CFA: School of Visual Arts: Scholarly Works
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Item A plural pedagogy for graphic design history(2022-10-20) Coogan, KristenAs part of the 2022 AIGA National Conference in Seattle, Washington, the DEC will host the SURFACE mini-conference on Thursday, October 20th, 2022. SURFACE will feature peer-reviewed papers, panels, workshops, posters, and other work from design educators, graduate students, and others. SURFACE Both a noun and a verb, this word has two meanings that are deeply connected to design. Surface can be a way to describe or refer to the layered planes of an object, environment, or idea – the skin, the screen, the shell, the boundary, the face, a layer. Creators are well aware of the importance of the surface of/within things, and it often serves as a gatekeeper to deeper ideas. The word surface can also refer to the act of rising up or emerging – an object, statement, or idea floating to the top, being revealed, coming to light. As we navigate the chaos of our current context, and consider the ways design and design education have grown and changed over the last decade, we wonder what comes next? What have we learned? What have we tried? What is already in motion but needs more momentum? Where are we going? What kind of design future do we want to build? What lies beneath the surface, and what is yet to emerge?Item Revisionist history(2022) Coogan, KristenA pandemic. Racial reckoning. Civil unrest. Political uprising. For many of us, the year 2020 motivated self-examination across every spectrum of our consciousness — social, cultural, economic and intellectual. Academia provided space for impact. None of us had ever developed pedagogy overnight — we were building the plane while flying. My impulse to instruct remotely was at first off-base. The students clearly needed time to adjust to the improbability of it all. And so we traded leads; we flattened the pedagogical hierarchy. An egalitarian architecture materialized where students led and I followed. Students felt fragile, we all did, as individuals seeking to normalize mammoth instability. This vulnerability underscored the value of inclusivity, all voices deserved a platform. Was my pedagogy inclusive enough? Was it empathic enough? How did it speak to our social and political context that was under intense scrutiny? Instead of a pedagogy informed by my own lived experiences, a bias especially visible in my Graphic Design History curriculum, I wondered what would inspire students to independently ask the same important questions we are reflecting on in this publication.Item Susan Linn’s distance ventriloquism: play’s therapeutic potential in virtual space(2020-10-30) Amato, FeliceDuring COVID-19, Susan Linn has drawn upon her extensive experience as a therapist and her virtuosic ventriloquism to develop a virtual, screen-based approach to supporting children and families that are sheltering-in-place. She and her puppet, Audrey Duck, provide a crucial social-emotional space for play and make believe, drawing upon the opportunities presented by the relational triangularity possible in ventriloquism between child, practitioner, and puppet. By examining her work, one can gain insights into the nature of ventriloquism, as well as best practices for supporting children experiencing trauma and adversity.Item #designhistory: history in the age of the 24hr news cycle(MIT Press) Coogan, KristenDesign history, well, history in general is under interrogation. Technology is dismantling the historic status quo. The popularity of traditional chronological surveys relying on Euro-centric narratives is plummeting, as more inclusive, plural, and idiosyncratic models accelerate. The 24hr news cycle, social media and post-truth constructs diminishes the viability of an absolutist historical narrative as information comes with unyielding intensity and alacrity. When technology saturates us with media, it throws the historical record and questions of relevance off-balance. How do we define a design history in the age of the 24hr news cycle? We can use the very tools that undermine tradition as vehicles to fortify historical relevance. We can re-index design history to reveal commonalities in context and innovation. Indexing design history according to universal patterns that resulted in innovation creates the framework for understanding how ideas spread. This model transcends time and space: we can look backward, laterally and to the future to understand and predict cultural and visual trends based on prevailing archetypes. The value of reimagining historical narratives through a new system of indexing can both endure change and provide a benchmark for understanding visual and conceptual traditions. We can apply that awareness as we navigate the 24hr news cycle — using historical insights to find new ways of archiving our contemporary cultural condition while maintaining a deep connection to our past.Item Hand in glove: understanding the hand puppet’s life and liveness as a precursor to its application in education and therapy(The Kennedy Center for the Arts) Amato, FeliceHand or glove puppetry is one of the oldest and most common varieties of puppetry, appearing across the globe. While there are variations, the inexpensive, portable, and responsive medium has commonalities derived from its morphology, its relationship to the human hand and body, and its direct animation technique. Found in many educational, recreational, and therapeutic settings for children, recently more research has demonstrated its effectiveness in applied puppetry, in particular when working with students with autism spectrum disorder or ASD. Despite this, many important aspects of the hand puppet and best practices for its usage may not be widely known. In this article, Dr. Felice Amato discusses the hand puppet as a medium, and the specific qualities and techniques that make it a