Earlier, I mentioned that throughout my career, I have raised money for my work primarily through private donations. In order to complete The Dinner Party, I created Through the Flower, a small, nonprofit arts organization whose mission is to ensure that women’s achievements become a permanent part of our cultural history. The organization provided a fiscal structure for contributions and administrative support for my collaborative projects; it also handled the exhibition tours of the Birth Project and the Holocaust Project as well as The Dinner Party.
During the years The Dinner Party was traveling, the organization received many testaments from teachers who had based classroom activities on the piece. Most of these were mini “dinner parties” in which students created place settings for women of their choice. In 1996, I visited one such enterprise in an inner-city school that coincided with the exhibition Sexual Politics: Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party in Feminist Art History at the UCLA Armand Hammer Museum. The only reason I went was that one of the teachers was a cousin of Henry Hopkins, the museum’s director.
The boys and girls in the grade school class selected women to research and then made plates and runners for each one. At the end of the year, their creations were exhibited on open, triangular tables. During the opening of the show, the children read reports on their chosen woman and then discussed the ways in which they had represented them. I still remember one proud Hispanic boy explaining his tribute to Frida Kahlo. It was touching, especially hearing the teacher talk about how engaged the children had become and how much they had learned. But even though this undertaking was better than most, I really hadn’t paid much heed to such activities for reasons that will become clear.
While we were still at Vanderbilt, I received a copy of an upcoming article in a K–12 art education journal that was presumably a tribute to me and The Dinner Party. Although I understood that the teacher had good intentions, her project unnerved me. She had encouraged her students to create autobiographical plates, which was a fine assignment, but had nothing to do with The Dinner Party. Actually, such a project could be considered antithetical to my goals in that The Dinner Party is meant to teach women’s history through art and to build awareness of the many significant women who are worthy of study and honor. Equally important is the installation’s aim at helping girls—who are sometimes prone to being overly self-preoccupied—move beyond the personal in order to see themselves within the context of women’s rich heritage.
By that time, plans were well under way for The Dinner Party’s permanent housing at the Brooklyn Museum. Reading the article convinced me that there should be some guidelines for teachers who wished to incorporate the piece into their art classes. Like many university-trained artists, I had always looked down on art education departments, which helps to explain my previous lack of interest in the many school “dinner parties.” During our Vanderbilt tenure, Donald and I were privy to several intense dinner conversations at Braeburn during which Constance Gee held forth about her educational theories, the most unexpected of which had to do with her conviction that K–12 art programs should not focus exclusively on making art. This was news to me; like many people, I had assumed that art in the schools should be hands-on, perhaps because I’d never been exposed to any other approach.
Thinking back on my own education, I realized that my public school art classes had provided a place for me to ply the skills that I was developing at the Art Institute Junior School. However, as Constance pointed out, most children are not going to become professional artists. She believed that K–12 art programs should therefore introduce students to a broad range of ways to relate to art, which struck a chord with me. In this book, I have discussed the importance of building a larger constituency for art, but it had never occurred to me that art education might help to achieve this goal.
I began to think about ways that K–12 art programs could expand support for visual art as well as how to provide teachers with materials about Dinner Party school activities beyond mimicking the place settings. What I am describing is the process by which I came to a new perspective on art education along with the idea of establishing a Dinner Party curriculum. Although Through the Flower had offered a variety of public programs over the years, these were always secondary to the exhibitions that had been supported and toured by the organization. But this phase was over and the board was increasingly focused on educational programming, which is why I asked Constance to become a member. She took the lead in creating a K–12 curriculum that is introducing generations of young people to The Dinner Party and the largely unknown heritage that it represents.
Some readers might wonder why I was willing to spend even more time on a piece that I had created so long ago. Like most artists, I prefer to put finished work behind me and move on to new challenges. But The Dinner Party has always been distinct. My initial aim involved permanent housing, which took far longer to achieve than I had ever anticipated and tied me to the work for a protracted period of time. But more important is the historic information that the piece embodies—information that empowered me, those who worked on it, and the tens of thousands of viewers who saw it. Even today, people from all over the world visit The Dinner Party and I was recently told that the Queen of Norway considers it her favorite work of art.
