Observation and visualization: reflections on the relationship between science, visual arts, and the evolution of the scientific image

The connections between biological sciences, art and printed images are of great interest to the author. She reflects on the historical relevance of visual representations for science. She argues that the connection between art and science seems to have diminished during the twentieth century. However, this connection is currently growing stronger again through digital media and new imaging methods. Scientific illustrations have fuelled art, while visual modeling tools have assisted scientific research. As a print media artist, she explores the relationship between art and science in her studio practice and will present this historical connection with examples related to evolution, microbiology and her own work. Art and science share a common source, which leads to scrutiny and enquiry. Science sets out to reveal and explain our reality, whereas art comments and makes connections that don’t need to be tested by rigorous protocols. Art and science should each be evaluated on their own merit. Allowing room for both in the quest to understand our world will lead to an enriched experience.     

Language policy,language ideology,and visual art education for emergent bilingual students

ABSTRACT

In 1968 the Bilingual Education Act marked the first comprehensive federal intervention in the schooling of language minoritized students by creating financial incentives for bilingual education in an effort to address social and educational inequities created by poverty and linguistic isolation in schools. Since that time federal education policies related to language instruction for emergent bilingual students have undergone a number of shifts that reflect changing ideological perspectives on language and citizenship. These shifts, in turn, frame seemingly neutral educational requirements for preservice and practicing art educators related to language and visual art instruction, implicating art educators in ideological stances toward students and families who primarily speak languages other than English. This article reviews the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in its most recent reauthorization as the Every Student Succeeds Act, and offers insight into ideological implications of standards and assessments that impact art educator preparation and art teaching practices with regard to language in the art classroom, including the National Core Arts Standards and the Education Teacher Performance Assessment. Implications regarding ways art education, framed by ideological policies, might support or undermine social and educational inequities educational policies are intended to address are discussed.     

Ellen Dissanayake’s Evolutionary Aesthetic

Dissanayake argues that art behaviors – which she characterizes first as patterns or syndromes of creation and response and later as rhythms and modes of mutuality – are universal, innate, old, and a source of intrinsic pleasure, these being hallmarks of biological adaptation. Art behaviors proved to enhance survival by reinforcing cooperation, interdependence, and community, and, hence, became selected for at the genetic level. Indeed, she claims that art is essential to the fullest realization of our human nature. I make three criticisms: Dissanayake’s theory cannot account adequately for differences in the aesthetic value of artworks; the connections drawn between art and reproductive success are too stretched to account for art's production, nature, and reception; indeed, art enters the picture only because it is so thinly characterized that it remains in doubt that her topic is art as we understand it.     

Anna Fraentzel Celli (1878-1958)

This paper provides a short history of Anna Fraentzel Celli life, from her arrival in Italy in 1898 to her death in 1958, reviewing available documents and written testimonies. Anna Fraentzel was born in Berlin in 1878, third of four daughters from a bourgeois family; her maternal grandfather, Luigi Traube, was a very well known physician, as well as her father Oscar, and she developed an early interest in medicine that she couldn't fulfill: actually after her father's death she was forced to shorten her education, she couldn't enter the medical school, as she would have liked to, and she attended the nursing school, instead, displaying a lot of good practical sense. As a nurse in Hamburg in 1896 she met Prof. Angelo Celli, who was there on a professional visit, and who assisted the young nurse in finding a job at the city hospital. She was much younger than him, who was already a middle aged respected scientist; anyhow, even after his departure, they kept in touch and eventually fell in love. They married in 1899 and she moved to Rome to work at the S. Spirito Hospital joining a brilliant group of physicians and researchers as Tommasi-Crudeli, Marchiafava, Bignami, Bastianelli, Dionisi, Grassi, and her husband Angelo. They had long been studying the mode of transmission of the malaria infection and in 1898 they had identified the mosquito Anopheles as the vector of the malaria parasite. She got enthusiastically involved both in the scientific work and in the antimalarial campaign which Celli promoted in the Agro Romano. The strong personality of Anna Celli, her active involvement in social problems, her passionate dedication to her work, her peculiar way of being feminist, expressed fully her commitment to the struggle against malaria and illiteracy in the Agro Romano and in the Paludi Pontine at the beginning of the twentieth century. She must be credited as a major force in the creation and functioning of the Peasant Schools, as well as in the organisation of the experimental antimalarial health clinics. After her husband's death in 1914 she continued as a promoter of the antimalarial campaign, co-operating with the Red Cross and other institutions. Moreover, she edited the scientific and historical papers which Angelo Celli had collected and written during his life. She was also a prolific writer and lecturer on these issues and gained widespread appreciation both in Italy and in Germany. Toward the end of her life she retired to a nursing home in Rome where she died almost alone in 1958.     