powerful tool for child development. The author explores the way that it connects to the human body through gesture and affect and its sensory properties and the connection to assisting in supporting social interaction. She summarizes findings and describes a variety of insights from puppeteers who work in applied puppetry, specifically with students with exceptionalities. Amato offers insights and recommendations for ways to integrate puppets in a way that is grounded in subtle understandings of the medium while being flexible, responsive, and strategic.Item Item Knowing your design history is crucial to aesthetic innovation(AIGA, 2020-06-22) Coogan, KristenStyle cycles in and out of fashion—history helps us decode the present and forecast the futureItem Reimagining an antiracist graphic design history: a model for a plural pedagogy(MichPub) Coogan, KristenThis article calls for a reexamination of graphic design history and pedagogy as a form of antiracist action in response to the events of 2020. The horrific deaths of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd gripped America, drawing widespread outrage throughout 2020 amid a pandemic. It was an all too familiar tale of police brutality against Black Americans that incited national furor and once again thrust antiracist discourse into mainstream consciousness. Set against the backdrop of a polarizing presidency that normalized an autocratic culture and enabled far right extremism, many Americans acknowledged a system that enabled unfair and unjust treatment of certain classes. An antiracist consciousness urges us to actively fight against and reconsider systems that not only defy equality, but perpetuate inequality. As diversity, equity, and inclusive efforts transform America’s institutional structures including workplaces and academia, educator’s should draw on their innate desire for inquiry and acknowledge their position of influence. Educators reside at the cross-hairs of opportunity: we can enact change through revised narratives and the mechanism through which those narratives are delivered. Antiracist activist Ibram X. Kendi calls this narrative-change initiatives. While the dominant elite notion of Western graphic design history faces criticism as a narrative needing less prejudice by US-based educators, practitioners, and university students alike, educators can recenter the commonly taught narrative of graphic design around voices that actually reflect the diversity in the classroom. This article outlines a method for incorporating plurality into design history education to cultivate inclusivity and reverse systematic prejudice.Item Revisionist history(2021-01) Coogan, KristenWhile the year 2020 motivated self-examination across every spectrum of our consciousness — social, cultural, economic and intellectual, academia provided space for impact. In this context, my Graphic Design History class became a space for reexamination, and an egalitarian architecture materialized — students led and I followed. Students felt fragile, we all did, as individuals seeking to normalize mammoth instability. This vulnerability underscored the value of inclusivity, all voices deserved a platform. Was my pedagogy inclusive enough? Was it empathic enough? How did it speak to our social and political context that was under intense scrutiny? Instead of a pedagogy informed by my own lived experiences, a bias especially visible in my Graphic Design History curriculum, I wondered what would inspire students to independently ask the same important questions we are reflecting on in this publication.Item Stories of community practice, artistic ambivalence, and emergent pedagogies(https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/ijllae/vol3/iss1/2, 2020-11-30) Bourgault, RébeccaThe reflections and questions discussed in the paper emerged from a teaching artist experience in community-art that led to the examination of the contrasting values between the disciplinary paradigms of social practices, community-based and participatory arts, and that of the contemporary art world aesthetics. As goals of art for social justice often contradict the perception of artistic merit based on aesthetic quality, working at the intersection of artistic creation and community development demands a shift in perspectives. The position demands going beyond one’s artistic ambivalences, to include participants in a reciprocal relationship, attentive to the fact that any goals of empowerment inherently conceal a power structure. Models of interaction borrowed from prefigurative pedagogies, pedagogies of contingencies inspire the elaboration of a pedagogy of presence that allows for the unfolding of a process anchored in integrity, quiet activism, and the heuristic purpose of art.Item A pedagogy of presence: attending to context, process, being, and belonging(Brill/Sense, 2021-01-01) Bourgault, Rébecca; Mreiwed, H.; Carter, M.R.; Mitchell, CItem The shapeshifting and boundary crossings of socially engaged art(https://journals.library.ualberta.ca/ari/index.php/ari/about/submissions) Bourgault, RébeccaSocially-engaged art practices are understood to borrow from several disciplinary territories where they coexist and cross over into contexts that, in the process of engaging in civic work and quotidian actions, occlude their identity as art and aesthetic practices. The article examines the complications arising from these overlapping ontologies through a socially engaged project where the author acts and performs as an artist-scholar-facilitator, adopting, alongside the participants, multiple identities that are dependent on changing perspectives and conditions. Arguing for a different ethical orientation to research, the inquiry into this community practice further interrogates the wrangle between the expectations that symbolic capital is accrued by artists engaged in these practices and the invisible agency of quiet activism