The Art of Teaching Art

“Most of the time, you fail at making art. You fail, but you still want to go back to the studio. Teaching the arts here means giving students a chance to try something, to fail, to try again and, through that process, to begin to find a way to define how they feel about things, and what they want to say.” —Gary Burnley, Visual Arts Faculty

What began as chance for Erin Mallay '04 ended up changing her life. “I came to Sarah Lawrence to take writing,” she reflected after graduating last June. “And I didn’t take a single writing class. On a fluke, I went on an interview for a visual fundamentals class” taught by Gary Burnley. Mallay ended up studying art during each of her four SLC years—and she’s not finished yet.

Mallay is headed Down Under, having enrolled in a masters degree program at the University of Western Australia, to study the newly defined field of biological art, which, she said, uses advancements in biology and genetics to make art. “I have always thought that there’s such a close connection between science and art,” she said.

Although the visual arts had always interested her, she didn't believe she necessarily possessed “the raw artistic talent to go to art school.” But, in class, she found, “there wasn’t an emphasis on craft. Exploration and experiment were more important. I think that’s a fantastic thing.”

Mallay worked with sculpting techniques in various media: wood, metal, plaster, plastic, rubber, Latex. (Stone is no longer as popular as it once was, she said.) “It’s important to not be tied down” to a single medium, she added. “I came here without an inkling of what I wanted to do with my life. I still don’t have a plan, but a much better idea of where I want to go.”

The creativity question(s)

Sometimes, that’s the way it happens: Untapped gifts and uninvestigated interests emerge at the junction of youth and exploration. Maybe Mallay is lucky: For some, making art remains a pipe dream. Is creativity practical? And, can creativity even be taught?

True to its guiding principles, Sarah Lawrence started responding to such questions early on: Perhaps not “Can creativity be taught?” so much as “Should it?” (Answer: a resounding “Yes!”) And “why?” Also, “how?” What’s the difference between imparting technical skill and encouraging the imagination? What’s a lesson plan for visual inspiration?

There were art schools, of course, when Sarah Lawrence was founded, and there were schools for the liberal arts. But few, if any, liberal arts colleges taught studio art for credit. Why, then, the decision to teach studio art, particularly to students with no aspirations to become working artists?

College Dean—later President—Esther Raushenbush had the cognitive answer to that question. “It is not to create painters or to provide emotional release,” she once said. “It is to help students discover what the world looks like, to help them to see and understand what they see. Its discipline, as rigorous as the discipline of logic or mathematics, is the means by which many students learn new ways of thinking about experience.”

The painter Kurt Roesch, who taught at the College from 1934 to 1972, put it even more forcefully. “Art education should be a legitimate field of education, and art should not be the leisure-time course which offers merely a kind of ‘creative outlet’ with incidental, emotional happenings,” he wrote early in the 1950’s.
“Art education makes sense only if art is conceived to be as central to life and to education as any other activity, and is not merely tolerated as a ‘cultural ornament.’”

Going—and growing—legit

As the decades passed, visual arts study—at Sarah Lawrence, and elsewhere—grew, and cinema, photography and theatre teachers soon followed, all defending their areas of expertise against a skeptical academic world. (Other colleges would run into similar resistance half a century later, by introducing television studies.)

Art education makes sense only if art is conceived to be as central to life and to education as any other activity, and is not merely tolerated as a ‘cultural ornament.’

“Sarah Lawrence was one of the first schools to believe that the creative and performing arts are a legitimate part of, and equal to, any other areas in a liberal academic education,” Barbara Kaplan, current dean of the College, said last spring. “We believe in teaching the arts within a liberal arts context and are as interested in teaching students who want to become professional artists as in teaching students who are simply interested in art and want to learn it as a way of looking at the world.”

Surprisingly, that includes art history, which has fought its own battle for a spot in liberal arts territory. “Even on the college level, art history was the last ‘liberal art’ to be accepted,” art history faculty member emeritus Philip Gould said in a 1983 interview. “Over the years, art history has been considered the least practical field as far as job potential is concerned.”

“During its early years, the College had shied away from giving courses in art history out of the fear that academic approaches would deaden the students' interest in art,” wrote William Rubin, former art history faculty member—and longtime curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art—in 1968.

“Indeed, considering the nature of the art historical discipline in the 1930’s, these fears were not ungrounded.”

