Art Education Research Inquiry & Creative Process

Courtney Lee Weida

Capstone Process:

I.Qualitative Interview with artist or teacher to probe art educationII.Autoethnography: examining own artwork, processesIII.Infusing research into teaching philosophies and approaches.

Altered Encyclopedia “E” in honor of Eve Sedgwick

From re-presentation to re-search

• Research and representation as creative processes!

• (Remember re-presentation “this is not a pipe.”)

• Research as searching• Research as searching

again

Two Fridas. Frida Kahlo. 1939.

From Harvard’s Project Zero: Artistic thinking can be the kind of thinking researchers do: artist as storyteller, observer, visionary…

“Conditions for creativity are to be puzzled, to concentrate, to accept conflict and tension, to be born everyday, to feel a sense of self.”

- Erich Fromm in Creativity and its Cultivation

(Mary Stuart’s “Launching the Imagination)• RECEPTIVITY: open to new ideas• CURIOUSITY: research and analysis• WIDE INTEREST RANGE: drawing on different modes/ways of

thinking, discursive• ATTENTIVENESS: mindfulness• CONNECTION SEEKING: seeing similarities• CONVICTION: honoring past and new ideas together• COMPLEXITY: multi-tasking analyzing, observing and making

Framing with Fred Wilson and IFC

Mine/Yours. 1995, Whitney Collection

Gas Station Project. 2007-8.

Observing the Artworld

Emerging Education Research:• experience and document fiestas• “Kitchenspace” as the place where

food is prepared, a privileged and gendered site of social and cultural reproduction

• Visual models - women drew maps of their kitchens - heart of the home, fiesta kitchen as alternate kitchen outdoor transformed as community space.

Karen Rodriguez’ Arts-based Research in Guanajuato

• Arts-based research for study abroad students to explore new ways of seeing, processing, expressing, and knowing

(My fellow professors on a museum tour!)

Karen Rodriguez’ Arts-based Research in Guanajuato

Karen Rodriguez’ Arts-based Research in Guanajuato

• Arts-based research for study abroad students to explore new ways of seeing, processing, expressing, and knowing

• cultivate students’ awareness of difference in a way that does not blanket-highlight everything in US-Other terms

• “Why not teach them more about drafts and practice, lessons and apprenticeships, and the power of the imagination to pull us into difference?”

•Portrait painting as metaphor for qualitative research

•Interpretative description, nuances of language, “texture” of spoken words and phrases

•Collaborative research process with researcher’s voice recognized

•Inside/outside relationships, attention to context

Visual Data: Communication: speech and silence

what does it mean to you to be a female ceramic artist? Being female as a ceramic artist.

I identify with being a Black female potter.

I don’t know if I would emphasize the female part. I’m a potter.

I rarely think of myself as a ‘female potter’ but just a potter.

(I guess when I started) it didn’t mean anything. Just being an artist.

I didn’t want to be singled out. I wanted to be like everyone else.

I wanted to go forward in the profession.

Mostly I don’t think about being a female potter. I guess I think of myself as an artist.

I’ve never really thought about it. Not that much especially. No, I don't think so.

To answer your question, I'd just say no!

The main thing is I like being a potter.

Models/Metaphors: The Pot and the Person

• A poet by training, M. C. Richards frequently relates pottery and education to poetry via metaphor, arguing that “we must carry in our soul a picture of creating little by little the vessel of our humanity” (1980, p. 26). Richards also argues that a person can be a sort of “living vessel” (1964, p. 7) and later points out the linguistic link between vessels and cells, as the Greek word for cell translates into “hollow vessel” (1973, p. 56). Richards (1964) notes that her “own style of teaching is . . . based upon the physical foundation of the clay body” (p. 104).

• Craft adage – “We are what we make.”

Reggio Emilia – interview & personal exploration through artwork

Amanda Signorelli. ‘08

Art Teacher: The Teaching Artist

Kirsten Skorubski. ‘11

Artistic family histories, Connective geneologies in art

Michell Whang. ‘10

Hillary Broder. ‘09