I have always felt an obligation to the largely unknown information that I pieced together, which is one reason that I spent so much time re-researching the 1,038 women on The Dinner Party table and the Heritage Floor for the 2007 book, published in conjunction with The Dinner Party’s permanent housing. My initial research had been done before the advent of computers and the Internet, and I wanted the data to be as accurate as possible. Plus, when I finally understood the implications of so many teachers using the concept of The Dinner Party in their classrooms—sometimes well and sometimes egregiously—I took it upon myself to provide them with appropriate materials. With Constance as my guide, I ventured into the unknown territory (to me) of K–12 art education and curriculum development.
In the summer of 2006, she organized an initial meeting with a small team of people including two curriculum writers, a high school art teacher, and a district supervisor from Virginia Beach (which Constance referred to as “Vagina Beach,” which is pretty funny considering what subsequently happened). The initial idea was that they would pilot the curriculum they developed in their district. Though they made a good start, some issues arose rather quickly, in particular, concerns about the supposed sexual content of The Dinner Party. One of the curriculum writers became so agitated about the imagery of the plates that she quit (which was what I meant about the irony of “Vagina Beach”).
I wasn’t happy that my complex visual forms were interpreted in such a simplistic manner and wrote a stern e-mail explaining that it was essential to place the (sometimes) vaginal imagery of the plates into the context of the overall installation. Given some of the sexual content of our mass media, not to mention the ubiquity of computer porn, it seemed ridiculous to get so riled up about a work of art, especially one created in the 1970s.
Another issue that came up was whether it was possible to teach The Dinner Party to students below the high school level. Some members of the group didn’t think so while others argued that there were already teachers in elementary and middle schools who were incorporating it into their classrooms; it would be foolish if the curriculum didn’t provide for them as well.
And then there was money. Several participants in that first group had unrealistic ideas about what they should be paid. It was not a matter of what they were worth but, rather, what Through the Flower could afford. As Through the Flower has a minimal budget, whatever funds were needed for this project would have to be raised by the organization. While we were still trying to resolve these issues, Marilyn Stewart, a renowned curriculum writer and a pivotal member of the team, announced that she would have to withdraw from the project because of a conflicting publishing contract. In one of those strange (and wonderful) twists that sometimes happen in life, Constance convinced her to stay involved and in fact to spearhead the development of a curriculum that was even more ambitious than we had originally imagined.
As it turned out, a number of Marilyn’s colleagues in the Kutztown University art education department were already using The Dinner Party in both their classes and their published works. In fact, Peg Speirs, one of the professors, had written her dissertation on The Dinner Party. Fortunately, this team was willing to volunteer—in part because they believed that the enterprise would benefit their own research. Be that as it may, it is such generosity of spirit that has fueled many of my projects and The Dinner Party Curriculum Project turned out to be no exception.
In October 2006, I was to attend a meeting at Marilyn’s house near Kutztown University, in eastern Pennsylvania. In preparation for the gathering, Marilyn (whom I had not yet met) sent me two books, Rethinking Curriculum in Art, written by her (with Sydney Walker)89 and Gender Matters in Art Education90 by Martin Rosenberg and Frances Thurber. To say that I was blown away by these publications would be greatly underestimating my reaction. While studio art programs were continuing to stress an outdated modernist agenda, K–12 art education seemed to have undergone a revolution.
In contrast to the paltry amount of discourse on university studio art education, K–12 educators have long been involved in a comprehensive rethinking of art curriculum. Marilyn’s book is an outstanding example of this effort, and her content-based approach to art mirrors my own. This is reflected in the worksheets in the back of her book, intended for teachers in planning their units of study, which are structured around a number of key principles. Early on, I filled out one of the worksheets and quickly discovered that my goals with The Dinner Party could be easily transposed into this intellectual framework. I have listed the different principles along with my responses (in italics) below in order to demonstrate the near-perfect fit between my work and Marilyn’s approach. My answers are intended to promote deep study (one of the tenets of Marilyn’s book) of The Dinner Party:
1. Enduring Idea:
The importance of women’s history
2. Rationale:
To counter the idea (both explicit and implicit in education) that only men have a history worthy of study
3. Key Concepts:
a. Women have a significant history
b. Women have made unique contributions that need to be integrated into mainstream culture
4. Key Concepts about Art that will be addressed:
Contrast images of women in The Dinner Party with male representations in order to introduce students to the concept of the male gaze
5. Essential Questions:
a. Why did I create The Dinner Party?
b. How did I do it?
c. How do the images translate historic information about each of the women represented?