Neither filmmaking nor film history made it into the curriculum until the mid-1960’s; this time, SLC was in the vanguard, offering “The Movies,” a team-taught course by literature teacher William Park and theatre teacher Wilford Leach. On most other campuses—once it became worthy of a curricular spot—film history was, for decades, overlaid with a heavy layer of theory that obscured the impact of its images. “I don’t want to sound like I’m against it totally,” says visual culture faculty member Gilberto Perez, “but questionable things came out of applying theoretical models like linguistics, and people lost sight of the visual.”

No vacuum

Sarah Lawrence film students, Park wrote in the early 1970’s, “explore all facets of film, from criticism to filmmaking, and in past years have combined filmmaking with courses in biology, visual arts, music and literature.” Truly, Sarah Lawrence philosophy has consistently held that nothing exists in a vacuum, and this view continues to shape the way students relate to the visual arts.

Current art history faculty member Lee McCormick Edwards ’76, for instance, encourages students to accompany her to performances of 19th-century operas that relate to class material.

“The date range of my courses is c. 1750-1910,” Edwards recently wrote. “I like to give students a good social and cultural overview of the period covered in a particular course so that they can more widely appreciate and understand works of art in their historical context. Related literature, theatre and film are discussed where appropriate.”

What’s true for the art historian is essential to the artist as well: Nothing can be studied by itself, and self-reflection can go only so far in producing art that has meaning. As Gould said two decades ago, “While artists should be in touch with their feelings, they should also be well informed, and well read, and generally well educated. The arts are connected to everything else we do and think.” Art students like Erin Mallay share this philosophy. She called the study of art—or any subject—by itself, “problematic.” “How can you be an artist without being a complete person,” she asks, “and how can you be a complete person without an academic component to your studies?”

I push them to discover themselves, to focus on a particular sensibility, being really creative and not just accepting what has been given to them.

—Tishan Hsu, faculty member

“What makes you an artist is what you read, what you think— not just technique,” said art writer and teacher Thyrza Goodeve ’80 at a 2001 Sarah Lawrence panel on “Critical Thinking, Critical Seeing.” Artist Janine Antoni ’86, Goodeve’s neighbor on the panel, agreed. “It was really my classes in literature, psychology, anthropology and religion that prepared me for graduate school,” said Antoni, celebrated for work that blurs the distinction between performance art and sculpture. “And when I got to graduate school, I realized that many of the other students were incredibly good at talking about art, but that they had nothing to make their art about.

“I come from a generation of artists who really don’t believe in a style. You can’t look at one of my works and say, ‘Oh, that looks like a Janine Antoni.’ What defines me is content, and there are certain things—from feminism and psychology, most prominently—that I’m dying to express.”

Content: It comes from the clash—and ultimately the connecting—of concepts across every academic boundary, mixed with the personality and goals of an individual student. A pedagogy like Sarah Lawrence’s can provide the energy for students to channel as they create their unique mixture. In fact, a goal of the new Monika A. and Charles A. Heimbold, Jr. Visual Arts Center, say the faculty who helped shape the building’s elements, is to make the linking of ideas as integral to arts study as it is elsewhere in the curriculum.

“So many of our students, particularly the art history and art theory students, are energized by their contact with artists,” said art history faculty member Joseph Forte at the 2001 panel. “Students may or may not be art practitioners, but they’re enlivened by the discourse of practitioners.” The architecture of the Heimbold Center, with its open studios and public access, encourages students from any discipline to walk through and see their peers making art— allowing the exchange of ideas to spill out from classrooms and into more casual, intimate dialogue. “The new building gives us a chance to add different options to our curriculum, moving us toward a richer, more interdisciplinary foundation for the visual arts,” said Barbara Kaplan. {Ed. Note: For more about the building, see Open Doors.}

Art for all

Sarah Lawrence has graduated many working artists and professionals in visual arts administration; the roughest recent count suggests upwards of 950. But teaching studio arts to nonartists is still essential to the College. The fundamental principle of a liberal arts education holds that all knowledge—and, indeed, any discipline that encourages critical thinking—is useful. And longtime psychology faculty member Rudolf Arnheim, celebrated for his influential works in the field of visual perception, took that principle even further. “Once it is recognized that productive thinking in any area of cognition is perceptual thinking, the central function of art in education becomes evident,” Arnheim wrote in his seminal book, Visual Thinking. “What is needed is the systematic training of visual sensitivity as an indispensable part of any educator’s preparation for his profession.”

