On March 14th, artist Oliver Herring visited Oak Hall School in Gainesville along with art education faculty and students from the University of Florida. Students were given scissors and tape and challenged by Oliver to transform themselves using fragments of photos previously taken of them and printed out. Here are some of the results. (view slide show instead)

Internationally acclaimed artist, Oliver Herring, will visit the University of Florida’s School of Art and Art History on March 11-15th. During his stay, Herring will present a public lecture at 6 PM (EST) on Thursday, March 14th at the Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art Auditorium. This lecture will be streamed live on the Web and can be viewed at:

http://mediasite.video.ufl.edu/Mediasite/Play/10aaddcb80994261b74f5ff1968592ce1d

Note that you may need to install the SilverLight Plug-in in order to view the streaming lecture.

In addition, Herring will produce one of his “Areas for Action” events at WARPhaus Gallery, and collaborate with students from WARP, Art Education, and Creative Photography during the week.

UF students and the public are invited to view and/or participate in a collaborative Workshop at WARPhaus Gallery.  Open to public: 12-5PM, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday March 11, 12, 13, and 15th.

Performance Event: Friday 5-6PM, Friday 15th WARPhaus Gallery, 534 SW 4th Ave., Gainesville.

Background
Oliver Herring received his MFA degree from Hunter College and his BFA degree from University of Oxford (Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art), in England. Herring has received grants from Artpace, New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Joan Mitchell Foundation. Herring is based in Brooklyn, New York and was born in Heidelberg, Germany.

Selected Solo Exhibitions include: Kyoto Art Center, Kyoto, Japan, Meulensteen Gallery, New York, NY, Max Protetch Gallery, New York, NY, MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Frye Art Museum, Seattle, Washington, Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art, Palm Beach, Florida, Rhodes & Mann, London, England, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris, France, Camden Art Center, London, England, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY, Baumgartner Gallery, Washington, D.C., and The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, NY.

Selected Group Exhibitions include: 2012 Contemporary Art Wing Reopening; Baltimore Museum of Art; Baltimore, Maryland; 2011 Bodily Choreography; The Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, Poland; About Face: Portraiture as Subject 2010 Aichi Triennale, Nagoya, Japan; The Logic of Paper: American Works on Paper; He Xiangning Art Museum, Shenzhen, China; 2009 10th Lyon Biennale of Contemporary Art; Lyon, France 2008 I Feel I am free but I know I am not, SF Camerawork, San Francisco, California; 2007 BoysCraft, Haifa Museum of Art, Haifa, Israel 2005 Collection 2, Fondation pour l’Art Contemporain Claudine et Jean-Marc Salomon, Annecy, France.

Oliver Herring’s visit is organized by the School of Art and Art History and funded by the Art Education Visiting Scholars Fund.

Related Links
Oliver Herring on Art21
http://www.art21.org/artists/oliver-herring

Oliver Herring: Legacy \ Art21 “Exclusive”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDcuwHV40NA

Oliver Herring Talks About Task
http://youtu.be/9dv8pMkJRGw

On Friday evening, I’m honored to be receiving the Kathy Connors Teaching Award from the NAEA Women’s Caucus in the Texas Ballroom E in the Omni Hotel (2nd floor).  Mostly though, its just going to be a real pleasure to meet up with all my tweeps and former students who are presenting at the conference.

See you all in Texas!

1. What type of equipment do your students have access to in addition to the software (Photoshop, Flash, etc.) that you described in your video?

We have about 12 digital cameras that I use for with all my classes. Sometimes just to take photos of their work, other times to take photos to use with their work and sometimes just to teach camera use.

Use to created artwork–>apexhsart.blogspot.com/2013/02/interactive-self-portrait-with-cartoon.html

Use to teach Photography–>apexhsart.blogspot.com/2010/11/forced-perspective.html

We have Wacom drawing tablets in the Computer Lab and also in each classroom.

Since the making of the video, we added a class set of iPads, on which we use Sketchbook Pro and are starting to explore 123D Sculpt, a 3D software app.

iPads in the classroom–>apexhsart.blogspot.com/search/label/ipad

Also, all my students maintain blogs where they post all their work.

See student blogs–>apexhsart.blogspot.com/p/student-blogs.html

2. How does the school itself react to your use of Facebook and Twitter in the classroom? Does your school have a policy [regarding the use of social media]?

