Swinging into art with pendulum paintings

Children are captivated with how things work and they like to build things and in many ways, engineering comes naturally for them. Progress does not come from technology alone but from the melding of technology and creative thinking through art and design. There has been a push for STEAM-based curricula to be included in science classrooms and the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) provides the framework for integrating engineering design into the structure of science education. The push for the STEAM platform is derived from the lack of creativity and innovation in recent college graduates in the United States. This STEAM-based unit meshes engineering design, representing and interpreting data, visual arts, and motion/stability. As students investigated and analyzed pendulum motion, they also created unique pendulum paintings. Throughout this unit our students applied their content knowledge across several disciplines and in turn allowed them to gain a better understanding and retention of these concepts. Through creating their own pendulum paintings, the students learned about pendulums and how they work, designed and constructed their own pendulums, and applied prior knowledge of forces and motion in a controlled experiment.     

A natural anthropology of art

This article discusses the relevance of recent developments in neurobiology for the study of art worldwide. It is argued that both anthropologists and art historians can gain a better understanding of species-specific art and art practices over time and space by broadening their vision and approaches, building on the fundamental and exciting findings concerning art in neurobiology.     

Comparing the effects of art education and science education on creative thinking in high school students

What is the link between art and creativity? The purpose of this study was to determine the role of art education in creative thinking. A causal-comparative research design was used. Arts and science high school students (N = 162) participated. Results showed that creative thinking in visual arts students in Grade 10 with high scores differed significantly from that in music and science students; however, this difference was not found among students in Grade 11. A main reason for this result in Grade 10 students might be the non-routine problem-solving process in visual arts education, in which artwork production is an important component in creative thinking development. Considering this result, it was concluded that the effect of different education disciplines—called education department effect—on creative thinking can be significant.     

Anthropologies of Violence and Resistance

Encounters with Violence in Latin America: Urban Poor Perceptions from Colombia and Guatemala. Caroline O. N. Moser and Cathy McIlwaine. New York: Routledge, 2004. 272 pp.
Violence: Theory and Ethnography. Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew Strathern. New York: Continuum, 2002. 196 pp.
Shadows of War: Violence, Power, and International Profiteering in the Twenty-First Century. Carolyn Nordstrom. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. 293 pp.     

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.     

An Interview with Juan Jose García, President of Ojo de Agua Comunicación

This is an interview with Zapotec video maker Juan Jose Garcia, president of the award-winning media organization Ojo de Agua Comunicacion, in Oaxaca, Mexico. He presents a brief history of native video in Mexico and discusses issues such as indigenous video production and circulation, thematic content, communal practices, relation to indigenous communities, funding, and current projects of his group.     

An Ethnographic Filmflam: Giving Gifts, Doing Research, and Videotaping the Native Subject/Object

Using the discussion of self-reflexivity as an organizing principle, this article examines how mobilizing digital video technology during fieldwork opens up empirical and theoretical space for reconceptualizing the relationship between anthropologists and informants. Placing the field of visual anthropology into critical conversation with long-standing theoretical arguments about the objectivist limitations of native anthropologists, I argue that the slipperiness of nativity as an anthropological designation helps to provide analytical tools for examining filmmaking as a kind of gift-giving process between native ethnographic filmmakers and the subjects of their films. This article highlights some of the ways in which my own filmic and videographic exploits in Harlem, New York, mark integral connections between seeing and being the proverbial other, probing social exchanges predicated on the usefulness of low-budget digital technology as a means of fostering politically and epistemologically valuable ethnographic collaborations.     

Conceptualizing world art studies: An introduction

This special issue aims to contribute to the conceptualization of World Art Studies. The first two articles offer evaluative views from art history, the third and fourth perspectives from anthropology, the fifth and sixth arguments for including neo-evolutionary and neurological studies in understanding world art as a universal human behavior.     

Dans le bain avec Rouch: A Reminiscence

This issue's Visual Anthropology Section is a tribute to anthropologist and ethnographic filmmaker Jean Rouch (1917–2004). In nine brief articles, authors discuss the impact of Rouch's pathbreaking career on ethnographic and documentary filmmaking and his contributions to our knowledge of postcolonial Africa. The authors demonstrate the significance of his work for the larger discipline of anthropology, and commemorate Rouch with personal reflections of their time working with and learning from him.     

Formula Fact & Fable

In the light of a decision taken in April 2009 that the arts will be included in a projected national curriculum it seems relevant to examine First We See: The National Review of Visual Education, which was completed in August 2008. That Review recommends the development of a visual education curriculum for the compulsory years of schooling. Under the guiding concept of “visuacy,” a neologism deriving from “visual literacy,” the newly conceived subject is intended to have educational outcomes complementary to literacy and numeracy. I examine the arguments and recommendations of the Review, and briefly examine the methodology of Phase One of the Review (i.e., a literature review, a questionnaire, and school visits) for its relevance to the Review's recommendations.     

