broader audience of voices in order to articulate the cultural complexity of the history of art education.

In this article we examine the inclusion of Black American artists in a selection of western survey art history textbooks using the Harlem Renaissance as an analytical exemplar. We first examine Black intellectual and artistic representations of the Great Migration and the Harlem Renaissance arguing that this work provides a vital contribution to the Western Modernist art tradition. We argue that although there is a great deal of critical contemporary scholarship around the Harlem Renaissance period, three problematic narratives still persist in college-level textbooks: the omission of Black American artists from the larger narrative of Modernist art, the misrepresentation of major themes of Harlem Renaissance art, and a continued focus on Modernist tropes of primitivism. We analyse the content of three mainstream western art history textbooks using Kymberly Pinder’s (1999) theory of the ‘native informant’ as well as other major ideas surrounding Black visual omission and representation. Finally, we examine possible implications of these problematic narratives for art educators, students and historians.

The Barrio Mobile Art Studio, an educational outreach programme created in 1975 by the art centre Self Help Graphics, predominantly served Chicano/a and Mexican immigrant populations in East Los Angeles. The paper examines the creation of this programme, its philosophy and pedagogy in the context of the Civil Rights Movement and an agenda for equity and social justice. By examining the training of the artists who became the teachers for the programme, and its impact on the population it served, it brings to light a significant aspect of the history of Self Help Graphics: its innovative educational outreach programme, which has particular relevance to Chicano/a studies, as well as to the broader history of art education in the United States.

Recent debate has arisen regarding the utility and value of a Ph.D. for the creative artist, where the M.F.A. most often serves as the terminal degree in the field. Yet many engaged in the debate surrounding this degree on the horizon are unaware of the historical discourses that both gave birth to the current-day terminal status in the United States as well as similarly questioned the purposes of the Ph.D. more than 50 years ago when a decision was upheld by the College Art Association in 1960 that the M.F.A. be the terminal degree for artists rather than the Ph.D.. In this article the author reviews the proceedings of three arguments set forth either for or against the Ph.D. at the 1959 Midwestern College Art Conference that informed the College Art Association’s decision, arguments made by Dr Manuel Barkan, Dr Louis Hoover and Dean Kenneth Hudson. Through an interpretive textual analysis, this article examines in-depth the language and logic of the ‘winning’ argument in favour of the M.F.A. as terminal. This debate in 1959 has yet to be critically examined by scholars, and includes conceptions of the artist that continue to be held to this day. The author here examines how arguments particularly by Dean Hudson, which represent the ‘winning’ stance that the M.F.A. be considered terminal, served to romanticize the artist while pitting him against the goals and practices of the academy, arguments that the author believes still linger today and that continually require committed critical examination by both sides of the debate. Such scholarship recognizes the indispensible role that knowing our own history plays in the descriptions, metaphors and images of the status quo that we ourselves construct about the artist in the university even today.

This brief biography introduces the life of American painter Alexander Brooks ‘A. B.’ Jackson (1925–1981) and seeks to better establish his place in the annals of American Art and Education history. A student of renowned colour field painter Josef Albers at Yale, and the first black professor at Old Dominion University in Virginia, Jackson represents a connection between the teaching methods of Germany’s Bauhaus design school and the politics and aesthetics of segregation in America during the 1960s and 1970s. Art by African American artists of Jackson’s generation is often examined either in terms of a radicalized political stance, or in the context of abstract expressionism – often linked to the self-described (or presumed) rhythm and attitudes of African American identity. Jackson’s work and professional identity did not adhere to the trends spurred by the nation’s heated racial tensions, and therefore defies current educational and aesthetic categorization. A deeper understanding of Jackson’s experience, methods as an artist, and greater body of work are sought through interviews, archival research, and an examination of why his presence amongst the greater perception of ‘black art’ is largely omitted from scholarly resources.

This article explores the time in which the large Robert E. Lee monument was planned and built in Richmond, Virginia. Drawing on archives, the story of this monument relates to remembering this man in ways that build and perpetuate the stories of the Lost Cause movement. This article also explores how competing interests in the local community tried to sway the movement to commemorate him in ways that favoured their various interests. The issue of who owns the past and how it is represented in the present in artistic forms continues to be an issue in Richmond and throughout the world. Because people in communities learn from their environment, it is important for art educators to consider the history of their geographic locations and to think about how this history is a form of education.

This article discusses the pedagogy of Hoyt L. Sherman, a fine arts professor at The Ohio State University from 1932 to 1974, whose approach to art education utilized the psychology and physiology of visual perception as presented in his three pedagogical books – Drawing By Seeing (1947), The Visual Demonstration Center (1951) and Cézanne and Visual Form (1952). The article describes Sherman’s innovations, The Visual Training Laboratory (aka Flash Lab) and the Visual Demonstration Center, comments on two of the demonstrations, and summarizes several of Sherman’s key ideas, arguing that recent studies in neuroscience confirm his thinking. A review of Hoyt Sherman’s pedagogical legacy concludes the article. His most notable student, Roy Lichtenstein, credited Sherman’s ideas on perception and visual unity as a major influence.

Although German Expressionism is understood as a heterogeneous art movement that includes diverse forms, scholarly attention is just beginning to turn towards its more distinctive outliers. A review of the life and art of Christof Drexel, whose work has yet to be fully explored, gives voice to vital pedagogical impulses influential to the generative artistic landscape of early modernism.