Surveying the Survey (2017)
Twenty years ago, the art history survey seemed to be heading toward radical reconfiguration yet today, at many institutions, it is as entrenched as ever. How has it changed? How does it need to change? How do you balance coverage versus depth? What is included and what is omitted? What effects does this have? And how does the survey relate to the larger curriculum? We invite submissions that consider the traditional art historical survey, that fight against the traditional survey, that offer alternatives to the survey, or that consider both its potentials and its pitfalls.
Session Chairs / Président(e)s de séance:
Andrea Korda, University of Alberta korda@ualberta.ca
Anne Dymond, University of Lethbridge anne.dymond@uleth.ca
Abstracts:
Art History 101 and 102 are the bane of our existence! M. Elizabeth Boone, betsy.boone@ualberta.ca
Professor, History of Art, Design, and Visual Culture, University of Alberta
These classes, which typically survey the western tradition from antiquity through the twentieth century, have received poor marks from students, who complain about memorizing images, their focus on a Eurocentric tradition and the fine (as opposed to applied) arts, and the irrelevance of history to their twenty-first century lives. For their part, senior faculty avoid teaching these classes, claiming they lack expertise to teach outside their fields of specialization and passing them over to sessional instructors and graduate students. Yet, the first-year introduction is arguably the most important class in the post-secondary curriculum, one that every faculty member should be able to teach. At the University of Alberta, we have been engaged in a two-year process of renewal and reform. Art H 101 and 102 was offered for the last time during the academic year 2016-17, and our new HADVC 100 (History of Art, Design and Visual Culture) will debut in Fall 2017. Every one of our seven faculty members—who work in fields ranging from the sixteenth century to the present and from East Asia to American and Europe—will be teaching this course on a rotating basis. What they share is a commitment to a series of learning outcomes, assignments that will promote them, and a willingness to give it a try. This presentation will introduce our new curriculum to the audience in attendance.
The art history survey and the (Québec) national imaginary – a report from the field Dominic Hardy, hardy.dominic@uqam.ca
Professor, Département d’histoire de l’art, Université du Québec à Montréal
Since 2013, the Équipe de recherche en histoire de l’art au Québec (ÉRHAQ), a group of researchers working at UQAM, the Université de Montréal and Université Laval, has been at work preparing what will eventually be the very first survey text of Quebec art history. The aim of the project is to provide for the undergraduate community a reference book that will attend to the development, from the era of contact to 1960, of the visual arts on the territories that now constitute the entity known as ‘Québec’. In its first four years, the team established a digital lab at UQAM where key researchers’ and institutional archives have been scanned and are now being prepared for entry to a relational database. This work has resulted in the first critical timeline, and the first comprehensive bibliography, for the visual arts in Québec (1600-1960). This necessary ‘infrastructure’ work supports the team in its fundamental questions: how should the planned survey take shape? How should it deal with notions of ‘beginning’ and ‘end’; what are its temporal divisions? How should we think through issues of identity and linguistic diversity or the shifting geographical territorial parameters that tend to undermine any stable sense of what “Québec” is? How should we think about these pluralities in our imagined readership?
To help us address these and other questions, we organized a series of workshops between January and May 2017 to which we invited eight colleagues who had worked on historical survey projects, four of them in areas of Québec Studies (other than art history) and four of whom had worked on surveys of art history for territories beyond Québec (for Canada coast to coast, for the history of Iroquois territories, for the United States and for France). This presentation will focus on the outcome of these workshops and offer insights into the critical planning process now underway as the team prepares to undertake its (long-awaited) writing and editorial process.
Art History Restart: Curricular Approaches
Dr. Caroline Seck Langill
Associate Professor & Dean, Liberal Arts and Sciences, OCAD University
As we struggle in Art and Design post-secondary institutions to determine how to decolonize the curriculum and integrate non-western and indigenous knowledge, the majority of students continue to opt for traditional art histories as electives. In addition, the first-year art survey often bears the responsibility of dealing with a Eurocentric art history canon while attempting to integrate non-western and indigenous art histories, often inadequately. In the wake of the global turn and, in Canada, the TRC calls to action that cover education, is the art history survey even relevant? Are there other means besides the survey to teach parallel art and cultural histories? Can art history even be decolonized given its imperialistic gaze? This presentation will ponder these curricular questions in order to open up a dialogue on approaches to restarting foundational art history curricula at Art and Design schools.