6.Unit objectives:
a. Learn about women’s history
b. Develop an appreciation of all that is involved in the process of making art
7. Evidence:
After studying The Dinner Party, students will create their own projects which will involve:
a. research
b. written texts or art about the women researched
c. developing skills to accomplish either written or visual projects
The notion of “Enduring Ideas” spoke to me because I have always focused on subjects that have global significance, from women’s history to the Holocaust in a contemporary context. In Marilyn’s view, “such ideas have educational import because they link academic subject matter with life-focused issues,”91 which is exactly what I have promoted through my pedagogy. Additionally, her book addresses the role of the teacher, which the authors insist: “must shift from that of one who dictates information to one who is a fellow inquirer…this shift has been characterized…as a shift from the teacher as ‘sage on the stage’ to ‘guide on the side.’ ”92 In other words, a facilitator, which is precisely what I’ve practiced in the classroom and been advocating in this manuscript.
In Gender Matters in Art Education, Rosenberg and Thurber stress the importance of gender in the classroom, asking: “What does gender have to do with education or art in general and art education in particular? Reflect on your own school experiences.…Did you learn as much about women’s contributions to history and society as men’s?…Did you learn about women artists?…Were images of their…work displayed on your classroom walls?…For most of us, the answer to all of these questions would be a resounding no.…Since the art classroom places a special emphasis on individual expression…it can either contribute to inequality or provide a potent site for promoting gender equity.”93
Reading these two books, it became obvious that many of the changes I have been recommending were already happening, at least among a number of K–12 art education curriculum writers. They were advocating a more content-based, inclusive curriculum, one that made room for women, artists of color, gays and lesbians, and other marginalized groups. There was also an emphasis on “discipline-based art education” (DBAE), which is a comprehensive approach to learning in the arts, developed primarily for K–12 but also for adult education, lifelong learning, and cultural institutions.
DBAE was developed and formalized in the early 1980s by the Getty Center for Arts Education (later known as the Getty Education Institute). Its intention was to broaden the content and strengthen the requirements of arts education within the school system and was a reaction to the fact that art in the schools was traditionally taught exclusively through studio activities. Instead, DBAE promoted a more expansive curriculum that consisted of four parts: art history and culture, criticism, aesthetics, and art production. Unfortunately, in the late 1990s, the Getty Trust closed its center for art education and shifted its priorities.
I learned about the Getty initiative only while researching this chapter. Even though I never discussed that endeavor with either Marilyn or Constance, in retrospect, I can see that their respective positions reflected many of the Getty-supported ideas. And my insistence that there are a variety of ways to be involved in art (which would be reflected in The Dinner Party Curriculum) was also consistent with the Getty thesis.
The meeting at Marilyn’s house was lively and enlightening. The group had assembled a variety of curriculum materials for me to review. Many of them had been put out by museums and were slickly packaged. In contrast, one of the attending high school teachers had brought her own curriculum packet—a three-ring binder that was bursting at the seams. Apparently, many teachers prefer to assemble their own materials with selections from various publications and bits and pieces from other sources. This led me to the notion that our curriculum should not be prescriptive, but rather a flexible framework on which teachers could build. After all, perceptions of The Dinner Party have changed dramatically over the course of thirty years. Because I imagine that this will continue to happen, I wanted the curriculum to be able to evolve accordingly.
In the summer of 2007, the Kutztown team organized the first of what became an annual Dinner Party Institute. Fifty teachers from around the country, working at all levels of education, attended (thereby demonstrating the importance of creating a curriculum that could be used by different grade levels). The curriculum team felt strongly that our materials should be developed in the same collaborative spirit that had produced the piece (a view that I strongly supported) so teachers would be involved from the start.
I am not going to discuss the development of the curriculum in any detail. For those who are interested, it is available online at: http://judychicago.arted.psu.edu and http://www.thedinnerpartyinstitute.com/. The point is that I learned a lot about the rigorous discourse on curriculum development that has occurred among K–12 art educators for many years. It was thrilling to benefit from their extensive experience.