I’m sure they have a policy:) Actually, I have taught several workshops at my school on Twitter and also on Blogger. Several teachers now use Twitter with their classrooms because of the workshops. My principal is very open to allowing the use of social networks as long as it is used correctly.

3. Where do you get the ideas you use for your projects/lessons?

I steal a lot of them I look at what other people are using as a medium or how the are handling an element. The rest of my ideas come from me looking at things and asking myself, how could I make that into a project? How could I use that material differently? What can I do with birdseed besides feed birds? Stuff like that.

4. You tend to do a lot of collaborative artwork (students working with each other, working with other schools). Have you found this more successful than having students working independently?

I think collaboration adds another dimension to a project. Not only do you need to deal with the requirements of a project but you need to learn to work with others to deal with the requirements of the project. Working with people can be difficult but at the same time, bouncing ideas off another person can make a project twice as good as if it were done alone.

Working with other schools adds even more dimensions as you are now dealing with communication and cultural issues you may not have encountered before.

5. Is art a requirement or elective in your school?

It is an elective, but it is encouraged. When the school address rising 9th graders they always talk about how colleges like to see some form of the arts (be it visual music, drama..) on a transcript.

6. What other non-traditional tools do your students use?

One of my goals is to do a better job of seamlessly merging the traditional and the non-traditional. This can be a medium or it can be physical tools or it can be “traditions” themselves.

For example, In many art classes I see a gap between the teaching of technology and the traditional art class. I’ll use my own school as an example. I was hired primarily because of my Photoshop background. They wanted to start a computer Art class. So traditionally, you have your Computer Art class where Photoshop is taught and then your Visual Art classes where traditional media is taught. That seems silly to me. Every visual art class should include Photoshop.

Now take that a step further. For visual arts classes that do teach Photoshop it is taught as a unit. i.e. This week we are completing our unit in clay and next week we will start our unit on Photoshop. Why not teach them together? I’ve seem ceramic lessons where the teacher takes the class to the lab to design their ceramic pieces in Adobe Illustrator. Then they take those designs back to the ceramic room to use as a reference. Integration is better.

Thx to Ian and Dr. Gates’ students. -cr

Further in the article, Jessica R. Metcalfe, a Turtle Mountain Chippewa and Doctor of Native American Studies at Arizona State University is quoted as saying, “The issue now is not only who gets to represent Native Americans, but also who gets to profit.”

This is certainly not the first time this has happened, nor are Native Americans alone in their complaints about others appropriating their culture. The history of art as well as our everyday lives are filled with examples of cultural appropriation. I picked up the ‘tribal spirit’ dream catcher shown below at a local gas station convenience store. It happened to be “made in China.”

This practice is also common in art classrooms across the U.S. (I can’t say for certain how common the practice is in schools elsewhere). While I know that many art teachers will argue that teaching cultural appropriation is acceptable practice in the classroom (if for no other reason than ‘everyone does it’), my question is should both sides of this issue be a part of the learning experience for students? Should students learn that some groups are offended when others ‘steal’ their cultural imagery?

A photo set dedicated to looking at art: (view slide show instead)

The viewer completes the work of art. • Marcel Duchamp

For an interesting dialogue on the value of repeated and prolonged looking at works of art, read James Elkins’ 2010 Essay on “How long does it take to look at a painting?” along with the follow-up comments from readers.

It wasn’t simply a matter of adding new content to the site.  The design of the old site was built on Flash elements and predated the rise of social media and mobile technology.  Thus, it wasn’t responsive to newer platforms or media.  I knew it was time for a change.

So, with the help of Wes Wilson who did the heavy lifting, a ‘new and improved’ Art Junction is now live and open to visitors.   There are two major changes worth noting:

First, the new site consolidates selected materials from the ‘old’ Art Junction site along with materials I formerly stored on my personal website. Most of these items are now available as PDFs for easy downloading.  The new site also includes links and feeds to my various social media activities.

Secondly, I’ve retired the title of my old blog “The Art Teacher’s Guide to the Internet” and now simply use “Art Junction” as the name for this blog.   The archives of postings from the old blog are still accessible through the new site, its just the name “The Art Teacher’s Guide. . .” will no longer be used.