Hip-Hop: The Culture, the Sound, the Science; One Planet under a Groove: Hip-Hop and Contemporary Art

Hip-Hop: The Culture, the Sound, the Science. The Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago. January 18–May 27, 2002.
One Planet under. Groove: Hip-Hop and Contemporary Art. The Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, NY. October 26, 2001—March 3, 2002; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, July 14–October 13, 2002; Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta, GA, Spring 2003.     

Theorizing the nexus of STEAM practice

ABSTRACT

Recent advances in arts education policy, as outlined in the latest National Core Arts Standards, advocate for bringing digital media into the arts education classroom. The promise of such Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics (STEAM)–based approaches is that, by coupling Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) and the arts, new understandings and artifacts emerge that transcend either discipline. Evidence of this can be seen through fundamental shifts in both fields; in the arts, artists are expanding the creative potential for design through computational flexibility, which affords artists the ability to exceed the limitations of their tools. The infusion of the arts into STEM has shown to be equally transformative, with the emergence of tools and communities that not only engender new content understandings but also invite participation from populations historically underrepresented in STEM fields. Drawing on over a decade of research at the intersection of the arts, creativity, and new technologies from the Creativity Labs at Indiana University, this article theorizes the learning that takes place at effective couplings of STEAM to assist today's educators in realizing the potential for transformative experiences for learners of all levels. This article provides a synthesis of this past work across two compelling cases of STEAM-based tools, materials, and activities (i.e., the media-rich programming environment Scratch as well as the work the LilyPad Arduino used to create electronic textiles), incorporating findings from more than 50 peer-reviewed papers and books, and conceptually outlines an approach to “gathering STEAM” in arts education classrooms today. Implications are explored for policy makers in teacher education to think about preservice curriculum and field experiences; policy makers in arts education to think about tools needed in classrooms today; as well as how art education can play a critical role in STEM disciplines and offer solutions to address STEM pipeline challenges. Such efforts extend current and prior discussions in the arts education landscape about the use of new technologies, and draw our attention to how new technologies can be leveraged for artistic expression.     

Biographies for Artistic and Social Intervention: A Youth-Driven Project

This article discusses how biographical materials may be used in youth arts education projects to develop new methodologies and approaches that can stimulate artistic and social intervention in contemporary urban communities, thus changing the field of arts education policy at the community level. Through their creation of Artistic Society Projects, a group of young people from the arts education project Bando à Parte: Youth Cultures, Arts and Social Inclusion (O Teatrão, Coimbra, Portugal) have created a voice that may be used to transform their own communities. The starting points for this transformation are the young peoples’ biographical paths. The influence of youth on education policy may be strategically understood in the context of formal and nonformal school curricula. How can youth use their biographies to develop specific contributions both to change in individual behaviors and to social change in urban communities, influencing arts education policies to instigate action? The exploration of these processes through the work of artistic creation, inspired by collected biographical materials, represents a contribution to ongoing reflection on the issues of memory, identity, youth resistance, and community change in urban settings, influencing the ways in which arts education policy is understood and implemented.     

Healing the body, healing the self: the interrelationship of sickness, health, and faith in the lives of St. Lawrence Island Yupik residents

For about 15 years, Carol Jolles has been traveling to St. Lawrence Island, Alaska to study the role faith plays in the lives of Sivuqaq (Gambell) residents. From the outset, she was aware of the strong presence of two Christian faith traditions in the community. She was present when people “spoke in tongues” (entered a spiritual state, sometimes identified as an altered state of consciousness), and she was aware that people relied on prayer, often uttered in a spiritually inspired context, to ease the pain of daily life and to find the strength to do difficult tasks. Many months passed, however, before she realized that many people relied on faith to heal. From the perspective of her long-term working relationships and friendships with community members, Jolles takes a fresh look at some of the situations from her early work where faith and healing were intertwined. She also looks at more recent examples to place faith-based healing in a more general context. In the process, she focuses on a few special individuals to highlight the components of faith and healing associated with illness and mental distress.     