“Given that it’s undergraduate teaching, we tend not to assume that the students will be artists,” current sculpture faculty member Tishan Hsu said recently. “Teaching is about process. We’re not concerned just with what the end product looks like. The student who is not ‘an artist’ can, in fact, be very talented, as talented as a person who’s done a lot of work already. The difference is that the nonartist may not have the drive to do it.

Hsu, whose own work pushes the line between sculpture and multimedia installations, sees visual arts study as a skill students can apply to many other processes, like problem-solving, trusting their ideas—even just thinking. “I push them to discover themselves,” he says, “to focus on a particular sensibility, being really creative and not just accepting what has been given to them.”

But there can also be a tide of nonacceptance among those who believe that developing one’s visual imagination may be pleasurable—even useful—but ultimately impractical. Particularly in a college like Sarah Lawrence, where a student takes but three courses a semester, there can be pressure to make each one “count.” In a 1998 interview, painter and art faculty member Ursula Schneider spoke to this assumption. “Even if someone is not going to be an artist,” she said, “the experience of making something with one’s hands, creating something, is a very basic, important activity.

“No matter what they do later, a positive experience with art will make them enjoy art, appreciate it and value it. Art is what remains, what reflects who we are, who we were, who we’re going to be.”

Schneider’s belief in a kind of transcendence of art study echoes another SLC faculty voice from 50 years earlier. Noted sculptor David Smith—a faculty member from 1948 to 1950, and father of artist Rebecca Smith ’76—brought a particular enthusiasm for educating his SLC students, whether they aspired to a life in art, or not. In a 1950 end-of-term reading list for his drawing and sculpture classes, Smith wrote, “I hope to have made art a life interest for you. Whether you make it or consume it, it can be an added dimension in living and understanding; a catharsis, a truth, the vision of free men.”

Beyond the studio

Smith, like most of the College’s studio arts faculty through the years, was a working artist. So can a nonartist teach art to other nonartists? Yes, again—“Can” and “has.” Psychologist Arnheim, in a catalogue description of “Design and Visual Perception” (a course he team-taught with artist Henry Kann), wrote, “This course grew out of the conviction that design is helped by the knowledge of perceptual problems, and that the study of perception without practical application tends to lack concreteness.”

The study of perception is a natural partner for the visual arts— and other science disciplines can provide understanding of the properties of the artist’s chosen medium. For example, in 2002 chemistry faculty member Ryan Hinrichs offered a photographic chemistry course that combines his interest in science with his “passion” for photography. In conference, he says, one student recreated 19th-century daguerreotypes (minus the toxic mercury). The purpose of the successful experiment? “If artists better understand their material, they will be better able to manipulate it,” Hinrichs said of the course, which he plans to teach again in fall 2004.

“Dealing with something like photography, where chemistry is involved,” he added, “it’s no longer just a black box where they press a button and an image comes out.”

And while we may take for granted that the study of visual culture is as essential a tool for the creative person as a pencil or a paintbrush, it hasn’t always been so, even at a place like Sarah Lawrence. Early on, the College was concerned that students’ imagination and drive would be “deadened” by the “provincial” traditions of academe. But since the domain of the art historian expanded from repositories of the past to the studios of “the avant-garde that was producing vital art,” former faculty member William Rubin wrote, “talking about art has existed as an important counterpart to making it.”

Talk — or make?

Let’s give the artists the last word. We started out talking with Erin Mallay ’04, who reminded us that words are essential to the development of the artist. Deadened by the academy? Hardly—this fall, her passionate drive to create will propel her halfway around the world to make art in a way that is completely new, cutting-edge and perhaps even controversial. She knows that words are imperative, but can only be the beginning.

Flash back a half-century. In a 1950 assignment for his sculpture students during interim week, David Smith wrote, “I was pleased with the Motherwell discussion Wednesday afternoon. Whether conclusive theories were arrived at was not the point. The questions and opinions were active, and the session lasted twice as long as I had expected, so we can call it a success.”

But enough talk about images, Smith cautions us. “Motherwell and I both want to remind you that art is made by doing and not talking.”

One might add that art is also made by learning.

A brief history of art history
Joseph Forte has seen different approaches to both learning and teaching in 26 years of teaching art history at the College. “When I first arrived, the emphasis was much more on the personal styles of artists, the chronologies of their works and the formal qualities of their works,” he said... | read more

What is talent?
Ansei Uchima was a mainstay of the Sarah Lawrence studio art department from 1967 to 1988, teaching, chiefly, printmaking. As an artist, Uchima created works in a variety of media that can be found in museums and galleries around the world... | read more