TV is Moving in

Visual arts teachers engage in complex work on a daily basis. This work is informed by practical knowledge that is rarely examined or drawn on in research or in the development of policy. Focusing on the work of secondary visual arts teachers, this article reports on a research program conducted in a regional area of New South Wales, Australia. The research engages in a collaborative process of educational connoisseurship and educational criticism to examine and discuss classroom practice. The process is underpinned by a belief in research as an act of discovery and is guided by a framework that provides a language and grammar of practice. Drawing on qualitative data, discussion focuses on how the collaborative process enables the mobilization and generation of new knowledge. The article concludes by considering the relationship between teaching practice, research, and policy development and by recommending support for collaborative research-based initiatives that foreground the knowledge of teachers.     

Indigenous Media Gone Global: Strengthening Indigenous Identity On- and Offscreen at the First Nations/First Features Film Showcase

For 12 days in May 2005, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York and the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), as well as several other screening venues in Washington, D.C., hosted a group of renowned indigenous filmmakers from around the globe for the groundbreaking film showcase, "First Nations/First Features: A Showcase of World Indigenous Film and Media." This film showcase highlighted the innovative ways in which indigenous filmmakers draw on indigenous storytelling practices to create cinematic visions that honor their long-standing indigenous cultural worlds while reaching local and world audiences. In this essay, I highlight the onscreen impact through an analysis of several films featured in First Nations/First Features, as well as the offscreen impact emphasizing how the indigenous directors used this opportunity to strengthen social networks and share experience in this industry, which may develop into future collaborative film projects.     

Visual arts education provisions for primary schools in Turkey

This article examines the history of art education in Turkey. Since the beginning, the purposes of the arts and art education have been a point of discussion by various authorities. Whether art education should be taught, and how it needs to be taught, have been at the forefront of educationalists' minds. As a result, introducing certain models of art education has been a challenge. The objective of this article is to present the changes in art education since the 19th century in Turkey. The main focus is on art education practices and policies and an overview of key events in Turkey's history of art education. The article also presents issues related to the importance of visual arts education in Turkish primary school settings. In so doing, this research aims to show readers how past developments helped to create the current visual art education policy in Turkey.     

Mind the gap: Encountering contemporary art through play

Knowing how to approach and experience contemporary art is a challenge to many people outside the art world. Emerging contemporary art, as the newest of this genre, is often the most challenging. This article recounts my own early struggles as a researcher in this field, and proposes a way of understanding the interaction between artist, artwork and perceiver based on my observations of how contemporary artists encounter each others' work. I argue that contemporary art, and especially emerging contemporary art, creates a space to play by creating an intentional gap in the physical form and/or the semantic structure of the artwork. The object of play is the co‐investigation of an idea initiated by the artist, facilitated by the form of the work and furthered by the encounter. Play, it is argued, is essential to emerging contemporary art as an activity, a communicative frame and a disposition. I draw from earlier theoretical connections between art, play and liberation, challenging some of these assertions, and bringing others into relevance in the contemporary context.     

Building Bridges and Traveling through Time: Ethics, Practice, and Priorities in the Second Moscow International Visual Anthropology Film Festival

International film festivals are entangled spaces in which filmmakers and audiences negotiate aesthetic, ethical, political, and practical traditions and communities. This review of the Second Moscow International Visual Anthropology Film Festival explores some of the differences in ethics, practice, and priorities of anthropological filmmaking between Russia and the West. By providing a brief history of Soviet anthropology and a discussion of the festival's main themes, this review explores some of the historic and contemporary influences shaping the development of (one particular strain of) visual anthropology in post-Soviet Russia.     

Improve your Frames with Inserts

The field of education in the United States is in a period of unprecedented change. Educators in all disciplines are challenged to understand and respond to the waves of reform sweeping over the national education landscape. Linking these reforms to meaningful outcomes that will produce more rigorous and effective measures of quality and performance in our schools is an ongoing goal for all educators as they work to respond to calls for educational reform. Changes in the general field of education have direct implications for arts education policy and practice. Arts educators find themselves in the position of making sense of these landmark reforms and changes in the context of arts education and determining what courses of action and responses they should pursue on the road to meaningful reform. This report provides an overview of a selected number of contemporary developments in the general field of education, brief summaries of consequential studies and education-related reports, and an examination of some policy issues these developments and reports raise for arts educators as they work to shape the future landscape of arts education.