In the spring of 2009, Through the Flower held an official launch of The Dinner Party Curriculum at the New Mexico state capitol building in Santa Fe. Our original thought had been to produce a printed edition but for several reasons we changed course. In order to create a nonprescriptive curriculum, it would be better to have a more flexible format. Also, teachers tend to be environmentally sensitive and many of them don’t want to use printed books because of the number of trees that are destroyed in the process. And printed copies are expensive to produce. Given Through the Flower’s limited resources, it made more sense to produce downloadable materials that would allow teachers to pick and choose from what became a complex curriculum. Needless to say, I had to revise my original opinion about online education and whether my pedagogy could be translated into this new mode, which meant eating a lot of crow with the Penn State art educator Karen Keifer-Boyd. Live and learn. Some months after the launch, the curriculum team and I did a session at the annual conference of the National Art Education Association (NAEA), which now cosponsors The Dinner Party Institute. One of the teachers came up to me afterward to express her appreciation, especially for the fact that I had worked with art educators to create the curriculum, saying plaintively, “I wish that more artists would do this.”
I found her comment extremely intriguing. I’ve already discussed the importance of making art more accessible; working with art educators showed me that another way to broaden the audience for art (and with that, the potential support base for artists) might be for more artists to engage with them. I’m not talking about artists-in-the-schools programs, which are ubiquitous and perpetuate the idea that art education consists only of studio-based activities.
I’m suggesting a more comprehensive approach, wherein artists work with art educators to develop curricula that can teach children how important art can be. Although The Dinner Party Curriculum grew out of a single work of art, it exemplifies how art can educate, inspire, and empower students in all areas of their lives. And it can be used by teachers in subjects besides art. In fact, most of the school groups that visit The Dinner Party are not art classes (funding cuts for the arts means they cannot afford the transportation).
In 2009 I did another presentation, this time for the New Mexico branch of the NAEA. After my talk, a member of the audience stood up and addressed the group, saying: “Look at us; most of us are women. In fact, most art teachers are women. But most of us don’t teach about women. Why is that?” This question should be raised more frequently in order to recognize women’s complicity in perpetuating the lack of recognition of female achievement. As bell hooks has pointed out many times, all of us are raised in a male-centered society. It is easy to absorb its values and conclude that what women do is not significant. This is precisely the bias that The Dinner Party challenges. Our curriculum provides the materials with which teachers can become empowered to change this attitude in themselves and their students.
Before long, teachers from all over the world were downloading the curriculum. Through the Flower then began to receive requests for training sessions from teachers who wanted instruction on how to implement the curriculum in their classrooms. Because our small nonprofit organization was unequipped to handle these requests, we decided to partner with two institutions, Kutztown University and Penn State. As part of my Art Education Archive, Penn State established permanent online access to The Dinner Party Curriculum. And each summer, Kutztown now hosts an annual summer Dinner Party Institute, which provides teacher education based on the curriculum—a job they are far more qualified for than Through the Flower could ever be.
From the beginning, I participated in The Dinner Party Institute by meeting the attendees for one day at the Brooklyn Museum so we could explore the piece together and discuss its implications for K–12 education. Although these sessions are enjoyable, my one frustration is with the difficulty of weaning teachers from their insistence that art education should only involve hands-on artmaking activities. As I discovered, there is a distinction between curriculum writers (who often teach art education in universities) and the art teachers themselves.
Like university studio art professors, many art teachers start out as artists but soon realize that they cannot support themselves through their studio practice. Perhaps the classroom studio activities provide the teachers with some connection to art production; this could explain why so many of them are resistant to the broader approach to teaching art advocated by the Getty, curriculum writers like Marilyn Stewart, and The Dinner Party Curriculum.
In our curriculum, I had hoped to inspire K–12 teachers to think about teaching art in a new way, one that acknowledges that even though most students won’t become artists, there are other modes of involvement. For instance, I sometimes speak about an imaginary student in a high school art history class who learns that even though Elisabeth Vigée-LeBrun created a larger body of art than any woman artist who preceded her, her work had never been catalogued. At that moment, the student has an epiphany, realizing that s/he can have a career in the arts by becoming an art historian specializing in Vigée-LeBrun, thereby protecting the artist’s legacy and making a contribution to art while carving out a paying career. Unfortunately, not enough teachers have paid attention to this idea. (Equally frustrating are the teachers who insist on inventing their own Dinner Party curriculum without reference to ours, which took over two years and many minds to create.)
