CAA News Today
Help Art History Teaching Resources (AHTR) Teach the Importance of Design History
posted by CAA — October 01, 2018
ArtHistoryTeachingResources.org
Funding Sought: $4,000
Every day, across thousands of universities and high schools in the US, students learn about the history of art from prehistory to the present. Very rarely is design history incorporated into this curriculum. Art History Teaching Resources (AHTR)—a non-profit teaching resource site in the visual arts—wants to change this.
AHTR has collaborated with CAA’s Committee on Design to propose an initial collection of online teaching resources related to design history of the last two hundred years that will enable university-level and AP instructors to confidently teach them in foundational art and design history survey classes. The resources will be hosted online at arthistoryteachingresources.org in an area clearly marked as “design history” content.
Like AHTR’s existing resources already, the Design History Teaching Resources will include scholarly, well-researched, and peer-reviewed lecture outlines, image clusters, and bibliographies, as well as innovative digital videos and links to other Open Educational Resources (OERs) for students and teachers. The resources will remain freely accessible and open to all under a Creative Commons license.
To realize these resources AHTR needs to raise a modest sum of $4,000. If you might consider supporting this venture with a donation large or small, and would like to see the budget outline, timeline for completion, or any further details about the project, please contact: info@arthistorytr.org
Hunter O’Hanian in Conversation with Eric Segal, Director of Education and Curator of Academic Programs at the Harn Museum
posted by CAA — September 04, 2018
CAA’s executive director, Hunter O’Hanian, recently visited the Harn Museum of Art in Gainesville, Florida to speak with Eric Segal, the museum’s director of education and curator of academic programs, about the role of academic art museums and Resources for Academic Art Museum Professionals (RAAMP).
A project of CAA supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, RAAMP aims to strengthen the educational mission of academic museums and their parent organizations by providing a publicly accessible repository of resources, online forums, and relevant news and information.
Watch and read the interview below.
Hunter O’Hanian: Hello everybody. My name’s Hunter O’Hanian and I’m the director of the College Art Association. I’m very pleased today to be with Eric Segal, who is the director of education and curator of academic programs here at the Harn Museum in Gainesville, Florida. Hello, Eric. How are you?
Eric Segal: Hunter, I’m doing well. It’s great to have you here in Gainesville.
HO: Well, it’s absolutely beautiful. It’s been great to be spending time here and to go through the museum. Before we start, tell us a little bit about your background. I know you’ve been a CAA member since you were in graduate school, but tell us a little bit about your professional background.
ES: Sure. CAA since 1993.
HO: Yay.
ES: I actually started my college career as a computer engineering major. So, it was a big change when my sister made me take an art history class and that led me into art history, and I studied American art subsequently at UCLA, Masters.
HO: And, I think you won a Terra award, too.
ES: I was really fortunate to have a Terra award in 1999.
HO: Great.
ES: And that was very exciting for me and helped me in my studies. Following the completion of my doctoral dissertation, I took an assistant professor position here at University of Florida. So, I was in the art history department teaching undergraduate and graduate courses in American art, African American art, illustration and even occasionally about museum theory. Later, in 2010, a position opened up in the museum where I was able to take on museum practice a bit more. That position was the academic programs position, which had just been created as the museum realized it was important to draw closer to the university. At that time, before the position opened up, there were perhaps a few dozen courses using the museum, because there was no one doing the outreach to work with faculty across campus.
Since that time, about 10 years, we’ve maybe increased that tenfold. The number of courses, the number of faculty, the number of disciplines and students using the museum—we’ve been really delighted to expand that quite a bit.
HO: That’s great. So, [the] University of Florida here in Gainesville, about 50,000 students here on campus.
ES: Yes.
HO: You have an art history department here. And do you have a studio arts department as well?
ES: It’s a combined school of art and art history and they’re both very robust. There’s a faculty of about seven in art history and the tens, twenties in art and they’re all great colleagues. In fact, in 2019 we will have the studio art faculty show here at the museum, which comes [around] every five years.
HO: Wonderful. So, the Harn Museum has been around since 1990. Roughly, how big is it? How many square feet is the facility?
ES: The museum is about 26,000 square feet.
HO: That’s big for an academic art museum.
