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A cross-cultural approach - art history
Art Journal, Fall, 1995 by Joanne E. Sowell
I have taught the traditional survey of ancient and medieval art for some time and have been increasingly uncomfortable with the strong Western bias. My dilemma was how to change the survey course without simply adding many more cultures and reaching a point where none of them were given enough time. I have not been comfortable with the approach taken by most introductory texts, simply adding a few token chapters on non-Western art into a format based on the stylistic development of Western art. Instead, I have developed a cross-cultural survey of art that is taught in addition to a more traditional survey course.
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There are three major goals for the course: the inclusion of multicultural content, the exploration of issues that arise from this content, and the use of multicultural pedagogy. The course is organized around the art of five cultures, those identified as the cultural heritages of the major ethnic groups in the United States: Mesoamerican art, Native American art, West African art, Asian art, and Western European art. The last section of the course focuses on contemporary artists who use these traditions in their own work.(1)
Western art is included for a number of reasons. In most survey texts the Western tradition forms the focus and provides the structure, with extra chapters devoted to non-Western art added. Instead, I wanted to deal with Western art as one of many parallel traditions. The contemporary Latina/ Latino, Native American, African American, and Asian American artists I include respond to the Western tradition in their works, and an introduction to Western art allows students to understand in what ways these artists combine and reconfigure their Western and non-Western heritages. A consideration of the Western tradition also enables students to see how this dominant tradition in the United States has affected the way other cultures are seen.
Second, the course is designed to address issues that arise from a consideration of non-Western art. For example, a discussion of the differences between fine art and craft raises questions about the function of art in culture and about the way we categorize and value objects. This is also a topic currently being debated in the art and museum communities and one which is tied to issues of diversity and gender.(2) Most of the students who take my course have little or no art background, but they do have opinions on what they think art is and what they like. We try to examine these opinions and their consequences. When I lecture on art from particular cultures, I include discussions of how the art has been treated or consumed and understood from the Western perspective. For example, when we discuss African art, we talk about early twentieth-century artists' interest in the abstract qualities of African art and how that has affected the way African art has been studied and exhibited. We then look at African art from a thematic and contextual perspective. We compare, for example, the treatment of African art in the 1984. Museum of Modern Art exhibition "Primitivism" in Twentieth-Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern with that in more recent exhibitions at the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
Third, the course is designed to provide students with diverse learning styles and a variety of approaches to the material. As student populations become increasingly varied. learning styles must also become diverse in the classroom. Adding multicultural content is not a sufficient response to the growing diversity of our population. Pedagogy must also become multicultural.(3)
To organize group activities that introduce students to issues and ideas, I use a method called the learning cycle.(4) This method requires students to work in small groups to explore concrete objects, texts, or images (fig. 21), from which issues and ideas arise that can be applied in other situations. In one case, I use this technique to explore the way images require and depend on a body of cultural information for understanding. Students look at a selection of magazine advertisements and discuss the knowledge that they must bring to the images to understand them. They also note any stereotypes they see and consider who the audience for the advertisement might be. This helps students to understand that they have a knowledge base of popular culture as well as their own biases and assumptions that allow them to "read" the advertisements, and that people in other times and places also had a similar knowledge base for their images. Students then are given a reproduction of an artwork from one of the cultures we will be studying, with its subject matter identified. They are asked to go to the library to research the image and to gain the kind of contextual information its original viewer might have had.
[Figure 21 ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
In another learning cycle, students are given twenty images and asked to sort them into two piles labeled "fine art" and "craft." Images are chosen carefully to provoke discussion. There are a number of examples of fiber art: a Japanese kimono hung as if displayed in a museum, a photograph of beautifully decorated clothing being worn by African women, an applique and pieced quilt, and a story quilt by Faith Ringgold. Pottery is also included: an ancient Greek vase (fig. 22) and a platter by Maria Martinez (fig. 23) in the collection of the local art museum, a fur-covered cup by Meret Oppenheim, a plate from Judy Chicago's Dinner Party, and a "collector's plate" from an advertisement in a popular magazine. Student discussion usually focuses around the function of the objects, and many students conclude that only the fur-covered cup and the collector's plate are truly fine art because they are obviously not meant to be functional. This leads to a discussion of what art is, who makes it, and how it functions in different cultures, as well as to a discussion of the long-standing Western conviction that art cannot be functional. This activity is done as we begin our study of Native American art, so that students are considering these issues as we discuss clothing, blankets, pottery, and masks.
