A Cross-Cultural ApproachAuthor(s): Joanne E. SowellSource: Art Journal, Vol. 54, No. 3, Rethinking the Introductory Art History Survey(Autumn, 1995), pp. 72-75Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/777591 .

Accessed: 15/06/2014 00:06

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

College Art Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Art Journal.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 188.72.126.108 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 00:06:34 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

72

in which artists played a wider role in society in the Renais- sance and Baroque era than what we expect of an artist today; (2) The artist's intended meaning in certain artworks only becomes evident when you reconstruct the common beliefs of the original audience. Give specific examples of how this

interrelationship of historical context and iconography works; (3) The "ideal" of what art should do changed drastically during the nineteenth century. Trace this by comparing the work of Ingres, Goya, Friedrich, Courbet, and Munch; (4) What was a woman's place in eighteenth- and nineteenth-

century European society? How did male artists view women?

(5) How did the urbanization of Paris, photography, and

Japanese prints all play a part in the distinctively "modern" look of Impressionist painting? (6) Pretend you are Picasso

visiting the University of Kentucky Art Museum's special exhibition of African art. What would your reactions to it be?

(7) Discuss the interrelationship of politics, art exhibition, and art censorship in modern art; (8) "Women's art": Is there a

specifically female aesthetic? Is it different in essential ways from the male vision?

A short research paper (of about five pages) allows the

student to go into greater detail with a topic of special interest to him/her. It encourages a personal engagement with mate-

rial of the student's own selection. One of my favorite projects is for students to imagine they are an artist and to write a

letter or a journal entry describing the events of a typical day in their life. These papers include documentation (in footnote

and bibliography form). The single thing students most often compliment about

my introductory course is the inclusion of music. Second,

they usually have praise for my enthusiasm, passion, and

energy for teaching at this level. The most frequent complaint is that my course is much too hard for the 100-level number it

bears. It is possible that this class, as I teach it, could/should

be offered as an alternative introduction to art history under a

higher number. Many times the students who find this experi- ence most appealing are my more mature, nontraditional ones. But there are some well-prepared and sophisticated young freshmen and sophomores who thrive in this heady

atmosphere. While I aim my class at the creative spirit in

everyone, some students are naturally more willing to risk an

exploration of this aspect of themselves. Other students never can loosen up enough, or dig deeply enough, but I like to believe that it's not for lack of my trying.

The benefit of a topical approach for me is not only in the opportunity it provides to bring together my teaching and research interests, but in the way it makes almost everything I read, see, or hear seem relevant to me. This course is

always in the back of my mind.

A Cross-Cultural Approach JOANNE E. SOWELL

have taught the traditional survey of ancient and medi- eval art for some time and have been increasingly un-

comfortable with the strong Western bias. My dilemma

was how to change the survey course without simply adding

many more cultures and reaching a point where none of them

were given enough time. I have not been comfortable with the

approach taken by most introductory texts, simply adding a few token chapters on non-Western art into a format based on

the stylistic development of Western art. Instead, I have

developed a cross-cultural survey of art that is taught in

addition to a more traditional survey course. There are three major goals for the course: the inclu-

sion of multicultural content, the exploration of issues that

arise from this content, and the use of multicultural pedag- ogy. The course is organized around the art of five cultures, those identified as the cultural heritages of the major ethnic

groups in the United States: Mesoamerican art, Native Amer-

ican art, West African art, Asian art, and Western European art. The last section of the course focuses on contemporary artists who use these traditions in their own work.'

Western art is included for a number of reasons. In

most survey texts the Western tradition forms the focus and

provides the structure, with extra chapters devoted to non-

Western art added. Instead, I wanted to deal with Western art

as one of many parallel traditions. The contemporary Latina/

Latino, Native American, African American, and Asian

American artists I include respond to the Western tradition in

their works, and an introduction to Western art illows stu-

dents to understand in what ways these artists cc' nbine and

reconfigure their Western and non-Western heritages. A

consideration of the Western tradition also enables students to

see how this dominant tradition in the United States has

affected the way other cultures are seen.