ES: It is. We have all of our storage onsite. We have great galleries devoted to five collecting areas. We collect in African [art], in Asian [art], in photography, in modern and contemporary art. And we have a curator in each area. So, we’re very lucky. Many academic museums don’t have such a robust curatorial staff. And we also have classrooms where we can do teaching, where we can bring objects out from storage in order to connect with academic classes on campus if we have a theme we want to try to address, say, “urban imagery.” It may be better just with works that are in storage, rather than those that happen to be on view at a given time.
HO: And 11,000 objects in the collection?
ES: That’s right.
HO: Wow. And so how do you go about procuring objects for the collection?
ES: Right. So our curators are very active along with our development officer and our director in building relationships. So, we do have an endowment for acquisitions, but many of our acquisitions do come through gifts from donors, and that would be in all areas.
HO: I noticed too in going through the museum with you that you also have a fair number of Florida artists in your collection. Can you speak about some of them?
ES: We have Florida artists from the 19th century through the present. Some of them are former faculty at UF with international and national reputations, and some include folk artists who work locally and are widely collected and whose work reveals unexpected and inspiring perspectives on our own community. So, we have both highly-trained professional artists and amateur or untrained artists.
HO: It seems to me also that you’ve done a lot of work in your role as far as inviting members of the local Gainesville community, people who are not part of the academic campus on or into the museum through different programs. Can you talk generally about how you’ve been programming in trying to bring the local Gainesville community into the museum?
ES: Sure. So, as curator of academic programs, I obviously personally focus a lot on the academic community, but I’m also director of education as you mentioned, and I have a staff with whom I work to engage the community. I also consider that my responsibility as well. We have public programs that I think of as creating layers of access. There’s programs that are traditional museum programs of lectures and educational docent tours, which have immediate appeal to people who are familiar with museums and have a museum-going experience and know they might want to learn something about an exhibition, but we also have our whole range of activities that invite the community in perhaps for a first time. We’re creating museum goers out of our local citizenry.
So, those might be experiences that sound more fun and social, but include informal learning opportunities. We have a museum nights event once a month which is open in the evenings. So, lots of programs such as that, but we also think it’s really important to reach audiences that aren’t even looking at the museum as a possible venue for leisure or art experiences and we find it’s really effective to work with the local public schools. All children go to schools and we’re able to work with them to provide transportation and rich tour experiences and programs that engage children and parents as well. Creating the opportunity to connect with families that might not be thinking of the museum, but may learn from the children that it’s a really welcoming, relevant, and meaningful space.
HO: Overall for the whole museum, how big is the staff here?
ES: The staff, including security and frontline staff, is about fifty.
HO: Wow. Great.
ES: So, it’s pretty robust.
HO: And for academic programs and education, how big is that?
ES: In education, we have six full-time staff and a number of part-time staff who support programs and activities. So, we’re also very lucky. There are smaller museums that are working on a narrower range of staff resources.
HO: What challenges do you see for the education programs here at the Harn Museum going forward?
ES: Well, you did ask about our connecting with community audiences and our challenge is to continue to grow that and be relevant and to let audiences know that we are welcoming. We want to reach audiences that have not seen themselves in museums. So, diversity in our audiences is something we’ve done a lot to improve with by partnering with local groups, with activists, with people in different communities. We’ve done a lot to improve our diversity of audiences, but we’re still expanding there. In staff, that’s another area where we really need to work hard and we have focused part of our strategic plan extension into 2019 to focus on developing new ways to build diverse staff members across the museum, including in senior staff, which as we know in museums in the United States is a real problem.
HO: If you were speaking to someone else in your position, maybe in a more rural location or a smaller facility, and they wanted to engage the community more, what advice would you give them?
ES: That’s a great question. I think that it’s really important to let audiences know that they’re welcome and to my mind, the best way to get that message out there is by being out in the community, attending community fora on relevant topics, being part of discussions of education and educational resources, being part of discussions on how universities are trying to engage—the local university or college may be trying to engage the community, both on campus and in the community. Being a face in the community makes you somewhat approachable and starts to build the relationship that’s hard to build with an advertisement in the paper that says, “Everyone’s welcome. Admission is free”. Hopefully.
So, that would be one of the first steps that I think I would try in that position is to really be part of the community and to make contact with community leaders who already have authentic connections to different members of different areas of the community.