Inbreeding,eugenics, and Helen Dean King (1869–1955)

Helen Dean King’s scientific work focused on inbreeding using experimental data collected from standardized laboratory rats to elucidate problems in human heredity. The meticulous care with which she carried on her inbreeding experiments assured that her results were dependable and her theoretical explanations credible. By using her nearly homozygous rats as desired commodities, she also was granted access to venues and people otherwise unavailable to her as a woman. King’s scientific career was made possible through her life experiences. She earned a doctorate from Bryn Mawr College under Thomas Hunt Morgan and spent a productive career at the Wistar Institute of Anatomy and Biology in Philadelphia where she had access to the experimental subjects which made her career possible. In this paper I examine King’s work on inbreeding, her participation in the debates over eugenics, her position at the Wistar Institute, her status as a woman working with mostly male scientists, and her involvement with popular science.     

Bridging the gap: How the National Core Arts Standards forge the divide between the arts and assessment-based learning

ABSTRACT

This article is a review and thematic analysis of the 2014 National Core Arts Standards (NCAS). Historically, there exists a gap between the arts and assessment-based educational practices. Thematic analysis of the NCAS reveals a policy striving to bridge the gap between the way arts educators envision arts in schools, and the current reality of assessment-based schooling in the United States. This policy could become the foundation for the recognition of the arts as academically rigorous subject matter, capable of existing and thriving in an assessment-oriented world; it remains to be seen as to how and if arts educators will use and adapt NCAS. Is the NCAS merely a symbolic policy or does it have the support behind it to be a material policy that truly creates change in the educational system?     

Skvyrs'ka Etel Berkivna--a gifted researcher and pedagogue (to the 100th anniversary of birthday)

E. B. Skvyrska was born in the town of Chigirin. In 1928 she graduated from the Agricultural-Pedagogical Division of the Kyiv Institute of People's Education (Taras Shevchenko Kyiv National University, now) in speciality pedagogue-biologist. In 1937 she finished the post-graduate course at the Institute of Biochemistry of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR, in 1940 she defended the thesis for the Candidate's degree in biology and the title of the senior researcher was conferred on her in 1941. Beginning from 1936, E. B. Skvyrska had been working at the Institute of Biochemistry. She was working at the Department of Structure and Biochemistry of Nervous System (till 1963), and then at the Department of Structure and Biochemistry of Nuclear Acids (till 1973). In 1958 she defended the thesis for the Doctor's degree. From 1938 to 1941 E. B. Skvyrska worked as the assistant, and from 1945 to 1950 as the docent of the Department of Biochemistry at the Taras Shevchenko Kyiv (State) National University. Up to 1941 her scientific work was dedicated to the investigation of peculiarities of carbohydrate metabolism of the central and peripheral nervous system depending on the animal age. Since 1951 E. B. Skvyrska was investigating the metabolism of high-molecular phosphorus-including compounds (nucleic acids, phosphoproteins and phospholipids) in the central nervous system during the excitation and inhibition, in ontogenesis, in functionally and morphologically different parts of the nervous system, in different structure elements of the nerve cell. The results of investigations allowed finding the biochemical peculiarities connected with the difference of structure and function of morphologically different divisions of the nervous system. Peculiarities and functioning of t-RNA and aminoacyl-t-RNA synthetases of rats in norm and during starvation were studied at the Department of Nucleic Acids. More than 50 scientific works have been published.     

Biosemiotics in a Gallery

In this article we review the biosemiotic art exhibition ?Signs of life? (Livstegn), that was organized by the Danish installation artist Morten Skriver and the biosemiotician Jesper Hoffmeyer in 2011 at the Esbjerg Art Museum (Denmark). The exhibition presented five central (bio)semiotic concepts using artistic tools: the semiosphere, the sign, semiotic scaffolding, semiotic freedom, and surfaces.     

