Session One

Making the Printmaking Studio Green
Chair:  Donna Adams, University of Indianapolis

Keith Howard, Rochester Institute of Technology

Friedhard Kiekeben, Columbia College Chicago

Susan Rostow, Rostow & Jung Akua Water-based Inks

Increasing awareness of environmental and health concerns is transforming the printmaking studio. This session addresses the challenges of updating the printmaking studio to make it less toxic and more environmentally responsible. It explores the advantages and disadvantages of transforming the printmaking studio and discusses the effects on printmaking practice and education. Friedhard Kiekeben will present the role of safer etching solutions and grounds. Keith Howard will present the role of photoetching as an alternative to the toxicity of traditional etching. Susan Rostow will present the development of less toxic inks. Donna Adams will discuss implementation of these changes in printmaking studios and the effects (or lack thereof) on printmaking practice and education.

Curricular Objectives/Creative Possibilities:  Innovations for Teaching 3D Foundation Art
Presenter:  Karen Bondarchuk, Western Michigan University

In our post-Bauhaus, post-modern, hyper-global information age, implementing a foundation art curriculum that fulfills all of the necessary objectives in a program is increasingly complex, requiring us to wrestle with, among other things, the quandary of teaching in the post-Postman age of “information glut.” How do we effectively teach all of the current art practices (in addition to traditional methods) in an introductory foundation art class?

This session will focus on a variety of innovative strategies in teaching 3D Foundation Studio Art. Emphasis will be placed on developing innovative 3D projects by combining an exploration of traditional and non-traditional materials, thinking models, research methods and working processes. Through a lens of contemporary art practices, and with the aid of sample projects, visual examples and open dialogue and discussion during the session, participants will gain valuable knowledge in order to implement novel approaches to 3D Foundation Studio Art curricula.

The Beam in Thine Own Eye: Criticism and Aggiornamento
Chair: Andrea Ferber, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Olawole Famule, University of Wisconsin-Superior
African Art Criticism: The Yoruba Ancestral Egungun Spectacle Example

Charles A. Gick, Purdue University
Flowers From the Mouth

Menachem Wecker, George Washington University
Art History 2.0: A Religion and Art Blog as a Model for a New Critical Approach

The arts has a more public forum for critique and self-analysis than other fields, as artists, art historians, curators, writers, and even critics themselves routinely experience praise, scorn, or neutral reactions to their work in printed and online forums.  Criticism has been seen as constructive and forward-thinking and inflammatory and unethical - sometimes simultaneously.  This panel will focus on the role of criticism in the studio, the art and publishing markets, and the exhibition space, asking how one’s reactions to criticism drives practice.  Indeed, how do artists, historians, writers, critics, curators, or gallerists react to criticism or reviews of their own work?  How does criticism incite change in academia, the studio, or cultural institutions?  When and how does it stall progress or ignite it?  How are printed reviews and blogs received differently?  What is the distinction between “professional” and “amateur” critics?

Nature Studies – Continuity or Decline?
Chair:  Armin Mühsam, Northwest Missouri State University

Mark Lewis, University of Tulsa

Dale Leys, Murray State University

Brady Haston, Watkins College

Vincent S. Wojtas, Ohio University

Krista Busacker (student), Northwest Missouri State University

Nature just isn’t taken seriously anymore – or is it? Has the cultural shift towards the Internet, video/computer games, DVDs, YouTube, etc. also altered the way artists see nature? It used to be a given that responding on site to the richness of our environment teaches one to see and cultivate a sense of rhythm, proportion, balance and structure – the very elements of design without which there can be no successful work of art. But do artists, old and young, still go out into nature to hone their visual skills? In particular, what is the primary relationship of landscape artists to the subject they depict -- is it first-hand, virtual or a combination of both? Can a webcam view of “nature” function as the equivalent of plein air painting or drawing? And do these new media allow the enjoyment and implementation of another (and for some, even more important) dimension of nature studies…the spiritual?

Session Two

Art History at a Fine Arts College: Pedagogical Practices and Curriculum Enhancements
Panel Presenters: S. Reed Anderson and Jan Kennedy, Kansas City Art Institute

Recently, the Kansas City Art Institute’s Art History program was recognized by national accreditors as having developed a unique curriculum and pedagogical approach.   Our presentation examines the program’s distinctive methods for teaching art history within a fine arts environment.   Especially in recent years, a vital curriculum has emerged that not only supports the studio disciplines but also enables students to understand the various relationships that exist between artists and art historians.  A primary spark for this change was the development of a degree-based major in art history ten years ago, initiated at the request of students.  The vitality of the program is due in part to a department that has always encouraged faculty to be creative in the design of upper-division electives.  Additionally, an organic approach to curriculum has led to the achievement of a synthesis of critical, creative thinking and scholarship.  In this panel, speakers will address the challenges of providing visual art students with an education in which art historical scholarship relates to contemporary culture, professional practice, global perspectives, and community outreach.