HO: We’re going to be recording some video practicum about different areas in the museum and we’ll get into some more of those details later, but it also seems as if you’ve developed good relationships with different departments within the college itself. Can you speak a little bit about doing that and how you go about being successful there?
ES: Some of our failures in doing that have been—not that I wouldn’t continue to do it—you know, I go and give a talk to the faculty senate and I send a letter to all faculty and I get a lot of emails back, if I’m lucky, that say, you know, I saw your email but I didn’t read it last year because you sent it to everyone. So, the hard work is making individual contacts either by email but also being out there again on campus. I try to serve on committees, be it in the international center or on undergraduate curriculum, wherever it might be useful, seeing that the museum could be a resource that can be built into emerging programs and projects. So, being at the table is important. And then building the individual connections to faculty. One faculty member in a language and literature department can be your ambassador to other faculty members.
HO: And, of course you’re familiar with RAAMP resources for academic art museum professionals, and the Harn has been one of the original stakeholders, and this has been a great project that CAA has worked on with the Mellon Foundation.
ES: Yes.
HO: We’ve been very happy with the success. As a resource out there, how have you been able to use RAAMP and also were there any changes you’d like to see to it or more things you’d like to see us add to it?
ES: Yes. RAAMP is a great resource. It’s been wonderful to see it grow and the website has, for anyone who hasn’t visited it recently, really been improved in the last year, making it searchable in a way that it wasn’t before. So, it’s a resource where you can actually find the materials that are there pretty easily now and that makes it especially useful. So, for me, it’s been great as a source of inspiration when I come up against a problem such as “How do I…?” I haven’t found this one yet, but one of my problems is how do I connect with low temperature physics? I’ve never solved that problem, but when someone posts that to RAMP, that’s where I’m going find it.
HO: Great. So, for any of you out there who have an answer to that quick question as to how to deal with low temperature physics, please post it on RAAMP now.
ES: That’s right. But, it’s really a great source of inspiration [for] problem solving and models that exist out there. It’s also I think increasingly going to continue to serve the role of [a] point for conversations, which is something that I’m really looking forward to, because sometimes someone hasn’t posted on low temperature physics, but they may have already done it. And so it’s a chance to get feedback and ideas. I’m also really looking forward to in the future ideas about building diversity, as we discussed earlier. How it’s being pursued at other museums, both in terms of audiences but also in terms of staff. I think as a community academic program officers in museums need to come together to build the pipeline of museum professionals. That includes recruiting students when they’re young. I’ve been working with high school students in the past week to just tell them that museums are a career and that’s important.
It includes supporting internships. I think that discussion can happen in RAAMP about how we can sort of strategically create a pool that we’re all going draw on to diversify our staff. I’m also looking forward to learning from RAAMP more about ideas for academic programs working with development offices.
HO: Interesting. The fundraising piece.
ES: Yes. The fundraising piece. We’re all challenged in our budgets. In the past year, we’ve developed a program on early learning that we built with the college of education, and we built a really robust project, and someone said: “You need to do a video for this.” And that video has been helpful for us in developing private funds to continue to pursue this program that provides education for headstart students.
HO: Which is great, because it gives potential funders the opportunity to see what the programs are really about and be able to see that.
ES: It is. And that’s the kind of thing I’d love to share on RAAMP and also learn from others their strategies for taking our programs and having them be tools for building our funding.
HO: Yes. I’ve been recently reviewing the session proposals for the upcoming CAA conference in New York in February of 2019 and there are a lot of sessions that are coming up for professionals in academic art museums, because I do think it’s a growing field that a lot of PhD students or PhD holders and Masters will be going into it in the future. So, there will be a lot at this year’s conference in February.
ES: That’s really great to hear. And I hope that non-museum professionals, hope that artists and art historians will attend those as well, because their voices are really useful to be part of those conversations that art museum professionals are having. I was thinking about the sort of professionalization that another area of RAAMP is going help us connect on is going to be evaluation. Museums are always challenged in terms of evaluation. We know it’s important to prove that what we do is effective. Evaluation is time-consuming or expensive or both, and sharing expertise and ideas in that area I think is going to be something that’s going to really help us to build our case in the future.