In 2012, at The Dinner Party Institute’s annual trip to the Brooklyn Museum, I recounted the story about the New Mexico teacher who had confronted her colleagues about why they didn’t teach their students about women artists. In response, one fellow said that he worked with two women whose curriculum included even fewer women than his (the workshop also stimulated him to include even more), adding that he was going to confront them when he returned home. Of course, there are many factors that prevent educators from devoting time to teaching about women.
Habit is a powerful motivator; imagine if a law were passed mandating that equal time be devoted in all classes (not just women’s studies) to women’s activities. As the authors of Still Failing at Fairness suggest, “Few things stir up more controversy than the content of school curriculum”94 because it strikes at the core of what is considered significant. Additionally, this would require educators to overhaul their lectures and lesson plans; it is far easier to stick with the status quo even if it means perpetuating one-sided information.
And then there is social resistance. In the inner-city school that I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, several of the students reported that their parents had asked why they were only focusing on women that year. One of the children replied, “Usually we study men so it’s only right,” which seemed like a perfect answer. I wish it were that easy to convince mainstream culture of this.
One cannot discount downright ignorance as another factor, which is disappointing because there is so much information now available. I recently read How to Be a Woman by Caitlin Moran, a lively young British feminist. In one chapter, she writes: “Even the most ardent feminist historian, male or female…can’t conceal that women have basically done fuck-all for the last 100,000 years.…We have no Mozart; no Einstein; no Galileo; no Gandhi. No Beatles, no Churchill.…It just didn’t happen.”95 Upon encountering this quote, I thought back to my UCLA history professor who so confidently pronounced that women had made no contributions to European intellectual thought. How could it be that after forty-plus years of feminist scholarship, history, and art history, a young feminist is still convinced of such a preposterous (and sexist) idea?
Clearly, change is difficult, but why do such ideas continue to hold sway? In addition to habit, social resistance, and ignorance, I would like to suggest another reason, one that also helps to explain why little or no attention has been paid to the changes in K–12 curriculum by the university studio art community.
Previously, I mentioned that teaching K–12 art classes is not a good career choice if you want to be taken seriously as an artist. I also referenced the low esteem in which art education is held in many art departments. For example, the Vanderbilt faculty was not interested in establishing an art education department even though Constance Gee had found donors to create two endowed chairs. Then there is the abyss between the College Art Association (CAA) and Foundations in Art: Theory and Education (FATE), a national organization that is trying to improve undergraduate foundational art courses in studio art and art history. Even though FATE has existed for thirty years, in my research for this book I never found any references to it in the (sparse) literature on studio art education. And while some art educators attend CAA conferences, no studio people ever go to the NAEA conferences.
I hate to state the obvious, but most art educators are women and, as bell hooks suggested, what women do is not only considered unimportant, it is often disregarded. I believe that this helps to explain the fact that the radical changes in art education might have happened on another planet as far as university studio art is concerned. One of the hallmarks of my work is that I have been able to see the value in marginalized activities like china-painting and needlework. The aesthetic potential of these techniques had not been appreciated because perceptions had been filtered through the lens of gender, which elevated what men did and ignored women’s work, especially when it was produced with “women’s” techniques.
In The Dinner Party, the Birth Project, and Resolutions: A Stitch in Time, I demonstrated that china-painting can transform subject matter just as well as oil paint and that thread can be like a brushstroke. Although there was considerable opposition initially, my work helped to create a new climate in contemporary art; it is now commonplace to see all sorts of previously taboo techniques being employed by both male and female artists. Just as I was able to help pave the way to greater freedom in terms of media, I hope that I will be able to clarify what K–12 art educators have to offer to university studio art programs.
I’ve learned over the course of my recent teaching projects that there’s a deep hunger among students to learn how to find and express personal content. They also need to be able to transform content into visual form, which means skill training, regardless of the chosen medium. Lastly, I have learned from the response to both my work and my teaching projects that there is a large audience for art that deals with real issues in an accessible way.
As I have tried to clarify, my approach is markedly different from most present-day studio art programs, which have almost no agreed-upon curriculum. In contrast, K–12 art educators have been grappling with curriculum issues for years, writing curriculum for others to use, integrating a sensitivity to gender and diversity, and promoting a content-based and broad approach to the arts. Even if there is some degree of resistance, still, the efforts they are making have a lot to offer.
