Faculty Publications – Wonsook Kim School of Art

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  Negated Identities in Dominican Art Education

  Felix V. Rodriguez Suero

  Drawing from decolonial theories, I explore the history of art education in the Dominican Republic in the first half of the 20th century. I examine how racial hierarchies were activated in art classes in school through the romanticization of the countryside and the mystification of children’s material culture. A distorted use of rural imagery served to advance the elite’s narrative of White Dominican identity and to normalize a racial imaginary that negated the country’s African heritage. I analyze how national and global discourses that coupled modernity with Whiteness encouraged aesthetic preferences that permeated children’s visual culture and national art. I contend that, because children’s art and play conjure images of innocence, the exhibition of children’s material culture was utilized to naturalize the absence of a Black heritage. This article builds on recent scholarship that underscores the need to diversify art education histories.

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  Art Evading Confinement: Abolition as Universal Design

  Albert Stabler

  Universal Design, initially an approach to designing barrier-free architectural spaces for disabled people, has primarily been adapted to schooling through the Universal Design for Learning framework. Contemporary abolitionism is a visionary grassroots movement to make prisons and jails obsolete, which has been brought into education discourse primarily through considering urban public schools as institutions of policing and punishment. By considering these strategies for reforming and ending confinement, respectively, this essay argues for a more expansive understanding of access in education. The argument for their compatibility in arts education is articulated first through reviewing shared aspects of these two approaches, then surveying examples drawn from artists’ practices, and lastly through a pedagogical approach framing the school as a complex and contradictory setting for making art.

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  Stoic indulgence, gratuitous restraint: White feelings and campus art

  Bert Stabler

  The 2010s saw a revival of reactionary politics on college campuses, which now appear to have paved the way for contemporary right-wing culture-war talking points regarding K–12 education. Revanchist attitudes around race, as well as gender and sexuality, can be linked to White Americans’ affective attachments to ideas of historical entitlement, which can be seen both in campus responses to university art programming and in acts of student vandalism. I describe a campus gallery exhibition I organized in 2016 around the theme of White affect, and I make connections between expressions of rage, anguish, and reasonableness on the part of White people within White-dominated institutions of art and education, before considering what possibilities and difficulties may exist for leading substantive classroom discussions and projects that engage explicitly with race generally, and Whiteness in particular.

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  Growing Time

  Melissa Oresky

  This catalog details the exhibition Growing Time, which was on display at the McLean County Arts Center from January 10 to February 14, 2020.

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  Summer Workshop: Illustration, July 9, 1973

  Richard Hentz Illustrator-Designer

  A short course in illustrational mediums and techniques will be given by illustrator-designer Richard Hentz, from July 9 to 27. Mr. Don Tate, nationally known Chicago illustrator will conduct a 3 day workshop within the course.

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  Viewpoints: Dialogue in Art Education, 1973

  Jack Hobbs Editor, Richard Hentz Graphic Consultant, Merle Miller Managing and Layout Editor, Susan Amster Associate Editor, and Otto Harris Associate Editor

  VIEWPOINTS is designed, edited & published by students and faculty in the Department of Art, Center for the Visual Arts, College of Fine Arts, Illinois State University, Normal, Illinois 61761.