HO: Yes, I mean, ultimately all museums are educational institutions, and we have to be able to quantify how that happened.
ES: I think that is the case.
HO: Eric, thank you so much for your time here. It’s been great to tour the museum and I really have appreciated it. And so good luck with all your work going forward.
ES: Thank you, Hunter, for sharing your interest of the museum with our RAAMP audiences.
Explore SAH Archipedia, an Online Encyclopedia of American Architecture and Landscapes
posted by CAA — July 09, 2018
Hosted by CAA-affiliated society Society of Architectural Historians (SAH), SAH Archipedia is an online encyclopedia of US architecture and landscapes that contains peer-reviewed essays, photos, and maps. Since its launch in 2012, SAH Archipedia has grown in scope and the full version now contains nearly 20,000 building histories covering all 50 US states.
Currently, entries for over 3,700 structures are available to the public through the site’s open access counterpart, SAH Archipedia Classic Buildings.
SAH recently announced that SAH Archipedia will be made open access in 2019. Help SAH in this effort by donating before August 31 to secure their NEH matching grant.
Call for Contributions to RAAMP (Resources for Academic Art Museum Professionals)
posted by CAA — December 12, 2017
Given the spirited discussion taking place on a number of curatorial listservs and websites, RAAMP (Resources for Academic Art Museum Professionals) invites submissions to add to its publicly accessible online archive for individuals working in academic art museums.
Examples include museum strategic plans, campaigns for outreach to campus communities, and strategies for diversity and inclusion in the academic art museum, and include PDFs, links, videos, and more.
Click here to submit resources.
You can also browse the existing resources, submit updates, or join the conversation on Humanities Commons.
What is RAAMP?
RAAMP serves to promote scholarship, advocacy, and discussion related to the role of academic art museums and their contribution to the educational mission of their parent institutions. To this end, it functions as a publicly accessible online repository; it collects, stores, and shares resources.
RAAMP is a project of the CAA with support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
CAA Launches CAA Commons in Partnership with MLA
posted by CAA — August 03, 2017
Dear CAA members,
For the past year we have watched conversations grow in discussion groups on CAA Connect, our online social community for members. We see how our members want to stay in touch and develop ideas around the visual arts and their work outside of our Annual Conference. Our CAA-Getty International Program Scholars, for example, have a discussion group with 280 posts and twenty library items. Our Resources for Academic Art Museum Professionals (RAAMP) group has over 100 resources posted.
Now it’s time to expand the network. CAA is joining forces with the Modern Language Association (MLA) to become part of their Humanities Commons platform, and CAA will also have its own CAA Commons network as part of the partnership. The two networks (Humanities Commons and CAA Commons) will serve different purposes for our members, but we believe each will be of value. Humanities Commons is an open-access network where one can create a professional profile, discuss common interests in groups, develop new publications, and share work. The Humanities Commons network is open to anyone. CAA Commons will be the CAA member portal on the same network, where CAA members only can start discussion groups, contribute to discussion groups, and post resources for professionals in the visual arts.
CAA is not alone in joining Humanities Commons. Other members include The Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES), Association for Jewish Studies (AJS), and the Modern Language Association (MLA), of course. Going forward we expect many more associations and organizations to join the network, creating a dynamic, interdisciplinary forum that CAA members can explore and use to expand the reach of their professional work.
Features of CAA Commons and Humanities Commons
- Join discussion groups or create your own on CAA Commons or on Humanities Commons
- Browse the Core Repository or deposit your own work: A collection of papers, images, and materials with open-access
- Create your own WordPress Website
Logging in to CAA Commons and Humanities Commons
Which email should I use to create an account?
If you do not have a Humanities Commons or CAA Commons account, you must create one. The CAA Support page can guide you through creating an account. Please note when creating an account, you must use your primary CAA member email address. If you do not remember this email address please log in to your CAA account to check.
I already have a Humanities Commons account
If you already have a Humanities Commons account, then you will automatically be added to the CAA Commons platform and have full access.
Please note that you DO NOT use your CAA Member ID to log into Humanities Commons or CAA Commons.
For more information about creating an account and extensive FAQs about CAA Commons and Humanities Commons, please visit the CAA Support page.
By joining CAA Commons, you are accepting the Terms & Conditions of the platform.
If you have any questions, please contact us at caa@hcommons.org.