Second, the course is designed to address issues that

arise from a consideration of non-Western art. For example, a

discussion of the differences between fine art and craft raises

questions about the function of art in culture and about the

way we categorize and value objects. This is also a topic currently being debated in the art and museum communities

and one which is tied to issues of diversity and gender. 2 Most

of the students who take my course have little or no art

background, but they do have opinions on what they think art

is and what they like. We try to examine these opinions and

their consequences. When I lecture on art from particular cultures, I include discussions of how the art has been

treated or consumed and understood from the Western per-

spective. For example, when we discuss African art, we talk about early twentieth-century artists' interest in the abstract

qualities of African art and how that has affected the way

FALL 1995

This content downloaded from 188.72.126.108 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 00:06:34 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Al %i ieii-i

ii iiiiii

FIG. 21 Students participating in a learning cycle on cultural context in the cross-cultural survey of art, University of Nebraska at Omaha.

African art has been studied and exhibited. We then look at African art from a thematic and contextual perspective. We

compare, for example, the treatment of African art in the 1984 Museum of Modern Art exhibition "Primitivism" in

Twentieth-Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern with that in more recent exhibitions at the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

Third, the course is designed to provide students with diverse learning styles and a variety of approaches to the material. As student populations become increasingly var- ied, learning styles must also become diverse in the class- room. Adding multicultural content is not a sufficient re-

sponse to the growing diversity of our population. Pedagogy must also become multicultural.3

To organize group activities that introduce students to issues and ideas, I use a method called the learning cycle.4 This method requires students to work in small groups to

explore concrete objects, texts, or images (fig. 21), from which issues and ideas arise that can be applied in other situations. In one case, I use this technique to explore the way images require and depend on a body of cultural information for understanding. Students look at a selection of magazine advertisements and discuss the knowledge that they must

bring to the images to understand them. They also note any stereotypes they see and consider who the audience for the advertisement might be. This helps students to understand that they have a knowledge base of popular culture as well as their own biases and assumptions that allow them to "read" the advertisements, and that people in other times and places also had a similar knowledge base for their images. Students then are given a reproduction of an artwork from one of the cultures we will be studying, with its subject matter identi- fied. They are asked to go to the library to research the image and to gain the kind of contextual information its original viewer might have had.

In another learning cycle, students are given twenty images and asked to sort them into two piles labeled "fine art" and "craft." Images are chosen carefully to provoke discus- sion. There are a number of examples of fiber art: a Japanese kimono hung as if displayed in a museum, a photograph of

beautifully decorated clothing being worn by African wo-

men, an appliqud and pieced quilt, and a story quilt by Faith

Ringgold. Pottery is also included: an ancient Greek vase

(fig. 22) and a platter by Maria Martinez (fig. 23) in the collection of the local art museum, a fur-covered cup by Meret Oppenheim, a plate from Judy Chicago's Dinner Party, and a "collector's plate" from an advertisement in a popular magazine. Student discussion usually focuses around the function of the objects, and many students conclude that only the fur-covered cup and the collector's plate are truly fine art because they are obviously not meant to be functional. This leads to a discussion of what art is, who makes it, and how it functions in different cultures, as well as to a discussion of the long-standing Western conviction that art cannot be func- tional. This activity is done as we begin our study of Native American art, so that students are considering these issues as we discuss clothing, blankets, pottery, and masks.

Students are required to do ten reading assignments during the semester. For each assignment there is a list of

FIG. 22 Attributed to the Omaha Painter, Attic black-figure ovoid neck amphora, ca. 570 B.C.E., 13 inches high. Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebr.; gift of Mr. and Mrs. Thomas C. Woods, Jr.

ART JOURNAL

73

This content downloaded from 188.72.126.108 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 00:06:34 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

74

.............

...........

FIG. 23 Maria Montoya Martinez, round plate, 1946-56, black on black ceramic ware, 143/4 inches diameter. Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebr.

choices to allow for individual preferences. For example, when we are studying Mesoamerican art students may choose

from articles on new archaeological finds from the Olmec

culture, the symbolism of clothing in Aztec art, or the

aesthetics of Aztec art. These articles follow and supplement the content of the course and address some of the issues

raised above. For example, the issue of craft versus art arises

again if the student chooses Patricia Mainardi's article on

quilts or Penelope Hunter-Stiebel's article on the craft object, two items on the reading list for my lectures on Western art."

