Evening for Educators: A Focus on Humanities
at UNM Art Museum
Hosted by: Sara Otto-Diniz, Curator of Academic Initiatives and Interim Director
Wednesday, October 26, 4P-6P
The Brochure:
The black-and-white event brochure (8 ½ inches by 11 inches) included the above information as well as information about parking, hours, admission, and contacting the museum. Half of the brochure featured one of the exhibit photographs, Ex-Slave with Long Memory, Alabama, taken by Dorothea Lange in 1937. The photograph is compelling, but the title of it is what sealed the deal for me. The woman isn’t just an ex-slave, but one with a long memory. I found myself curious about what this woman would have to say.
This paragraph was under the picture:
“Educators of Grades 4-16 are invited to preview the exhibition Re-Imagining American Identities and learn how historic…and contemporary…American photographs can support your social studies and language arts curricula. Gallery activities, vocabulary and lesson plans for the exhibition will be available.”
“Grades 4-16”…I never seriously thought of myself as an educator for 13th grade. It seemed odd word choice to me at first, but ultimately, I like that Sara chose this wording. It tied in nicely with the overall theme of the exhibit – human connection. This terminology creates community; it connects me to my cohorts doing their thing in elementary school, in middle school, and high school. I have a vested interest in what they are doing since I pick up where they leave off, but they have a vested interest in what I’m doing, too. Am I going to screw up what they worked so hard to achieve?
Sara created curiosity and connection before we ever crossed the museum threshold.
The Event:
A small group of us – 7 educators, Sara, and 2 of Sara’s interns (an art history graduate student and a student doing an independent study) – met in the entrance of the museum at 4P after museum hours.
Melissa, the art history student, walked us toward the Re-Imagining American Identities exhibit, pausing along the way to explain a large piece of sculpture and to indicate the direction of two other exhibits (one with famous printmakers and the other with paintings of sinners and saints) currently on display.
The Re-Imagining exhibit is located essentially in a dead-end hall. Photos are lined up on two opposing sides of this hall; no photos are displayed at the end of it.
As we stood at the opening of the hall, Sara gave us a little background information about the exhibit. She told us that the exhibit came into being from monies left over from a grant she had secured from NEH (thus a focus on humanities) to conduct a two-day workshop for elementary and secondary social studies and language arts teachers. In the workshop, Sara showed teachers how they could use NEH portfolio photographs in their classrooms. These portfolios are, as Sara said, “northeast centric.” There were very few representations of Hispanic or Native peoples. In fact, out of 44 photographs, there was one representation of the Hispanic culture and one of pueblo arts, pottery I believe.
When she realized she had enough money left over to do an exhibit, Sara wanted to take the idea of the portfolio, but expand it to include more images related to our region. She wanted to re-imagine American identity and really tried to pick a diverse group of Americans to exhibit.
She explained the layout of the exhibit. One wall has a seemingly random grouping of photos. They aren’t organized by regions, race, ethnicity, jobs, social class, gender – none of what we might consider typical groupings. Nor are they organized chronologically. Instead, they are organized in ways meant to provoke conversation.
The opposite wall is organized into five bays: Childhood; Crime & Punishment; The Civil War; Ritual; and Domesticity. Various bays represent, for Sara, various identities: family, national, community, etc. In each bay, Sara has selected a quote that is somehow related to the bay theme. She told us to imagine the conversations the photos in the bays could be having across time and various places with the photos on the opposite wall.
One bay has a quote from Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club. I commented that the way she chose to organize the exhibit reminded me of The Metaphysical Club. I kept thinking that the conversations the people in these photographs might have would be historically rich like Menand’s narratives. Sara said that The Metaphysical Club was an inspiration.
After introducing us to the exhibit, Melissa took over, leading us in an activity that could easily be mimicked with our students. Our activity focused around a photograph of Langston Hughes. This gave us the time “to see” because as Sara says, “It takes time to see.”
We sat around the photo, and Melissa asked us to take a few moments to quietly “see” it, to notice whatever we could notice. We shared our thoughts afterwards. Of course, our perspectives varied. I know a little about Langston Hughes and had just re-read Alain Locke’s “The New Negro.” My thoughts were mostly rooted in what I already knew, but others didn’t have this background info. Their thoughts were strictly limited to what they were seeing through the lens of their personal experience. I thought this added a lot of dimension to the overall conversation. When we take the time to “see,” we do so through the lenses available to us.
After this initial discussion, Melissa gave us a handout with three boxes. In the first box, we wrote down 10 adjectives describing the photograph. Then, she gave us a copy of Hughes’ poem “Freedom’s Plow.” We took turns reading this aloud and discussed our impressions of the poem separately and in reflection of the photograph. This led to another dynamic discussion. We noted such things as his audience, his tone, his discussion of hands and manual labor, and we commented that the various subjects in his poem have different definitions of freedom.
But the conversation was also a springboard into how we handle real instructional issues in the classroom. One of the educators works in UNM’s College of Education, specifically secondary history education. She talked about the limits of history texts. Two of the teachers – gifted ed elementary teachers who work as a team, one teaching in English and the other teaching in Spanish – talked about using literature, in part, to teach history. They talked about teaching their students activism as well. A librarian from Belen told us that educators in her district can’t take students off campus. The two gifted elementary teachers face funding issues, but will be able to take some students to the exhibit…with a little creativity. Their school is in downtown Albuquerque. They’ve secured one-day city bus passes for a limited number of students.
We ended the activity by writing our own poems using adjectives and phrases we had generated from the photograph and the poem. Sara had us read them aloud simultaneously because she said that students have a hard time sharing aloud one at a time. Then, we were invited to read our poems aloud individually.
At the end of this event, Sara told us that the grant reviewers at NEH laughed at the title of her proposal – Making the Human Connection. They tried to get her to change the name, but she was committed to the essence of this project and refused. The exhibit doesn’t share the same name, but the idea of making human connections is still a significant theme. Certainly, we felt connected at the end of our two hours.
This entire evening was an exercise in pragmatism.
http://unmartmuseum.unm.edu/education.html
http://unmartmuseum.unm.edu/
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