Nov 20th Session 4C

Presentation 1: Becoming a Curator of Memories: Memorializing Memory and Place in Art Making for Art Education, Heidi C. Powell

The purpose of this presentation is to describe and discuss memorializing memory and place in art making and discusses the theory and importance of re/collecting and re/telling memories through story and object making.  This presentation addresses 1) Art/ifacts as the memory palaces of personal and community identity, 2) Memorializing memory in arts education, and 3) Historical memory and the circularity of knowledge.

People, stories, and objects create the very curriculums of life and influence the choices we make as artists, art educators, and humans in a world of constant change, and influence what we come to know.  This presentation is a reflective investigation of memory and object making funded by family history, art making, and art education.   According to Rubin (2005, p. 79) the strength of recollection of an event can be predicted by the “vividness of its visual imagery,” and much of what is remembered is shared cultural knowledge and expectations.  As our recollections filter through our memory and emerge through story, it is important to acknowledge that the re/collecting is grounded in cultural nuances and ripe with personal values and emotions.  How do we effectively re/collect our experiences in art and art making? The role memory plays in the narratives of success, failure, change, and hope as an artist and art educator in our field is an invisible force that we often overlook.  Memory helps us “become,” influences how we see the world, and has the potential to leave legacies of knowledge and hope for those who come after us as a form of “memory palaces,” these memory palaces are the intangible of what exists in our work as artists and art educators and find voice in the tangible object becoming both truthful and imaginative reconstructions and constructions, built out of the actions, reactions and/or experience in the human journey.

Presentation 2: Impact of Two Female Art Educators in South Central Kansas, Mary Sue Foster

The purpose is to tell the story of two female artists who were teachers and leaders in south central Kansas, Elizabeth Sprague (1862-1936) and Sue Jean Covacevich (1905-1998).  Their paintings and prints are in the collections of two prestigious art museums, one a city-owned art museum, the Wichita Art Museum, which belongs to the largest city in the state and the other, The Beach Art Museum at Kansas State University, a land-grant university, Manhattan.  Both women carried the mantle of “pioneer” as they had large roles in establishing interest in the fine arts in the area.  Both taught in higher education, starting art departments.  One also taught in a public school setting and both encouraged art appreciation and practice, but most importantly, each helped lay a foundation for a thriving visual culture in the area.  In 1901 when she arrived from Boston, Ms Sprague established the art department at Fairmount College which later became Wichita State University.  In mid-century, Ms Covacevich established the art department at Southwestern College, Winfield, KS and pioneered an art therapy program at the Winfield State Hospital and Training Center.  Both women took their work beyond their studios to improve as much of their community as possible.  The proposed paper will compare and contrast the background of both women and elaborate on their individual legacies.  Their leadership skills laid the foundation for cultural growth which remains at a high level.  Their skills contributed to  the work of a small group of other female leaders in Wichita, some with high social standing.  The  result was a city with four art museums which enjoys strong support in the schools for music and art programs and has an outstanding symphony.  Ms Sprague came from a colonial Boston family while Ms Covacevich, the oldest of several children spent her early years on a farm in Wellington, Kansas, thirty miles from the Oklahoma border.  

The perspective for this study is directed by two art museum catalogues printed to accompany retrospective exhibits for Ms Covacevich, while a third art museum anniversary catalogue includes  information about Ms Sprague.  For the study interviews will be conducted with Teresa Grana, the younger woman’s daughter, who maintains homes in Washington D.C. and her mother’s home, Winfield, Kansas.

The methods, techniques or mode of inquiry used in the study is to compare and contrast the contributions of both women, review their backgrounds and the role of their mentors.  Each of the women studied with successful male artists while enrolled in higher education.  These mentorships had lasting influences, especially for Ms Covacevich as she remained in the area geographically close by.