Many of the readings are included in the required texts.6 None of my texts provide general information on all five

cultures or good color reproductions. To date I have not found

an introductory text that covers all five without privileging the

West. To compensate, I put a selection of slides used in class

in a student study area and rely on class notes and library reserve materials.

The variety of possible aesthetic approaches to art is a

topic that arises many times throughout the course. To help focus on this issue, students do an activity dealing with

approaches to art, based on interviews reported in Michael

Parson's book How We Understand Art (New York: Cambridge

University Press, 1987). They are given reproductions of the

works of art along with the texts of responses to these images and are asked to group them according to the aspects of the

images on which the responders focus. Students usually

recognize mimetic, formal, and expressionistic approaches in the interviews they read and propose a pragmatic approach based on what we have discussed in class. They then read

Richard Anderson's chapter on Western aesthetics (from Cal-

liope's Sisters: A Comparative Study of Philosophies of Art), which discusses these four philosophical approaches and

how they have been applied to both fine and popular arts.

Chapters on Navajo, Yoruba, Aztec, Indian, and Japanese aesthetics have been assigned previously. By looking at these

various aesthetic approaches, I hope to encourage students to

examine their own approach to art. Too often I find that

students who have grown up in the traditional "melting pot" of

the United States don't believe they have a culture. Their way of looking at things is just "the way things are," and other

ways of looking at the world are simply "weird" or exotic or

even wrong. As students begin to recognize that they tend to

approach art in a particular way, they become aware that

others may take different and equally valid approaches. They also begin to see that there are a variety of approaches they

might use to understand works of art they initially find

unpleasant or uninteresting. While I believe it is important to discuss each artistic

tradition in its own right, I do not want students to view these

traditions as cultural "isolation chambers," which have noth-

ing in common, that is, a collection of mutually exclusive

"others."7 When we come to the end of our separate discus- sions of the five cultures, we consider thematic similarities

among them. Students do a learning cycle in which they reflect back on art and architecture we have studied and try to draw some cross-cultural connections. This is also the

subject of the second written assignment for the course.

Students are asked to create an "exhibition catalogue" that is

cross-cultural in nature and that makes use of objects from at

least three cultures we have studied. The objects are chosen

around such themes as: How do cultures use objects to

influence the natural world? How have cultures used art to

commemorate their dead? How has art been used to represent

power? How have artists used art to portray individual iden-

tity? Students are given a list of about fifteen possible themes

and are asked to begin collecting images of objects that

belong to one. I have found it useful to give the students a

choice of themes to avoid such superficial ones as "the human

figure" or "pottery." Before the assignment is made students are introduced

to museum catalogues through in-class group activities. Each group is given two catalogues relating to one of the five

cultures we are studying and is asked to study them to

determine the kinds of information they include. They are

asked to examine the organization of each catalogue and to

determine its approach, whether formal, thematic, or contex-

tual. In a second activity they are given two catalogues with

objects from different cultures and are asked to choose

artworks that might be related thematically. This prepares students for the "exhibition catalogue" project in which they must include thematically related artworks from three cul-

tures with an introduction that explains their conception and

organization. The final section of the course focuses on contemporary

artists who are making use of the traditions discussed earlier.

At times we consider aspects of historical development such

FALL 1995

This content downloaded from 188.72.126.108 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 00:06:34 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

TAX

....

........ FIG. 24 Bob Hauzous, Portable Pueblo, 1988, steel, 94 x 78 x 33 inches. Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebr.

as the Harlem Renaissance, the styles promoted by the Santa Fe Studio and the Institute of American Indian Arts, or the

mixing of Mesoamerican and Spanish elements in postcon- quest Mexican art. These discussions are supplemented by readings. In other presentations I focus on such works of art as Renee Stout's Fetish #2, which makes connections to both

contemporary cast figures and African nkisi figures and raises issues of African American identity, power, and gen- der. We also discuss Bob Hauzous's Portable Pueblo (fig. 24), which is in our local art museum, and which raises questions not only about how white culture has affected Native Ameri- can culture, but about the values and symbols associated with each.8 These kinds of connections between works of art, readings, class discussions, and lectures, and students' own

experiences are what, I hope, form the real content of the course. Unless students make these connections, they tend to see unfamiliar works of art as separate from their own inter-

ests, experiences, and cultures. The course is designed not only to include multi-

cultural content then, but to challenge the way students think about the art both of their own culture and of others. It is not meant to propose a correct response to artistic diversity but instead is meant to allow students access to the debate. In order to do this, the students must explore their own precon- ceptions and become active in thinking, talking, and writing about art.

