Out of Abstraction

This paper describes a collaborative self-reflexive practice using art-making, personal experience, womanist performance pedagogy (WPP), the Black Arts Movement, and poetry as the starting material for inquiry. Through arts-based inquiry, we reflected on our practice and Black personhood as art therapists, artists, and activists. We investigated the concepts of therapeutic and professional space in three areas: negotiating identity, co-creating our therapeutic practice, and making alternatives. We utilized the seven characteristics of WPP proposed by Khalilah Ali in her dissertation ‘For Us Poetry is Not a Luxury’: A Case Study of Six Black Women Artist-Educator-Activists as a framework, while drawing from care and healing practices from the Black Arts Movement, and using poetry as material. We merge our experience, theory, and action through this collaborative, self-reflexive, exploratory investigation, to better understand how to cultivate subversion and challenge the power structures and systems that we navigate on a daily basis. Our interest in this topic derived from the two alternative spaces that we created during our time as art therapy students: BIPOC Makespace and Sister Circle. We realized that our starting point does not always have to be in relation to whiteness, critiquing whiteness, or talking about our experiences in relation to oppression that has happened in our education. This paper is giving us the opportunity to choose our own starting point and material to investigate, putting Black knowledge, experience, and praxis at the center.

Thinking Pedagogy for Places of the Relational Now

The work of American artist, educator, and researcher Elizabeth Ellsworth is profoundly influential in many fields of study, including social policy, architecture, feminism, mass communication, media, education, and art activism. In education, Ellsworth’s insights and ideas about knowledge and pedagogy challenge the view of student education in terms of mental activity and processes of growth promoted by modern psychology. She problematizes knowledge and learning by connecting them to moving bodies, offering radical insights regarding how human embodiment affects activities of teaching and learning and how places of learning implicate bodies in pedagogy. Ellsworth claims knowledge to be always in the making and pedagogy as a force that is already at play in the world, driving experience and sustaining the human prospect. Ellsworth challenges art education by actively questioning knowledge and reality as already made, arguing instead that both are multiple, and can and must be challenged so that society can respond and engage with discursive and material spaces of classroom and daily life practices that changing times, spaces, and bodies engender. Drawing from a wide variety of disciplines, including contemporary art and media design, Ellsworth urges education to orient to the pragmatics of aesthetic experience and the rich indeterminacy of time in moving bodies and demonstrates the potentialities in responding to the anomalies of teaching even while allowing them to be undecidable. In calling for pedagogic efforts that liberate matter from constraint, her work has inspired many varieties of new materialisms currently coming to the fore in curriculum studies. Ellsworth emphasizes the practice of thinking that pedagogy offers, which engages the aesthetic to neutralize binary thinking. She argues that even in attempts to act against oppressions, easy polemics oppose victims to perpetrators; unity is based on sameness; and an “us-ness” versus “them-ness.” Methods appear unproblematic in their use of rationalistic tools, and there are incapacities or refusals to acknowledge one’s own implication in the information and practice that assume exemption from becoming oppressive to others. Instead, Ellsworth advocates thinking in which dynamic and relational unities move through each other, always emerging as something un-predetermined. Her work carries a clearly articulated sociopolitical agenda for design of pedagogic circumstances whose anomalous and “impossible” natures are the actual places in which difference has the flexibility to differ, and students of difference can thrive.

The Way of the Artist Educator paradigm: Fusing artistic studio practice and teaching pedagogy

The purpose of this autoethnographic study is to examine the experiences of visual arts educators who identify themselves as Artist Educators. In particular, this article investigates how these Artist Educators perceive the fusion of their artistic studio practice with their teaching pedagogy, and how the perception defines their identity and impacts their creative and classroom practices. This study involved a focus group of six individuals, including the researcher. All the participants were practising artists, currently employed or recently retired K-12 visual arts educators certified in the states of Maine or New Hampshire, and members of the Kittery Art Association. This study used a combination of interviews and an arts-based method for data collection. All the data were analyzed and resulted in seven findings that culminated in the Way of the Artist Educator ‐ an alternative paradigm for a quality and holistic twenty-first-century visual arts education. This article presents the paradigm, discusses the study’s implications and offers suggestions for future research.

