Tag Archives: art

On Oct 24^th, 2015, I visited the Vancouver Art Gallery with a group of teachers during Pro-D programs. Gallery tour presents the exhibition:  the Gund Collection. The main goals of the tour are to consider historical and contemporary artistic traditions and disciplines and examine artists’ approaches to their art in terms of ideas, materials, techniques and inspiration.

This exhibition features a group of historical and contemporary Northwest Coast First Nations art objects, including magnificent nineteenth-century masks, feast bowls, argillite carvings and other objects from across the region. It comprises some nineteen historical works by Haida and other First National artists, as well as important contemporary works: poles by Ken Mowatt and Norman Tait, drawings by Bill Reid and a collection of extraordinary mask works by Robert Davidson. The Gund Collection tells a story of art in their regions.

Robert Davidson is one of Canada’s most important contemporary artists and a leading figure in the renaissance of Haida culture. Born in Hydaburg, Alaska, in 1946, Davidson spent his early years in the Haida community of Old Massett and learned to carve from his father and grandfather who were accomplished Haida carvers. While retaining precise technical traditions of Haida art and the legacy of Haida stories, Davidson has also established a distinct personal style, pushing formline design beyond traditional limits, combining elements in a manner that is at once deeply traditional and very contemporary.

In a major exhibition in 2004, Robert wrote: “My passion is reconnecting with my ancestors’ knowledge. The philosophy is what bred the art, and now the art has become the catalyst for us to explore the philosophy. I feel that, for Haida people, it’s the art that has helped us to reclaim our place—to reclaim our beliefs, mythology and spirituality. Other facets we’re working on are our language and our songs, our dances, our Haida names. What’s exciting for me is to express what the art is all about from my experience…I want the art to be recognized as a high art form. I feel it is up to the artists to bring it into that arena, to challenge the art world’s blinders of ‘curio’ that still define how our art is seen” (Duffek, 2004).

A great artist is able to appreciate his/her root culture and know how to bring their traditional elements back into modern life. Therefore, Robert constantly challenges himself to represent Haida art in different ways. His works builds on both the ancestral art that often incorporates animal figures in totem poles and masks and contemporary, abstract shapes.

Encouraging students to bring their traditional elements into the process of art making is also a part of art education. Making art, encountering art and using art is crucial in understanding how we learn to make sense of the changing world around us. Through art, we could find where we belong. This experience builds the bridge over communities, schools and social groups, links us to cultures across space and time and shapes our cultural identity. Art making is also a process that shapes the way we think, our relationships with others, and how our ideas become action that can make a difference (Sullian, 2011). As Robert wrote in 1993: “Our art has helped us as a people to reconnect with our cultural past, helped us in regaining our own identity, giving us strength to reclaim our place in the world.”

Traditional craft skills, such as caving, weaving, forging and soldering, are in danger of being lost as demand for them falls in the digital age. Robert Davidson, as one of Canada’s most respected craftsmen, was surrounded by fine carving from an early age from both his father and grandfather. He has carried on the family artistic tradition since he was 13 years old. Those skills still hold meaning for us today. They are valuable for our students to learn in our contemporary art class.

When using traditional skills, we literally grasp nature, as Robert used alder, horse hair, shells, stones and feather in his collection. Natural materials electrify our sense of touch and smell, and direct us to contact with nature like no other material pursuit. Furthermore, traditional skills could stretch our creativity and reveal our inner craftsperson. Practicing these skills sharpens the mind and taps our body’s kinesthetic sense. Through mastering traditional skills, our students could have another set of resources to rely on in the wildneress as our natural environment has not changed all that much. So as acquiring skills, students also could gain insight from nature and environmental awareness.

That reminds me of my observation in one art class with 6 students and another film class with 32 students during my school visit, which made me realize the impacts of media education and the need of promoting traditional art with hands-on experiences. Youth already spend so much time on media and electronic equipment. I think we should encourage them to take more courses on working with body, as fine art, drama, dance etc, and highlight the value of traditional handcrafts to our students.

Reference

• Hussain A. (2012). Editor’s Note: Robert Davidson, Haida Artist. Retrieved from: http://jaar.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2012/10/10/jaarel.lfs085.extract
• Quinn T., Ploof J. and Hochtritt L. (2012). Art and social justice education: Culture as commons. Published by Routledge

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” Good media education is not inoculation against feared effects but preparation in using and understanding how media operate, producing meaning, and help construct realities.” (Darts D. 2007)

Educators’  responsibility is not to shield students from the danger of negatives that media brings, but to promote their critical thinking and realization about where media comes from and what the purpose of it is. Be aware that media shapes our thought, behavior and belief.  By participating in media activities, viewers become part of art creation and have great influence on forming other people’s thoughts. Therefore, media is a tool for us to express, to generate and to reflect. “Deconstructing and reproducing the technical and aesthetic ‘grammars’ that make up the language of multimodal media products can help young people important expressive and communicative skills and can facilitate understandings about how the media arts to frame and filter the world while seeming to be a clear window.”