Reconciling Art and Motherhood
Chair: Rachel Epp Buller, Bethel College

Gail Rebhan, Northern Virginia Community College
 Mothering: From Pregnancy to Twenty-something

Jessica Westbrook, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
AFTERBIRTH Spectacular

Dean Schmiedel, Rochester, New York
 The Other Mother: An Artist’s Conception

Session Description:
This session includes presentations from practicing artists and art historians that explore how individuals have integrated experiences of motherhood within their work. Long denigrated as a viable topic for artistic practice, motherhood has gained some credibility in recent years, gradually increasing its visibility in contemporary art. Mary Kelly, Sally Mann, Renee Cox, and many others have paved the way to combining this life-altering social role with a successful career. Institutions, however, are slow to change, so that motherhood can still serve as a detriment in both the art world and academic communities. Themes of this session may include: the embrace of motherhood in artistic/art historical practice; the problematics of motherhood as a theme; the delicate balance of maintaining family and producing / writing about art; making motherhood a "legitimate" topic for artistic production; issues of motherhood and family leave in the workplace; the implications of intentionally avoiding motherhood or mothering-based art; "success stories" in the face of adversity.

Emerging Technologies and the Pioneers Who Loved Them
(FATE Sponsored Session)
Moderator: Barbara Giorgio, Ball State University

Marlene Lipinski, Columbia College

Rick Paul, Purdue University

McCrystal Wood, University of Cincinnati

How have emerging technologies changed the way we think and teach? Who were the pioneers that ventured into the uncharted territory of using the computer as a creative tool? When and how was the computer first integrated into the art curriculum? A bit of wit, wisdom, and knowledge about how and where emerging technologies have been introduced into the art curriculum.
    
This session looks back to those pioneers who could not resist tinkering with their personal computers. Who had the persistence to tackle any problem, had rapport with a programmer so they could write their own scripting or software, and whose computers did not have any printers or drivers and had to pay extra for a mouse. What were the arguments and dilemmas? What advice can we give to recent graduates and newbies? And what advice can they offer to “old school” learners and teachers?  
    
Foundations in Art Theory and Education (FATE) is a national organization dedicated to the promotion of excellence in the development and teaching of college level foundations courses in both studio and art history. FATE members and non-members from all disciplines are encouraged to attend this session.

Look Ma, No Hands!
Chair:   Michael Aurbach, Vanderbilt University

Barry Freedland, New College of Florida
Resurrecting the Art in Post Studio/Post Structural Practice

Susan Gunter, Birmingham Museum of Art
Head and Hand

John Powers, University of Alabama at Birmingham
The Virtual MFA

Alison Helm, West Virginia University
Why Fight Real Materials When You Can Have a Virtual Stand In?

It is no longer safe to assume that a graduate student in art will complete the MFA with a strong technical understanding of their discipline.  Many suspect that within a few decades there may not be critical mass of faculty who can pass on the time-honored technical skills used in sculpture, printmaking, painting, and other disciplines. It seems that the term "researching one's art" has displaced the idea of mastering one's technical skills.  Perhaps America's shift from an industrial economy to one based upon service has played a role.  Some might argue that methods of inquiry - such as Critical Theory where the object and processes mean little – have affected the pedagogical process. In some programs, one can find graduate students "contracting out" the technical matters in their creative work. As such, the knowledge gained from using one's hands may not hold the importance it did just a decade ago.

The Agility of Others: Keeping up with the Aggiornamenti
Chair:  Mysoon Rizk, University of Toledo,

Chris Burnett, University of Toledo,
The Echo 360™ Workshop: An Impossible Update for Art Education

Matthew Kolodziej, University of Akron
Forming Enlightened Collaborations between Art and Science Programs

Lisa Norton,  The School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Fast China Slow(er) Structures

Scott Sherer, University of Texas at San Antonio
Technological Sense and the Multi-Dimensional Viewer: Possibilities of and Pressures on Contemporary Art

Kevin Concannon, University of Akron
Migrating Media/Moving Images

When “the act of bringing something up-to-date to meet current needs” becomes the leading paradigm for change in educational arts settings, how often are such pressures to adjust propelled by reactionary tendencies to newly invented crises? When change unfolds in facilities planning, departmental structures, and adoption of new curricular models or pedagogical approaches, how carefully do the players in such systems register the dispensing or discarding of prior practices? In a fast-paced globalizing era during which “new media” dominates discussion at the potential expense and supplanting of “old media,” how might inevitable and often forcible change nevertheless allow for the simultaneous sustenance of a fossil-fuel alternative and non-electronic future? Engaging such questions as these, speakers draw upon personal case studies, while keeping sights on viable tactics for sustaining degrees of continuity even in the midst of flux.