Sincerely,
Hunter O’Hanian
Executive Director
Chief Executive Officer
Kathleen FitzpatricK
Project Director,
Humanities Commons, Modern Language Association
CAA Arts and Humanities Advocacy Toolkit
posted by admin — March 02, 2017
“The phone calls and emails began coming in a few weeks ago to the Nebraska congressional delegation — all Republicans, and all potentially crucial to an expected fight over the very existence of the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities under President Trump.” –“How to Block Trump Arts Cuts? Groups Look for G.O.P. Help,” The New York Times, February 28, 2017
Arts and Humanities Advocates are already taking action. CAA encourages its members and all advocates of the arts and humanities to be persistent and do more.
On January 23, 2017, CAA released a statement condemning the proposed budget cuts to the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, among other federal agencies.
“For more than a century, the College Art Association (CAA) has represented art historians, artists, museum professionals, designers, and others who think and care about the visual arts and its impact on our culture. We do this in part through direct advocacy for artistic and academic freedom.
Like many other Americans, we have closely watched the proposed changes to the federal government. Recent news reports reveal that the US President intends to propose the elimination of funding for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). This proposal is reportedly based in part on a recommendation by the Heritage Foundation that states, ‘As the U.S. Congress struggles to balance the federal budget and end the decades-long spiral of deficit spending, few programs seem more worthy of outright elimination than the National Endowment for the Arts.’
We offer our complete and total opposition to these efforts.”
The current administration’s proposal to cut funding for the NEA and NEH is based on a 1997 Heritage Foundation report, titled “Ten Good Reasons to Eliminate Funding for the National Endowment for the Arts.”
To support our statement, CAA has put together an Arts and Humanities Advocacy Tool Kit to help our members and anyone who wants to advocate for the arts and humanities. Information is power, after all. The Tool Kit information is pulled from a variety of sources that aid in forging partnerships, obtaining accurate data on the impact of the arts and humanities, and actions one can take in order to use your voice effectively.
We encourage you to contact us at CAA also. CAA staff will attend both Arts Advocacy Day and Humanities Advocacy Day. The more stories we can share as we meet with colleagues and representatives, the more influence we collectively bring to the table.
Locate and Call
Call your representatives about any and all pressing issues.
Find your local representative
This is a helpful guide on how to contact your local representative:
The How-to Guide to Contacting your Local Official
Face-to-Face
Face-to-face meetings with representatives are the most effective way to deliver your message. Hand your representative a physical document with facts and figures and be sure to explain who you are and how the group you represent relates to your local politician’s constituency.
Town Halls are one good way to voice your opinion to your local representative in person. The Federation for American Immigration Reform has a guide on how to attend Town Hall meetings.
You can also organize and request an appointment at the offices of your representative. The National Priorities Project has a good guide to setting up office appointments.
Sign Petitions
There are myriad petitions floating around these days, addressing vast numbers of topics. It can be hard to keep track or know which petitions to sign.
Change.org remains one of the best places to find a database of petitions by topic. The site also provides explanations and background information for each petition.
To sign the petition to support the NEA and NEH you can sign the White House created petition, the Change.org petition, and the Arts Action Fund petition.
Advocates can also send postcards directly to members of Congress that are customized with their artwork or other artworks, thanks to the #savethearts Postcard Project.
Arm Thyself with Data and Information
There is lots of good data about the impact of the arts and humanities on people and places. The National Humanities Alliance is working on several data gathering and mapping projects.
Americans for the Arts is also a hub for data and information about various federal arts agencies and arts education in America.
Data on the arts and humanities can also be found on the National Endowment for the Arts Facts & Figures page and the National Endowment for the Humanities Impact Reports.
This nifty website is a running tally of all the programs that the NEA funded in 2016.
You can also search the NEA website to see all grants they have awarded since 1996. Check to see what organizations in your local area are funded by the NEA.
The same search for grants can be done on the NEH website.