SOME ISSUES GRAPHIC MOVEMENT. USE MIRRORING IN RESEARCH M. PYSANKA

The matter of the graphic image of the motion, taking into account the laws of the picture plane, as well as the study of patterns of motion as one of the leading composition factor, especially in terms of creating and perceiving the artistic image, is extremely important for the instructional program of the academic drawing. The formula of the work involves the presence of students with a very specific knowledge and skills related to the properties of the picture plane, the nature and character of the motion within the composition, as well as the patterns of its visual perception.The purpose of the article is an attempt to determine the main issues of graphic image of motion and the peculiarities of its visual perception in the structure of the picture plane, as well as to demonstrate the expediency of use a mirroring in work on the composition, mainly on the basis of research of the famous native artist-educator Mykola Pysanko. The author collected his searches in the book “Motion, Space, and Time in the Figurative arts”. We can make a conclusion that the study of the influence of the basic laws of the picture plane, in particular the areas of its right and left sides, on the mode and contextual aspect of the motion in the middle of the picture field is a fundamental issue for the instruction of academic drawing. This predetermines the need for a broader coverage of theoretical issues of the graphic image of motion and its research using the mirroring.This topic is relevant in terms of using the article's material as an auxiliary methodological basis for the instruction of vocational subjects to students of creative specialties. The action of the laws of the right and left sides of the picture plane reveals the internal pattern of the artist's concept.Knowledge and understanding of the nature of the sides of the picture field, as well as its connection with the mode and content aspect of the motion within the composition is important for students of any creative specialty.

Crafting Identities: Folding and stitching the self

This article tells the story of two fibre artists, Kathryn and Clare, who craft their intergenerational autoethnographic insights through the creation of textile artworks. It explores the collaborative journey of both artists, who came together to create an exhibition titled “Stitching Identities.” The artists have embraced the Deleuzian idea of the folding act in artmaking as a process of continuous and complex revealing of narratives and intuitive insights about self, a bringing of the inside to the outside and into material aesthetic form. It also embeds the writing of a colleague artist/educator, Michelle, who worked with them on the writing of the article and in addition draws on the critical, reflective and philosophical writing of education theorist Inna Semetsky (https://columbia.academia.edu/InnaSemetsky) who wrote the “Stitching Identities” exhibition catalogue essay. Their artmaking is their method, a way of crafting for meaning, a way to research and explore the self and the formation of their current identities.

Eastern Art Group (Tung fang/ Ton Fan hua hui)

The eastern art group, or Tung fang/ Ton Fan hua hui, was one of Taiwan’s first modern art groups. It was formed in November 1956 by a group of artists who came to Taiwan from Mainland China during the mid- to late 1940s, and most were graduates from the Taipei Municipal Teachers College. Although their artistic styles were dissimilar, these artists shared a common purpose in modernizing Chinese painting by synthesizing traditional Chinese aesthetic values with Western modern art forms, particularly American abstraction. The Eastern art group evolved under the guidance of artist-educator Li Chung-sheng (Li Zhongsheng, 李仲生), who arrived in Taiwan in 1949 from Mainland China. Li played an instrumental role in the development of modern art in Taiwan, mentoring many artists, including members of the Eastern art group, and he is often referred to in Taiwan as "the father of modern art." Influenced by surrealism and abstract expressionism, he encouraged his students to delve into the subconscious and to embrace free and spontaneous artistic expression. Artists in this group included Chen Tao-ming (Chen Daoming, 陳道明), Ho Kan (Huo Gang, 霍剛) (original name Huo Xuegang, 霍學剛), Hsiao Chin (Xiao Qin, 萧蕭勤), Hsiao Ming-hsien (Xiao Mingxian, 蕭明賢) (original name Xiao Long, 蕭龍), Hsia Yang (夏陽) (original name, Hsia Zuxiang夏祖湘), Li Yuan-chia (Li Yuanjia, 李元佳), Ouyang Wen-yuan (歐陽文苑), and Wu Hao (吳昊) (original name Wu Shilu, 吳世祿). These eight core members were often referred to as "The Eight Bandits" (Ba da xiang ma, 八大響馬) because of their rejection of artistic convention and of academic training.

Growing Community Music Through a Sense of Place

Our relationships to places, people, and our physical and metaphysical environment drive our personal journeys. Our identity develops from birth through this complex web of relationships where skills, creativity, and personality grow in unique pathways. A sense of place is about this personal development as well as the way communities grow in response to their constituents in a symbiotic process of sympathetic exchange. This chapter will examine how music and culture articulate these changes and through examining forms of practice in historic and geographic contexts I will also investigate aspects of the role of the artist, educator, and facilitator. Over thirty years I have created work inspired by the towns and countryside of Morecambe Bay in the North West of England. Through detailed examination of this work in this chapter, I introduce themes of cultural creativity, vernacular art, and civic and personal celebration that are at the heart of the work of a community musician.

Stuart Marshall’s Idiophonics

Artist, educator and film- and video-maker Stuart Marshall (1949–1993) was an important link between the American experimental music of the 1970s and the British visual arts scene of the same epoch. The author looks at one of Marshall’s works, Idiophonics (a.k.a. Heterophonics), and offers thoughts on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of its presentation in London and Newcastle in 1976.