The poetics of babytalk

Caretaker-infant attachment is a complex but well-recognized adaptation in humans. An early instance of (or precursor to) attachment behavior is the dyadic interaction between adults and infants of 6 to 24 weeks, commonly called "babytalk." Detailed analysis of 1 minute of spontaneous babytalk with an 8-week infant shows that the poetic texture of the mother’s speech—specifically its use of metrics, phonetics, and foregrounding—helps to shape and direct the baby’s attention, as it also coordinates the partners’ emotional communication. We hypothesize that the ability to respond to poetic features of language is present as early as the first few weeks of life and that this ability attunes cognitive and affective capacities in ways that provide a foundation for the skills at work in later aesthetic production and response. By linking developmental social processes with formal cognitive aspects of art, we challenge predominant views in evolutionary psychology that literary art is a superfluous byproduct of adaptive evolutionary mechanisms or primarily an ornament created by sexual selection. David S. Miall is Professor of English at the University of Alberta in Canada. He is the author of essays on British Romantic writers, empirical studies of readers’ responses to literature, hypertext and literary computing. Ellen Dissanayake is Visiting Scholar at the Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities, University of Washington. Her most recent book is Art and Intimacy: How the Arts Began (2000).     

Picking at the Paint: Viewing Contemporary Bushman Art as Art

In most writing on contemporary Bushman art the art is discussed as a tool of development, a tourism endeavor and an income generator. While these are aims both legitimate and beneficial to the communities involved, they also work (implicitly yet effectively) to separate the art, artist and subsequently the community out of which the art is produced from “the rest of us,” defining these communities as “other.” This article attempts to engage with contemporary Bushman art as art objects. Using criteria of judgment based on a functional semiotics of art, two works will be analyzed to prove that the works may be discussed as Art. The premise is that once people recognize the aesthetic intelligence imbued in these artworks they will be able to engage with the work in a way that is similarly intelligent and contemporary. The art and its people will then stand a better chance of being accepted into the realm of the everyday as opposed to being relegated to the sarcophagi of history. Once taken from this starting position, goals of community development and tourism endeavors linked to indigenous art can become that much more beneficial and life-changing for the communities concerned.     

Defining quality in visual art education for young children: Building on the position statement of the Early Childhood Art Educators

ABSTRACT

This article reflects the collective voices of four early childhood visual arts educators, each of whom is a member of the Early Childhood Art Educators (ECAE) Issues Group of the National Arts Educators Association. The authors frame the article around the ECAE position statement, Art: Essential for Early Learning (2016) Early Childhood Art Educators. (2016). Art: Essential for early learning, position statement on early childhood art education (Rev. ed.). Reston, VA: National Art Education Association. Retrieved from https://www.arteducators.org/advocacy/articles/127-position-statement-on-early-childhood-art-education [Google Scholar], which focuses on the central role of art interactions among young children, educators, environments, and materials. The authors describe eight principles that underlie the statement from philosophical viewpoints, and provide practical examples of the principles in action. Amid a varied policy landscape for visual art in early childhood, the authors assert that children need organized, materials-rich environments that invite discovery, interaction, sensory and kinesthetic exploration, wonder, inquiry, and imagination in relationship with responsive educators who value young children's diverse abilities, interests, questions, ideas, and cultural experiences. The authors explore issues and possibilities resulting when educators work to bring visual arts fully and dynamically into the lives of young children in diverse education and care spaces. In closing, the authors explore the realities of visual arts policies in the early childhood education and art education fields while emphasizing the critical need for supportive pedagogical practices in all early childhood classrooms.     

Nora Volkow: motivated neuroscientist

Nora Volkow claims to have always been curious about the workings of the human brain. Even as a medical student in her native Mexico, she investigated animal behavior with the ultimate goal of understanding human motivation. Upon completing her medical studies, in the early 80s, she moved to the U.S. to take advantage of emerging neuroimaging technologies, first during her psychiatry residency at New York University and Brookhaven National Laboratory, and then as a faculty member at the University of Texas in Houston. In Houston, Volkow embarked on seminal studies into human drug use and the functioning brain, which she continued to pursue, again at Brookhaven, during the subsequent two decades. Volkow established herself as an eminent researcher and proponent of neuroscience, and her insights into the brain have greatly advanced our appreciation of human behavior and motivation. In 2003, she took up her present position as Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse.     