The sources for data and evidence will be primarily in the print materials from both museums.  The images produced by both in prints and paintings provides more data.  Miss Sprague studied with Denman Ross (1853-1935), an artist and art educator at Harvard.  Ross’s lessons began with teaching students how to orchestrate shapes and colors on a flat surface as he promoted the idea of rules or a grammar to follow.  A gifted creator, Ross’s study of non-western art led to a revolutionary approach to art education, similar to the approach of another gifted creator, Arthur Wesley Dow who introduced the Japanese concept of notan, a harmonious arrangement of lights and darks, in his 1899 book, Composition.  The art principles taught by both men made art eminently teachable.  Ms Sprague became a committed disciple of Ross while Ms Covacevich promoted Dow’s ideas.  The illusionistic representation of the three dimensional world was rejected by Ross and Dow. Both emphasized the elements and principles of art in their classes.  As a young woman, Ms Covacevich was fortunate to study with painter who has a regional reputation, Mr. Birger Sandzen, professor of art at Bethany College, Lindsborg, KS.  He was well-versed in impressionist and post-impressionist movements and had been recruited from Sweden to teach at the small liberal arts college located in a Swedish immigrant community of Lindsborg in north central Kansas.  Mr. Sandzen painted Kansas and Colorado landscapes with heavy impasto and bright colors, inspiring his students, including Ms Covacevich.  

The conclusion of the study is directed toward understanding the passion both women had for art and their community.  Another is in understanding how each of their careers in art and art education were sustained for several decades during the early and mid 20th centuries when females were encouraged to remain in the home.  Speculation about the obstacles that stood in the way of the development of their artistic careers directs another point of view as well as consideration of the connections the two women share.

Presentation 3: Making Place through Mabel Spofford: Archival Materials, Assemblages, and Events, Christina Hanawalt & Sue Uhlig

While historic research involves locating and correlating information within primary and secondary sources “in order to communicate an understanding of past events,” the research process also involves interpretation to “recapture the nuances, personalities, and ideas that influence these events” (Elena, Katifori, Vassilakis, Lepouras, & Halatsis, 2011, p. 25).  Paul Bolin (2009) supports the role of interpretation in historical research, stating the writing of history “consists of the historian’s ability to choreograph a dance of compatibility between the fragments of a known past and a world constructed through reasoned imagination and grounded speculation of the historian” (p. 110). In addition, Bolin (2009) encourages us to explore the history of our field in “new and adventuresome ways” (p. 110). Henry Glassie (1999) argues, “history is a story about the past, told in the present, and designed to be useful in constructing the future” (p. 6), and that history is known through the objects of the past that happen to live in the present.  In this paper, we take up Bolin’s challenge by using archival research as the basis for an imagined and speculative interpretation of the life and learning of early twentieth century art educator, Mabel Spofford. By placing archival documents in relation to relevant historical, social, and cultural contexts, a story emerges about the personal and social motivations of Mabel Spofford as an art educator whose life was inextricably intertwined with place.  The story we tell is of Mabel Spofford as a place-maker—an individual who embodied place not as a passive recipient, but as an active and critical agent of place.  Our original introduction to Mabel as place-maker began with a handful of documents and artifacts in the archives of our university in Pennsylvania, but expanded exponentially upon our discovery of rich archives in Cape Ann, Massachusetts and a visit to the places she called home. Our paper traces Mabel’s place-making through the materiality of personal records, collections of art education ephemera, teaching documents, her Bachelor’s thesis, and her documented experience in a mural course with Viktor Lowenfeld during a Penn State Summer Art Institute in 1947.  For art educators, Mabel’s life as a collector, educator, and risk-taker serves as an exemplar of the kind of critical place-based pedagogy for which Mark Graham (2011) argues; her life was both place-based in her connection to the local and critical in her understanding of “how culture creates boundaries, privilege, power, and inequality” (Graham, 2007, as cited in Graham 2011, p. 65).  The pedagogical force of Mabel’s life and work exudes the importance of place as intertwined with personal narrative, understanding, and criticality.  Our imaginative and speculative account of Mabel Spofford’s life suggests that educators encourage their students to explore an understanding of space (Massey, 2005) as being relationally interactive, pluralistic in containing co-existing narratives, and in a constant state of becoming as “[i]t is never finished; never closed” (p. 9), so that students might understand their own roles as active place-makers.