Session Three

Feminist Art History’s Aggiornamento and the Classroom
Chair: Joanna Gardner-Huggett, DePaul University

Peg Brand, Indiana University

Jean Robertson, Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis

Elizabeth Adan, California Polytechnic State University

Shirly Bahar, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Despite the renewed commitment to historicizing Feminist art and artists, such as the critically acclaimed exhibitions "Global Feminisms" and "WACK! Art and Feminist Revolution," little discussion has been given to this scholarship's impact on the classroom. The publications produced in conjunction with these shows introduce a more global perspective on feminism, art and women artists and given the abundance of this new literature raise a number of questions for teaching. For instance, are courses devoted to women artists still necessary or should they be eliminated in favor of gender studies where gender can be explored in concert with issues of ability, class, race, religion, and sexuality? If still offered, how do these classes resist creating a separate canon of women artists that fails to interrogate the universal construct of "woman"? This panel seeks innovative and distinctive pedagogical approaches to addressing the lives of women artists and feminist art theory that take into account the expanding scholarship in this field of study.

Multiples in Practice
Chair:  Brian Gillis, University of Illinois at Springfield

Susan Beiner, Arizona State University

Katherine Ross, School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Hoon Lee, Grand Valley State University

Multiples are united by their lack of uniqueness, which is usually regarded as a prerequisite in a work of art. Prompted by Marcel Duchamp's readymades, the multiple began as a subversive art form and has since become a prevalent system.  While bounding mechanization, globalization, and access may have catalyzed the 20th century introduction of multiples, the beginning of the 21st century is experiencing similar shifts on a different scale with different resonance.
    
Multiples in Practice will survey the use of multiples in art practice and what place those made from ceramic materials have in that continuum.  Issues of material specificity, context, appropriation, and repetitive action will serve as points of departure from which panelists will discuss the history and contemporary use of multiples as formal and conceptual systems.
    
Panelists come from diverse backgrounds and work with ceramics as a central material in a variety of capacities.

Shifting Contexts, New Competencies: Addressing Curricular Change in Design Education
Lee Vander Kooi, Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis

Paula Differding, Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis

Today’s design education programs struggle to respond to the multiple forces vying for consideration. Technological advances facilitate greater connections and catalyze social, cultural, and environmental change. The complexity and interrelationship of the factors shaping design education today calls for fresh curricular perspectives to prepare students to solve the kinds of complex, cross-disciplinary problems they will face. In order to deliver relevant competences to students, faculty at the Indiana University’s Herron School of Art and Design redirected the focus of learning to emphasize collaborative creative process knowledge and the process skills needed to perform real-world, team-based creative problem-solving in complex, “fuzzy situations”. By working experientially through real world design briefs students engaged audiences by recognizing the physical, cognitive, and social human factors relevant to the design challenge. By focusing on collaboration, process knowledge, and process skills faculty at Herron built a curriculum capable of responding to the forces driving social, cultural, and environmental change.  As patterns continue to shift the challenge to design education remains -- how can students be prepared for problem solving in a complex world?

Contemporary Color:  New Trends In Color Theory
Steven Bleicher, Coastal Carolina University
Color Psychology

Petronio A. Bendito, Purdue University
Color Communication in Marketing and Art - Paris, 2008

Pamela Fraser, University of Illinois at Chicago
Patti & Rusty Rueff, Purdue University
Julie Thomas, American University of Paris
Beyond the Perceptual: Color, Culture, and Communication

There have been new strides in the area of color theory. It’s no longer just the Bauhausian tradition. The rise of new media has necessitated changes in the traditional color curriculum changing the ways in which we think about and teach color theory.