Notes 1. Slide lectures and discussions are interspersed throughout the semester with nine in-class group activities in which students participate in small-group discussions.

Approximately two weeks is spent on each of the five cultures, with one week spent on cross-cultural connections and two weeks on contemporary artists. Students are

required to participate in the discussions, to answer questions on ten readings, to

complete two written assignments, and to take three tests during the semester. 2. See, for example, Marcia and Tom Manhart, eds., The Eloquent Object: The Evolution of American Art and Craft Media since 1945, exh. cat. (Tulsa: Philbrook Museum of Art, 1987). 3. See Linda S. Marchesani and Maurianne Adams, "Dynamics of Diversity in the

Teaching-Learning Process: A Faculty Development Model for Analysis and Action," in Maurianne Adams, ed., Promoting Diversity in the College Curriculum: Innovative

Responses for the Curriculum, Faculty and Institutions, New Directions for Teaching and Learning, no. 52 (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1992), 16-17. See also James Anderson and Maurianne Adams, "Acknowledging the Learning Styles of Diverse Student Populations: Implications for Instructional Design," in Laura L. B. Border and Nancy Van Note Chism, eds., Teachingfor Diversity, New Directions for Teaching and Learning, no. 49 (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1992), 19-33. 4. Joanne Sowell, "The Learning Cycle in Art History," College Teaching (winter 1991): 14-19. 5. Patricia Mainardi, "Quilts: The Great American Art," Feminist Art Journal 2 (winter 1973): 1, 18-23; and Penelope Hunter-Stiebel, "The Craft Object in Western

Culture," in Manhart, Eloquent Object, 139-55. 6. I am currently using Janet Catherine Berlo and Lee Anne Wilson, eds., Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1993), which is an anthology of readings; and Richard L. Anderson, Calliope's Sisters: A

Comparative Study of Philosophies of Art (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1990). Articles or chapters dealing with all five cultures are contained in these two books and are supplemented with materials on reserve in the library. 7. If cultures are isolation chambers, then we can never come to know another culture. Instead, Luise McCarty suggests a model of cultures as great circles, each

intersecting with the others. It is through the points of intersection that one comes to know her own culture as well as others. Carlos J. Ovando and Luise Prior McCarty, "Multiculturalism in U.S. Society and Education: Why an Irritant and a Paradox?" in J. Q. Adams and Janice R. Welsch, eds., Multicultural Education: Strategies for Implementation in Colleges and Universities (Macomb: Western Illinois University, Illinois Staff and Curriculum Developers Association, 1993), 3:53-70. 8. Related ideas are explored in readings for the course. The meaning of the architectural pueblo and the relationship between the structure and the society that built it is addressed in Amos Rapoport, "The Pueblo and the Hogan: A Cross-Cultural

Comparison of Two Responses to an Environment," in Berlo and Wilson, Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, 308-28. The impact of white culture on pueblo artists is raised in Edwin L. Wade, "Straddling the Cultural Fence: The Conflict for Ethnic Artists within Pueblo Societies," in ibid., 371-84.

The 301 Project

t the University of Texas at Austin, thirteen graduate-student instructors with diverse areas of

specialization have conceived the "301 Project." Art

History 301, an introduction to the visual arts, provides undergraduates with a grounding in formal analysis and

critical strategies for art appreciation. As at many American

universities, this type of course is offered as a precursor to

historical surveys of Western art and fulfills a distribution

requirement in the arts and humanities. Art History 301 often serves as the only introduction many undergraduates have to our field. From our dual perspectives as both students and instructors, we are collaborating on a reassessment of the

design, content, and presentation of this important course.

ART JOURNAL

75

This content downloaded from 188.72.126.108 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 00:06:34 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions