Visual Inquiry - Volume 3, Issue 1, 2014

This article focuses on the visual response of a contemporary Iranian artist (Farah Ossouli) to a painting by a Renaissance Italian artist (Leonardo da Vinci), and it discusses how and why Ossouli has re-presented an icon of the western art canon through her creative discourse. Also it investigates Ossouli’s use of visual re-narration as a pedagogical tool for offering alternative social, cultural and political perspectives.

Through a year-long collaborative practice of walking as art, three artists/researchers/teachers investigated embodied perception in terms of its capacities for self-sustenance. Amidst the rush and routine of busy lives, familiarity with feelings of potential as the nourishment sustaining bodily movement is often forgotten. However, in immersive practices such as walking, conceptual categories are not as significant as the positions and orientations that postures address, and the degrees of potential bodies feel in assuming these postures. Perception derives its sustenance in a social awareness at the level of the body where availabilities for next movement are generated by sensations of a world in movement already underway. The repeated aesthetic experience of practice-generated potential in every bodily repositioning grounds philosophical matters of perception in this study. This article describes our enquiry into the integrating capacities of walking art for feelings of relational aliveness and it includes both poetry and visual art as part of the study.

The purpose of this article is to examine the benefit of the inclusion of the arts in all students’ education. Since all human activity is a product of the organization of our brains, it stands to reason that understanding how the visual brain works will solidify arts education in every student’s curriculum. Research shows that the visual sense engages more areas of the brain than any other of our five senses. Provided within this article is the workings of the visual brain that should be utilized to provide educational advantages to all students. Through the research cited within this paper, the reader will begin to understand the workings of the visual brain and the benefits of instruction in the arts.

This art-based case study illustrates how primary-age children engaged in a drawing-telling project in order to represent their understandings of the Greek financial crisis. Living in a country where, for the past five years, the topic of financial crisis has vastly permeated television and print media discourse, social networks discussions and adult talk, has raised considerable interest about how primary-age students understand, view and identify this crisis. The children who participated in the research were asked to communicate their understandings of the financial crisis and its effects on Greek society through verbal and visual texts. Descriptions of selected ‘drawing and telling’ accounts show how these children not only depicted but also manipulated concepts and issues interrelated with the financial crisis as they created and recreated images, texts, ideas and feelings. The findings illustrate these children’s understanding, worries and fears and suggest that art education can be a space for healing and recovery from the adversities caused by the financial crisis and a place for fostering resilience.

Victor D’Amico was a pioneer and milestone in art education and served as Director of the Education Department at the Museum of Modern Art for more than 30 years. This article is based on an analysis of primary and secondary documents by and related to Victor D’Amico to construct an account of his art teaching philosophy from 1968 to 1979. I discuss his ideology about the need for the staff of an art institute or art department to possess a profound and homogeneous philosophy based on specific curriculum recommendations that, he emphasized, should draw from contemporary trends in art and art education. I highlight his vision of an art department’s relation to other disciplines in the University, to the community and to the reality of living in the current world (of his time), particularly focusing on an art institution’s flexible or rigid practices to new thoughts and methods. I further discuss his opinions about the rapport between faculty and students and the presence of mutual respect and sensitivity. This article also involves D’Amico’s perspectives on the adequacy of infrastructure and physical facilities being an asset or a handicap to making changes and developing a strong art programme. He strongly believed in conducting comprehensive research in the field, seeking solutions to old problems and improving the status quo in an art education setting. Finally, I discuss how some of D’Amico’s philosophies and ideologies, which evolved almost 35 years ago, are still relevant and being practised in contemporary art pedagogy.

Art Education beyond the Classroom: Pondering the Outsider and Other Sites of Learning, Alice Wexler (ed.) (2012) New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 194 pp., ISBN: 9780230114302, $85 (US distributor)