Joshua Graham

2.18 Snared: Getting Caught Up in the Art of Education (Paper)

Joshua Graham – College of Fine Arts, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, USA

Abstract:

The question of how a creative practice can be a pedagogical practice is increasingly relevant as cultural institutions embrace an educational turn in contemporary art. But we must ask, who is left out? I argue that it is the teachers who “unspool” their curricula, intentionally twisting it around their work. My presentation pairs assessment data from my teaching practice with work from my artistic practice – demonstrating methods and outcomes of a pedagogical approach to artistic production. I begin by following the well-worn path of sightless contour-line drawing. Yes, that universal art room experience of drawing without looking at what you are doing. Over the last two years I’ve lead hundreds of undergraduate, non-art major students, out of the classroom and into the Utah Museum of Fine Arts. The result is a collection of written responses and drawings, that embody newly formed knowledge, blurring the lines between practice, research, and artmaking. My presentation will highlight both the quantitative and qualitative data I’ve collected during the workshops. The collection of informal and formal assessments paint a broad yet detailed picture of human perception and its relationship to self-evaluation. In addition, I shed light on methods for designing process-oriented, rather than outcome-based, learning objectives. This body of research will be complimented by an example of my own artwork, a site-specific piece I created while in-residence at the Montello Foundation in Eastern NV. I put my educational methodologies to use, creating my own large-scale “sightless contour drawing” with discarded barbed wire on the studio wall. When I look back at the entanglements of my hybrid approach, I examine the snares. What happens if I resist the urge to straighten out (or up?) and instead embrace the idiosyncratic methodologies that bend and twist in an interwoven gesture of reciprocity, the gift of making art.

Joshua Graham – The Tangled Desert

Artist Joshua Graham explores the possibilities of how an artist residency in the remote Basin and Range Desert informed a series of drawing workshops conducted at the Utah Museum of Fine Art on the campus of the University of Utah. This research poster is an aesthetic inquiry exploring the overlap of art and pedagogy.