RAAMP—A Digital Resource for Academic Museum Professionals
posted by CAA — October 06, 2016
RAAMP (Resources for Academic Art Museum Professionals) is an online repository and forum that collects, stores, and shares resources to promote scholarship, advocacy, and discussion related to the role of academic art museums and their contribution to the educational mission of their parent institutions. RAAMP aims to strengthen the educational mission of academic museums and their parent organizations, and is oriented toward colleagues at academic art museums as well as university and other museum colleagues. RAAMP is a project of CAA made possible with a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
The principal investigators for RAAMP are N. Elizabeth Schlatter, deputy director and curator of exhibitions at the University of Richmond Museums in Virginia and an officer of CAA’s Board of Directors; and Celka Straughn, Andrew W. Mellon Director of Academic Programs at the University of Kansas’s Spencer Museum of Art and a member of CAA’s Museum Committee. Schlatter says, “Art museums at colleges and universities today are creating some of the most dynamic connections to their academic communities. RAAMP creates a virtual place to share these accomplishments and gain inspiration from colleagues. Academic museums can use examples created by their peers and posted on RAAMP to enhance their offerings to faculty and students.”
Straughn adds, “They can find curricular materials utilizing museum resources to emphasize critical thinking skills or sample reports that demonstrate and quantify how a campus museum contributes to its parent institution. RAAMP is also a place to promote professional development activities, to find research related to academic museums, and to engage in discussions with fellow professionals.”
RAAMP was created in response to a 2013 CAA Annual Conference session organized by the organization’s Museum Committee. Attendees at the session expressed a need to have a digital space where they could easily share information and strategies for communicating how their academic museums contribute to the educational mission of their parent institutions.
RAAMP would not be possible without the help of its partner organizations: Association of American Museum Curators (AAMC), Association of American Museum Director (AAMD), and Association of Academic Museums & Galleries (AAMG), and representatives from the following US-based academic museum stakeholders:
The Art Galleries at Lafayette College, Bowdoin College Museum of Art, The Fowler Museum at the UCLA, Galleries of Contemporary Art at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs; The Hood Museum at Dartmouth University, Lowe Art Museum at the University of Miami, Neuberger Museum at SUNY Purchase College, Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art at the University of Florida, Schnitzer Museum at the University of Oregon, Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago, Spelman College Museum of Art, Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas, University of Iowa Museum of Art, University of Richmond Museums
Visit the RAAMP website to learn more.
Visit the RAAMP submissions page to submit materials.
Subscribe to CAA’s YouTube Channel!
posted by CAA — June 20, 2016
CAA’s YouTube channel is the home of videos from our Annual Conference, tutorials and presentations on fair use, and content on a variety of other topics. We ask our members “Why are you a CAA Member?” at our 2016 conference. Longtime conference attendees reflect on the impact of their experiences over the years in “In Their Own Words.”
Immerse yourself in social-practice art from our 2016 Distinguished Artists’ Interviews (Joyce Scott with George Ciscle and Rick Lowe with LaToya Ruby Frazier) and watch colleagues and friends honor art historians Richard Powell of Duke University and Linda Nochlin of the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.
The Cuban artist and activist Tania Bruguera is interviewed by Rachel Weiss, professor of arts administration and policy at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. William “Bro” Adams, chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, talks with Jane Chu, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts; and Jarl Mohn, president and CEO of National Public Radio, speaks about his personal connection to the arts.
Subscribe to CAA’s YouTube channel to stay up to date on all our videos!
Art History Pedagogy and Practice Now Live on Digital Commons
posted by michelle — June 13, 2016
Art History Teaching Resources (AHTR), in partnership with the Office of Library Services at the City University of New York (CUNY), is excited to announce the launch of Art History Pedagogy and Practice (AHPP) on Academic Works’ Digital Commons platform. Published by AHTR, a practitioner-led, open-educational resource for educators who address art history, visual culture, and material culture, AHPP is the first academic journal dedicated to the scholarship of teaching and learning in art history (SoTL-AH). The result of a two-year initiative, AHPP responds to a long-standing need to advance, collect, disseminate, and demonstrate pedagogical research specific to the discipline. The call for papers for the inaugural issue, forthcoming in fall 2016, is available on the AHTR website.