Of course, it is important to acknowledge that teaching art to children is different from training artists or providing a substantive art education to undergraduates. The one commonality is that most students will not become practicing artists, a fact that needs to be addressed in formulating a more sensible form of art education at all levels. At the same time, I cannot help but wonder why so few qualified curriculum writers have turned their attention to the problems in university studio art programs. Perhaps they are deterred by the inhospitable climate—as exemplified by the situation at Vanderbilt—or by the scorn toward art education generally. All the more reason for me to try and provide a bridge between these two worlds.
Let’s begin with some of the peculiar contradictions in studio art programs. Dating back to Walter Gropius and the Bauhaus, there has been a recurring argument that art cannot be taught. All the while, studio art programs have been proliferating. If art cannot be taught, why are so many people trying to teach it? Perhaps it would make more sense to start with the premise that art is being taught in many forms all over the world. The question would then be: what should be taught in the twenty-first century? This is precisely the issue that the book Art School, which I have been citing, presumably addressed.
In an essay, Robert Storr—influential artist, critic, curator, and now dean of the Yale School of Art—took up the state of studio art education, writing that, “the problems…in the United States, as well as in many other countries, issue directly from a long-standing tendency to reassert obsolete philosophical dichotomies (mind-body/intellect-intuition/creation-interpretation/aesthetics-criticality) and impose them on institutions offering differing types in order to pit those institutions against one another or against non-institutional or quasi-institutional forms of teaching and learning.”
Well, at least we agree that art education is suffering from a number of problems, even if I consider his assessment far off the mark and needlessly obtuse. He then puts forth a series of axioms, a selection of which I present here, assuming they constitute his idea of a solution:
Students who go to art schools lack something.
Students go to art schools to get what they lack.
Students don’t always know what they lack.
The purpose of art schools is to provide students with the things they know they lack and ways of finding the things they don’t know they lack.
Schools that do not recognize what students lack should rethink what they are doing.
Schools that do not rethink what they are doing are the enemies of art and the enemies of anti-art. They should close.
All schools are academies.
Any student who goes to art school is an academic artist. [. . .]
Bliss is bliss, just as presentness is grace when grace is present. [. . .]
It is not right to critique popular culture but never go bowling.
It is not right to go bowling and think that you are in touch with America.96
As the head of one of the most important art schools in America, one might assume that Storr would have provided a path toward a relevant, comprehensive, contemporary curriculum for university studio art programs, something that K–12 art educators have been attempting to do in their field for years. Perhaps he felt he was being informative or maybe he was being playfully provocative. Whatever the explanation, he avoided the task of articulating a coherent educational philosophy. In contrast, consider this passage from Stewart and Walker’s introduction to Rethinking Curriculum in Art: “The ideas put forward are in response to more than a decade of school reform efforts in education regarding teaching for understanding, accountability, student relevance, and the information and visual explosion stemming from the continued growth of media and technology.”97
At least their book provides some philosophical framework upon which curriculum development can take place, a framework that is sorely lacking at the university level. What I am suggesting is that significant discourse of the subject of studio art education is long overdue. Because curriculum development is common among K–12 art educators, their methods might provide a model even if their focus is different.
Any restructuring of curriculum needs to build upon their work in terms of gender and diversity, which means fully integrating the artistic achievements of women along with others who have been marginalized by the modernist agenda that emphasizes a linear art history of predominately white men. This integration would affect the composition of studio art faculty as well as what is studied and promoted as important in art history classes. And it would necessarily include women’s history, women’s art, and the history of the feminist art movement because this movement marked the moment when women artists were first able to claim the right to express their own experiences clearly.
There is an urgent need for a radical restructuring of the programs that are now offered, which, frankly, are deficient, dishonest, and lacking in standards. In addition, we need to recognize that being an artist—even a successful one—does not automatically make you a qualified teacher. Of course, there can be significant value in bringing working artists to art schools as there is no substitute for exposure to such role models, something I learned as a student at UCLA when Billy Al Bengston taught there for a year.