that offers potent alternative forms of resistance.Item From high to low and high again(Plymouth University Press, 2020-06) Coogan, KristenStudying history in the age of the Wikipedia, Instagram and Snapchat warrants a reimagined pedagogy. While still curious, the Gen Z minds sitting before us have been conditioned to have shorter attention spans, seek instant gratification and multi-task to a fault. They came of age in a digital culture and thrive in an active and sensory studio setting. This hyper-accessible and hyper-exposed condition demands a new pedagogical model—as stewards of design history, we have to reframe the past in the language of today to teach the designers of tomorrow. We have to meet digital natives on their own media-saturated turf. Building on this idea, we can decode the evolution of style and forecast stylistic innovation. According to the steps outlined by Lorraine Wild in Eye Magazine #36, we critically observe style as a linear thread repeating itself over and over. Wild posits that style and ‘good design’ are intertwined; that ‘good design’ creates intrigue, gets consumed by the mass market, which superficially hijacks and proliferates form, resulting in cliché, embarrassment, then death, followed by fetish, revival, and curiosity, until we again arrive where we began: with style (Louise Sandhaus and Lorraine Wild). The cycle runs persistently throughout history to present day. This postmodern, hyper-exposed and hyper-accessed reality threatens stylistic novelty, while the past offers a wellspring of formal, conceptual and philosophical inspiration. This essay attempts to draw formal, conceptual and philosophical parallels between the past and the present both as a lesson in design history and a critical analysis of style—as well as championing real-time design history as a new pedagogy, where pop-culture becomes a critical component of a design history discourse.Item Presence: the search for wisdom in a socially engaged art education project(2019-07-11) Bourgault, RébeccaA socially engaged art pedagogical and relational experiment brings to light the necessity to trust the unfolding of personal and communal change as elusive yet credible value. Social practices of art, including art for social justice often situate the goals of their artistic project in qualities of relational exchanges. This paper reviews an experiment led through a pedagogy of presence for an open art studio at a homeless shelter for women. Narrated through the structure of Ground, Path, and Fruition, a Shambala conceptualization of life’s change, the paper is written from a personal, and philosophical storytelling approach. It situates the pedagogy of presence in the art studio as a shared method of discovery, experienced differently by every participant. Part social art practice inflected with quiet activism, part meditation, and borrowing from theories of adult learning, the qualities of presence at the open studio offered a centring counterpoise to the precarious living situation experienced by participants, enhancing human connections through shared artmaking, listening, and a sense of social belonging.Item Thinking in, through, and with art: challenges, discoveries, and knowledge construction in graduate arts-based research(The Alliance for the Arts in Research Universities, 2019-12-24) Bourgault, Rébecca; Ingalls-Vanada, Delane; Rosamond, CatherineThis panel presentation composed of instructors will discuss the design and experience of the collaborative facilitation of an arts-based research capstone course created in 2018 for an online graduate program in Art Education. Guided by the question,” in what ways were our students invited to explore, embed, and integrate the arts in their research?” we will discuss how the course design functioned as a creative map that provided direction yet allowed a flexible structure for student guidance. We will elaborate on the artistic and epistemological challenges students encountered in contextualizing their practice within a broader research sphere. As they worked, they aimed at maintaining “internal consistency and coherence that represent[ed] a strong and seamless relationship between purpose and method” (Cole & Knowles, 2008. p.67). Examples of students’ artistic research will illustrate the concepts presented.Item What I could make of mothering: matricentric puppetry and the mothers of the bestiary(JourMS) Amato, FeliceItem Theodora Skipitares’s textual bodies(Unima (Union Internationale de la Marionnette), 2018-09-15) Amato, FeliceItem Across the Bridge: A story of community, sociality, and art education(Penn State Libraries, 2018-09-25) Bourgault, RébeccaThe article examines the planning, development, and outcome of an experiential learning project that brought together undergraduate studio art students and the workers of a power plant about to shut down. As one of the instructors for the project, I reflect on how our emergent pedagogical methods interfaced or conflicted with students interests, and plant employees. Principles of phenomenological research inspired my early steps to the study. However, its operative conceptual framework follows the thoughts of socially engaged artists Suzanne Lacy (2010) and Pablo Helguera (2011), guiding an analysis of the relationships between students and workers with instructors as observer-participants. I investigate how these roles and relations developed through different modalities that ranged from familial sentiments to memorializing impulses, including the industrial conditions that inspired various sensual and aesthetic student responses. I argue that the production of artwork as autonomous objects, which constituted the self-evident outcome of this community-focused experience, contributed only a transactional materiality to the project, and that the relational exchanges from which transformative experiences originated, offered unrivaled creative possibilities.