SoTL in Art History
AHPP results from a two-year initiative that sought to examine the ways in which art historians devote time, effort, and energy to classroom teaching, curriculum development, and student engagement. Generously funded by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, AHTR began preliminary research in 2015, which included a field-wide survey conducted by Randi Korn and Associates and a literature review assessing existing pedagogical scholarship in art history. These findings were synthesized in a white paper that demonstrated the need for SoTL-AH to be acknowledged as a legitimate area of intellectual inquiry by the institutions and communities encompassing academic art history. As a peer-reviewed journal devoted to SoTL-AH, AHPP will facilitate this process by providing scholars a forum to share research on pedagogical topics and by encouraging further academic investigation and discourse around teaching and learning in art history.
Art History Teaching Resources
AHPP builds on the success of AHTR as a platform to exchange ideas related to pedagogy in art history. Founded on dual goals to raise the value of the academic labor of teaching and to provide peer support across ranks of tenured, tenure-track, and contingent instructors, AHTR began as a collaboration between Michelle Millar Fisher at the Graduate Center and Karen Shelby at Baruch College in 2011. Fisher, then a graduate teaching fellow with a background in museum education, and Shelby, then assistant professor of art history, organized meetings where colleagues shared teaching materials and experiences. These gatherings suggested potential for a digital forum to connect a wider community of practitioners and gave rise to the arthistoryteachingresources.org website, which launched publicly in 2013.
Since that time, the site has had more than 400,000 hits from over 91,000 educators in K-12, postsecondary institutions, and art museums, and from academic support staff including reference librarians and curriculum designers. AHTR’s administration has similarly expanded to a leadership collective of art historians, ranging in experience from early career scholars to those well established in the field, and an advisory network, assembled for expertise and leadership in art history, museum education, and digital humanities and united by their interest in advancing pedagogical research. The unique relationship between AHPP and AHTR will give scholars access to diverse resources about teaching and learning—including lesson plans and the AHTR Weekly on the OER—as well as peer-reviewed articles published in the journal.
AHPP in Digital Commons
In choosing the Digital Commons platform, AHPP is enthusiastic to extend the relationship with CUNY that was first established when AHTR was born in the Graduate Center’s New Media Lab with support from Baruch Learning and Technology Grants. In keeping with the site’s origins, AHTR also contracted CHIPS, a New York web-development studio known for innovative work with cultural institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History and 82nd and Fifth. CHIPS also redesigned the AHTR website in 2014 and created the AHPP logo.
The editors, editorial collective, and advisory board of AHPP are excited to join CUNY’s Office of Library Services in the broader open-access movement and look forward to the ways in which journal contributions will be used in the fields of SoTL, art history, and beyond. AHPP worked closely with librarians at the Office of Library Services to develop editorial policies and guidelines that are transparent to authors and readers.
AHTR and CAA
Members of the AHTR advisory board have recently collaborated with CAA’s Education Committee. At the 2016 Annual Conference in Washington, DC, Renee McGarry spoke on “Crowdsourcing the Art History Survey: How Communities and Conversations Might Help Shape the Global Survey 3.0” in a session cochaired by Anne R. Norcross, an Education Committee member. In addition, AHTR advisory-board member Kelly Donahue Wallace has been collaborating with the committee’s Denise Baxter, including leading a workshop on SoTL initiatives at next year’s conference in New York.
Smarthistory Call for Essays
posted by CAA — May 09, 2016
Smarthistory seeks to bring the expertise of individual scholars and curators to a new global audience. Smarthistory is now an independent not-for-profit organization and a leading resource for teaching and learning art history (Smarthistory received 13.5 million pageviews from more than 190 countries in 2015 alone). All content on Smarthistory is available for free and without advertising. Thanks in part to a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, in the last 15 months Smarthistory published 230 essays and videos with an emphasis on global content including the art of Africa, the Americas, Asia, and the Pacific Islands. Read more about Smarthistory here.
If you are interested in sharing your expertise in the form of short introductory essays, Smarthistory could really use your help. The website’s founders, Steven Zucker and Beth Harris, seek art historians, archaeologists, and conservators in many areas of study; they have a particular need for specialists in African, Asian, Native American, and Oceanic art.
Smarthistory uses Trello, an interactive list of essay topics chosen to support introductory art history courses. If you are interested in contributing, send an email to Zucker and Harris and please include your CV (beth@smarthistory.org and steven@smarthistory.org). If everything is in order, you will be added to the Trello Board, so that you can claim a topic in your area of specialization. If there is a topic that you feel should be added to Trello, please let Zucker and Harris know.