However, allowing visiting artists to act like prima donnas (Chris Burden’s 1976 “performance” at Ohio State University comes to mind) instead of people with valuable experiences to share with students is scandalous. Is the purpose of such visits to provide revenue to artists who need money, or is it for educational value? If it is the latter, then schools should put guidelines into place outlining what is expected from a visiting artist.
Moreover, full-time studio art professors should have some grounding in education in order to have the tools to be effective teachers. Here again, art educators could be helpful as part of their job involves training teachers. Along with a wider array of both art and artists, students need to be exposed to a variety of techniques across gender lines so that needlework, for example, takes its place alongside welding and, of course, an expanding number of new media options.
Perhaps the first two years of art school could offer a broad-based arts program until students decide if they want to become artists or prefer to be involved in art in other ways. For them, there might be options including apprenticeships with conservators, framers, art installers, or other professions (or they could just be encouraged to include art as an important aspect of their lives by becoming collectors or regular museum visitors). Upper-division courses could lay the foundation for those art students destined for graduate school, including helping them to find their personal voices.
As for graduate students, they must be better prepared for the realities of the art world. Instead of promoting the false idea that the goal of graduate school is to become an art star (as too many programs do), perhaps it would be more productive to expose students to a greater variety of art practitioners, by studying and meeting a range of artists, including muralists, community-based artists, street and activist artists, as well as other types. Most of these are rarely invited to art schools.
In the same way that Constance and I tried to reintegrate studio art, art history, and art education in the Vanderbilt program in order to provide a more comprehensive approach to art, a reconstructed art program could unite these disciplines so that art history students would learn how art is made, art students would have the opportunity to learn from art educators in terms of broadening their approach to art, and education students would be encouraged to bring the insights of their profession to bear on the other fields, especially how to teach. As I mentioned, instruction for teachers is almost wholly absent in graduate schools, even though many of these students will find employment in university studio art programs.
I’ve already argued that there needs to be a greater focus on content across the arts. As demonstrated, there is a serious disconnect between form and content, not only in studio art programs but also in art history classes. I will never forget a story I heard about a graduate art history class in the 1970s whose students (mostly female, of course) were being exposed to the burgeoning women’s movement at the same time as they were sitting in classes where professors customarily discussed paintings like The Rape of the Sabine Women by Peter Paul Rubens exclusively in terms of brushstrokes. “But isn’t that a rape?” one student whispered to another. The question swirled around the classroom, building in volume until one woman yelled: “That’s a rape; why on earth are you talking about the application of the paint?”
In addition to helping students find their own subject matter, critiques should include discussions about content as part of a more holistic approach to art. The overly harsh and unsupportive critiques that are prevalent today need to be acknowledged for what they are: a misguided attempt to separate out serious students from the rest (if, in fact, that is their intent; I’m still trying to understand the purpose of the brutality that often prevails). Of course, if comprehensive undergraduate art education produces a wider audience for art, there will be room for more artists and no need to drum out those students who aren’t tough enough to withstand the critique system.
Given the evolving nature of contemporary art, any curriculum has to be flexible and adaptable. Certainly, it cannot be the product of one person’s thinking, which is why I offer my suggestions as just that. Rather, there needs to be a wide-ranging collaboration between studio art and art history professors, art educators, and art professionals of all kinds. What I am calling for is the beginning of a serious national—or international—dialogue to radically restructure studio art and art history education. If such a goal seems overly ambitious, I would like to remind the reader that, long ago, I set out all alone to teach women’s history through art. Even though the transformation that I envisioned is not yet complete, still, my work demonstrated that change is possible, especially if people work together for a common purpose.
I have written this book in the hopes that there are many members of the art community who are dissatisfied with the state of university studio art education and who will come together to achieve what bell hooks outlined in Teaching to Transgress: “The classroom, with all its limitations remains a location of possibility. In that field of possibility, we have the opportunity to labor for freedom, to demand of ourselves and our comrades, an openness of mind and heart that allows us to face reality even as we collectively imagine ways to move beyond boundaries, to transgress. This is education as the practice of freedom.”98
If art is to once again become “the practice of freedom” instead of a steady reiteration of old or inconsequential ideas—as too many art schools seem to promote—we have to work together to retrieve art from the twisted paths into which it has gone. It has become mired in marketplace values and trivial pursuits instead of being “the practice of freedom,” which is the highest form of human endeavor. To me, that is what art is all about and, in my opinion, it is worth fighting for.