While the look of Art Junction has changed, its location remains the same.  It lies at the ‘crossroads’ of art, technology and pedagogy.  It’s here where all of my professional activities come together online.

Hope you like what we’ve ‘done to the place.’  I welcome your comments.

Craig

Got up this morning and went through my usual routine of reading the local newspaper and then skimming my RSS feeds and Twitter stream. After coming across several reminders that today is Earth Day, I decided to join in and post an acknowledgement of the annual event here. But, what?

What could I contribute that hasn’t been seen or said about Earth Day already, a hundred times over? There is always the old standby image of earth taken from space. Add an appropriate quote like “There is one outstanding important fact regarding spaceship earth, and that is that no instruction book came with it” from Buckminster Fuller, save the file, post it to the blog and I can go about my business for the day.

But, been there, done that. Besides, the image of earth from space doesn’t say anything about what’s actually happening on the ground. With still lingering images of the devastating impact of the BP Deepwater Horizon oil rig blowout on Gulf coast wildlife running through my head, I searched for a realistic image that might foster more reflective, sustainable action.

Perhaps the following image of a poster I collected from an Earth Day event in the 70s and have kept all these years would do the trick? While compelling, the image doesn’t speak to all the positive efforts to promote a more sustainable future that have grown out of Earth Day events over the years. Anyways, it just doesn’t feel right this Sunday morning: too over the top.

After rummaging further through my hard drive, and just as I was about ready to give up on this idea, I came across the following image that promotes a caring and responsible approach to the earth. I decided this one would best convey my message.

But, as I worked all this out on the screen something other than promoting the message that we need to “care for the earth” surfaced. The hidden message that I uncovered over the course of writing this blog entry has to do with the failure and the power of images. We need to acknowledge that any one image can’t tell the whole story of Earth Day, which has a long and rich history of encouraging sustainability and stewardship of the environment. More importantly, we need to recognize that some of the images we encounter through media channels have been constructed to portray certain myths intended to deflect our attention from more accurate pictures of what’s being done to the earth. As art educators we have a responsibility to teach our students how images can be manipulated in this way.

Geez, is it the afternoon already? I better post this before Earth Day is over.

Peek into a K-4 Choice Art Room from Anne Bedrick on Vimeo.

Next, Loudoun County Public Schools Television (VA) produced this video that shows several of their county art teachers in action:

Art Classroom Snapshot- A quick walk-through from LCPS-TV on Vimeo.

Lastly, this video highlights one of the Phillip Collection’s educational initiatives that promotes Teaching through the Prism of Arts Integration. Enjoy.

I’m back in New York this week for the 2012 NAEA conference. After checking in to my hotel yesterday, I made a beeline over to MoMA to see the Cindy Sherman retrospective and to wander once again through the museum’s galleries.

Whenever I visit MoMA, I always make a point to stop by and see ‘Christina’s World’ by Andrew Wyeth. I’ve written about my first encounter with this painting here. As a 15-year-old on a school field trip to NYC, I saw this painting for the first time, and fell in love with it. Since then I have revisited this painting countless times over the years. Actually, I must admit, stopping by to see Christina at the MoMA has been a part of every trip I’ve ever taken to New York over the years.

This time though the painting wasn’t hung in it’s usual spot. I experienced a moment of panic. I thought perhaps the work was on loan or temporarily taken away for cleaning. I asked a lady at a nearby information desk if the painting had been moved and she said “Yes, let me find it for you.” She pulled out a notebook that lists the location of all the works in the galleries, skimmed its pages, and said “It’s up on the next floor.” I breathed a sign of relief as she gave me directions to it’s new location.

I made my way up the escalator, down a hall, and there was Christina. As I stood there admiring her once again, I felt a rush of emotion come over me. I realized at that moment that I’ve had a lifetime relationship with this painting. Though all the ups and downs I’ve experienced over the years, this painting has been one of the constants in my professional life.

As I stood there, several people walked by and paused for a moment in front of the painting before continuing on. I wanted to stop one of them and share what I knew about Christina and how I come back to the museum over and over again to see her. But, I thought “no, they wouldn’t understand.” So, I just stood there a while longer, before finally saying goodbye.

I’m curious if others have similar stories to share about particular works of art that resonate with them?