Nov 21st Session 7B

Presentation 1: New Guide to Mexico: Teaching About Mexican Art, Elizabeth Garber

In South of the border: Mexico in the American Imagination, 1914-1947, Miller and Oles (1993) argue that the idea of Mexico in the US imagination is associated with quaintness, backwardness, and the exotic and romantic, as exemplified by art produced by non-Mexicans from the 1910s through the 1940s. Teaching about Mexico in k-12 classrooms has been tied, during and since this period, to ideas of folk craft and rural and Indigenous populations. As well, it is tied in a looser way to Mexicanidad, the movement to develop a national identity based on the Indigenous roots of the country rather than its colonial past. This study reviews coverage in The School Arts Magazine from roughly the same period that Miller and Oles studied, 1919-1948, an important time in Mexico because of social, economic, and political reforms following the Revolution of 1910 and a period when Europeans, US Americans, and other peoples paid particular attention to Mexican art.

Presentation 2: Lessons from Dorothy Dunn: The Studio at Santa Fe Indian School, Elise Chevalier

Dorothy Dunn served as the first director of the painting program, known as the “Studio,” at the Santa Fe Indian School (SFIS) from 1932 to 1937. Dunn’s Studio launched the careers of several prominent artists, influencing the course of Native American painting in the Southwest throughout the following decades. This paper contextualizes the Studio within social, educational, and legal reforms of the early 20th century and analyzes key features of Studio pedagogy. The establishment of a painting program at SFIS in 1932 hinged on contemporaneous social and political shifts in United States policy towards Native peoples in North America, the “Indian New Deal.” New Indian Service leadership encouraged changes in boarding school curriculum, including arts and crafts training, of which Dunn’s Studio was a part. Drawing from Dunn’s published writings, documents from the Dorothy Dunn Kramer archives, and scholarly criticism, this paper analyzes Dunn’s pedagogy by examining Dunn’s concept of “authenticity” in Native art, her view of teacher authority, and her core values as an educator. Dunn, an Anglo woman trained at School of the Art Institute of Chicago, attempted to develop a curriculum which connected Pueblo, Navajo, and Apache students with aesthetic traditions of their respective communities. However, the Studio pedagogy was rife with internal contradictions. Dunn’s ideals were irreconcilable with the reality of a post-Contact society and the colonialist nature of her position as a representative of the U.S. government.

Presentation 3: The Highwaymen’s Story: Landscape Painting in the Shadow of Jim Crow, Kristin Congdon, presented by Laurie Hicks

The Highwaymen are 26 African American landscape painters (25 men and one woman) who began painting as young adults in the 1950s to the early 1970s during Jim Crow times, in and around Fort Pierce, Florida. This paper describes the now highly honored group, placing their art education within the context of their segregated community, an astute art teacher, the open studio door of a white artist, A. E. “Bean” Backus, and a time and place of optimism for both blacks and whites. Using the work of George Lipsitz, who describes the “Black spatial imaginary” as “art-based community making” as opposed to “community-based art making” and Ta-Nehisi Coates, who explores what it is like to inhabit a black body, the Highwaymen’s African American aesthetic and educational resources are explored. Their boundaried community is seen not as a devalued space but as a place that can be used as a library. The audience who views the Highwaymen’s landscape paintings are acknowledged as active members of the aesthetic process that turns the tables on western approaches to valuing art. Ways in which their story fits into the Civil Rights Movement, changing the lives of both blacks and whites, is described and implications for the history of art education are noted.