How can we facilitate students to appreciate both “high” and “low” art and to understand both forms of art not just as products but as representations of different life experiences?

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Emily Jacir is a Palestinian American artist whose work addresses the plight of the Palestinian people through universal themes of home and community. Her artwork reveals to viewers the universal plight of human beings who suffer the loss of home and homeland. In which, I found an echo with her feeling about loss and confusion in cultural identity.

When I am thinking about community, I expect it is a place for everyone to grow by supporting each other. I know Vancouver already has done a great job on building multicultural community by facilitating colorful multicultural programs. However, let’s look at another side of Vancouver: the cost of living is increasingly out of reach for low-wage workers who are mostly new immigrants.

Vancouver is a place having special privileges for people who have potential networking connections for local people. Discrimination in employment still exists. In my first job, I didn’t get the same pay as other local people. But with the same qualifications, I am competent for a professional job in my homeland. Hence that makes me rethink citizenship as concept.

Painted in 2012 by J. Chen. As immigrants, we are like no-root dandelions flying around to find right places to plant ourselves.

Paula Nicho Cumez also speaks from the heart about immigrant rights in her Crossing Borders. Over the boarders, some people triumph, and some people fail. That’s how things go when someone leaves their place of born. Even I wasn’t forced to leave my country to Canada, I have strong feeling about people who leave their cherished home and migrate in order to survive.

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“Give the pupils something to do, not something to learn; and the doing is of such a nature as to demand thinking; learning naturally results.”          ― John Dewey

More thinking on the Dewey’s pedagogy of art as experience, it starts make more sense to me. Art plays a non-negligible role of activating a shift “in the one who experiences at the moment of experiencing, with the result that one is made different or becomes other than was prior to participation” (Grosz, 2011; . O’Donoghue, 2012) In Lee Mingwei’s work, the guests, who have been invited to dine with him, were sharing their stories of gratitude, forgiveness, and understanding with him in public setting with the minimalist table design. This simple yet multi-sensorial design of installation alludes to the spatiality and sensuality as an aesthetic faculty and the place where participants and artist to meet to exchange their experience of life and be changed by that.

Such experience reminds me of one of my art teaching with the primary elementary school students.  When I was try to deliver a lesson on expressing hope through art in suffering, I met unexpected outcomes. Despite being a similar age, the students could not relate to artwork done by the children from the concentration camps. Learning from this experience, I redesigned the lesson plan. To inspire their experience of art, firstly I needed to enrich their experience of hardships and stimulate their imagination about what oppressed lives would be like. I set up a big tent in the classroom to show poor living conditions and cover all the windows to create a dark and miserable atmosphere.  We watched videos about suffering kids in Syria, drank bitter tea, and meditated on the Psalm about suffering and salvation. These activities and experiences gave them deeper understanding about suffering. Afterwords, I asked them to make art on kites which would fly high above all the hardships symbolized as hope in their lives.

This art class was way more successful than the one without experiencing suffering, which had great impact on them from now on. They would remember how art formed their way of looking into the world and themselves through experiences.

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In traditional Art history, female artists haven’t had much chance to practice art or to acquire art education, as male artists tended to dominate the traditional art world. The bias on female is still exist nowadays.

According to feminist aesthetics, approaches to art by women are fundamentally different than those by men in a way that gender-biased roles for women such as knitting and quilting are stressed. Despite this gender bias, routinely practicing those activities can actually enrich women’s life in family as well as enhancing their crafting skills. Acquiring these skills therefore does not precisely infer that the inner potential of men and women are inherently and inevitably different. These approaches partially reflect social and gender bias and different expectations on each gender.

Different social expectations are implied by the difference of the life of Pablo Picasso and that of Emily Carr who were born at almost the same period. However, Emily obviously had more struggles in her life as an unmarried women and had less fame. Being a single lady was not easy at Emily’s time, yet Picasso’s wild life was relatively uncontentious. Due to absence of social and family pressure, men tend to succeed easily.

As Art educators, we should start to question many of the assumptions and beliefs that had taken for granted, and to design a gender-equal art curriculum for students.

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