Pushing back frontiers: Towards a history of art in a global perspective

Traditionally, art history is a discipline focusing on the developments of Western art and architecture. It is time, however, to broaden our perspective. The world is changing, art is changing, somutatis mutandis is art history. This does not happen on its own accord. Art history needs rewriting and art historians have to do it. We need to take a critical look at our premises and points of departure, and we need to change the art historical curricula at universities and art schools. At Leiden University, the Netherlands, the Department of Art History has opted for a new orientation and decided to study the history of art from a global perspective. This means that students will meet with three lines of approach to the visual art and material culture from regions other than the West. Firstly, they are introduced to the art and material culture of Asian, African, and Amerindian civilizations by colleagues from those fields, which Leiden is so fortunate to have. The Faculty of Arts at Leiden University, houses a wide variety of language and culture studies of the world. The second approach focuses on interactions, mutual influences, and interculturalization processes in art and culture. And the third addresses methodical-theoretical reflection on art history in a global perspective. The aim here is to formulate a theoretical framework for the study of art worldwide, thereby pursuing ‘comparative art history’. In order to achieve these perspectives, exchanging ideas and concepts with anthropologists can be very productive.     

Profiles of Pioneer Women Scientists: Katherine Esau

“Profiles of Pioneer Women Scientists: Katherine Esau” tells the story of a noted botanist, plant anatomist, and electron microscopist who was born in the Russian Ukraine (in 1898), forced to flee the Bolshevik Revolution with her family—her father a mayor of Ekaterinoslav under the Czar—to Germany, where she received a bachelor’s degree in agriculture, education she put to good use in America. Beginning in a sugarbeet field in Salinas, California, she progressed through the doctoral degree at the University of California at Davis (UC Davis) and there began her exceptional research on plant anatomy and plant viral diseases. Her textbookPlant Anatomy became known among college students as “Aunt Kitty’s Bible,” and all of her textbooks have gone into second, and some to third, editions. Transferring to the University of California at Santa Barbara (with its new Chancellor, V. I. Cheadle) only two years before retirement, she blossomed anew, producing some of her best work there and obtaining National Science Foundation support for a new electron microscope and other research funds through her 89th year. Katherine Esau started accruing awards and honors at a relatively early age (Faculty Research Lecturer at age 50, election to the National Academy of Sciences at 59) and has never stopped (the President’s Medal of Science at age 91, a UC Santa Barbara building named for her at age 93). It has been her good fortune to live to enjoy these honors. The short autobiography of her father, a truly enterprising engineer, is included here, as are the recollections of Celeste Turner Wright. Celeste, who arrived at UC Davis the same year as Katherine Esau, became an acclaimed poet, and chaired the English Department for many years. She has added a lively reminiscence of the days she and Katherine spent at UC Davis. The introduction to the book by one of Esau’s former graduate students, Ray Franklin Evert, himself a renowned plant pathologist, provides a heartfelt tribute to his greatly admired professor.     

The artist Carl Abrahams and the cosmopolitan work of centring and peripheralizing the self⋆

The article looks at the work and life of Jamaican artist and ‘citizen of the world’ Carl Abrahams. Responding to Gell's argument that art should be thought of as a ‘technology of enchantment’, and to a wider approach that seeks to explain art by reference to cultural context, the article takes Abrahams's own Weltkenntnis, or world‐knowledge, as its focus. The Weltkenntnis of an artist, or indeed any person, is often at odds both with their surrounding cultural situation and the technical means they have to express themselves. It is never entirely possible to reduce a particular form of self‐expression either to the wider worldview or to a particular set of technical effects. The article explores the conceptual tensions involved in Abrahams's claims to be a cosmopolitan artist and his work of centring and peripheralizing himself in colonial and postcolonial Jamaica.     

Education Through Art

In this article, the author revisits a case study presented in Arts Education Policy Review 105(1) in September/October 2003. The author discusses Arts Collaborator's Incorporated's (ACI) efforts to educate the community about art and about arts opportunities in River City. Themes visited in the discussion are community development through the arts, and connecting economic development to education. Implications for the arts education community that the author draws from this discussion are (a) ACI has assets and connections that the arts education community may not have, (b) ACI uses its influence to teach and promote certain kinds of art, and (c) the arts education community needs to be aware of advocacy groups to maintain education standards and to fully use available opportunities.