There are new philosophers including David Bachelor and Mihai Nadin. Batchelor in his book Chromophobia, discusses the fact that artists have moved away from the tube of paint and mixing color to the use of premixed ready-made color. New areas including color psychology have moved the discussion on color from one solely based on the visual appearance and color interaction to issues on inherited, physiological and emotional responses to color. The discussion has also expanded to include cultural aspects of color and nonwestern traditions of color theory and use.
This session will look at these new concepts in color theory and how they are being disseminated in the classroom/studio.

Idea, Process, and Criticism: Inverting the Traditional Foundation Course Model
Leandra C. Urrutia, Memphis College of Art

Zark Strasburger, Memphis College of Art

Traditional foundation art training fails to adequately introduce and address the development of personal voice to the beginning art student. For too long physical and media specific skills have been given preference in introductory courses while idea crafting has taken a back seat, usually until advanced coursework in subsequent years. Memphis College of Art is countering this trend with the Idea, Process, and Criticism (IPC) class, bridging the gap of idea crafting in core curriculum. This class specifically focuses on students' individual idea development by structuring and codifying the art making process in such a way that the beginner is able to insert their idea into a system for making informed and cohesive work consistently in the early stages of their academic career. IPC applies a methodical and procedural approach, similar to cumulative incremental systems used in teaching manual and conceptual studio skills, as a central strategy for crafting ideas and communicating artistic intent.

Session Four

Thinking About the Box: Reconsidering Creativity Head-on
Michael Arrigo, Bowling Green State University

In the arts there is a fair amount of controversy over whether or not creativity can be taught, however there is near unanimity in the fact that instructors value and encourage students to think “outside the box”, regularly rewarding solutions that are uncommonly inventive, imaginative or unique. However, there is often a disconnect between course outcomes which assume creativity as an evaluative criteria, and course content which does not expressly include strategies or techniques that allow students to rise to these expectations. Is providing a permissive, stimulating environment and opportunities to experiment the same as teaching creativity?  Can creativity actually be taught and not simply encouraged?  If not, then can faculty reasonably expect that which they do not explicitly teach?  And if so, what are some examples of art courses, classroom assignments, or teaching strategies that tackle student creativity head-on?

Using Web 2.0 Tools in Design Communication to Engage Students in Social Activism
Natacha Poggio, University of Hartford

In this presentation, the audience will experience how University of Hartford design students utilize Web 2.0 applications, like Facebook, wikis and blogs, to create and disseminate a visual communication awareness campaign to address an environmental cause.  Through their experience, students will motivate others from their social networks to become involve with the campaign and disseminate their work online, therefore involving an audience outside of the classroom boundaries.

Using audiovisual materials, the audience will be taken on a tour of different online collaborative tools utilized during the “Issues in Design” course. The session will demonstrate how these technologies enhance students’ learning and facilitate the design thinking and processes involved in the visual communication campaign.

Dynamic Approach in Contemporary Chinese Visual Art Practice and Education
Ching-Yuan, Hsiao, National University of Tainan

Li-Ming Liu, National PingTung University of Education

Art education has been emphasized strongly in the Asian world recently. Contemporary Chinese art educators are concerned about how to develop a comprehensive art curriculum which includes multiculturalism, various art issues, and research methods. This session attempts to explore Chinese current art education system from kindergarten through university levels. Discussions in panel presentations include: firstly, a study of enhancing children's art ability by using different art materials, art making, picture books, museum tour, and appreciation methods. Secondly, an integration of theories and practices of folk art culture in higher education.

Contemporary Ceramic Sculpture and New Technology
Presenter: Lesley Baker, Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis

Industry has developed equipment to mass produce ceramic products such as dinnerware and bathroom fixtures and the processes are becoming more high tech and efficient. Ceramic artists have distinguished themselves from industry by hand making work. However, there has been an increase of contemporary ceramic sculptors utilizing industrial processes such as digital decals, rapid prototyping, and ram pressing, to create unique art. Examples of work of various artists will be presented to address a current movement in ceramic sculpture along with possible reasons artists are utilizing non-traditional equipment, such as accessibility and conceptual impact.

Making Thinking:  Methods for Facilitating Student Reflection
Jeremy Shellhorn, University of Kansas

While facing issues of new content, emerging forms of design practice, history, strategy and rapidly changing technology, it is easy for faculty to feel the need to start "adding" more to an already overloaded curriculum.  Consequently, students must do more inside and outside the classroom:  they make faster, they make more and they make last minute. So when do they learn anything? Do they ever put the pieces together? As the scale and complexity of design problems expand and audiences become co-creators, our students must work in teams and need to be able think in terms of systems and the “big picture”.  So how can we can create smart ways for students to reflect - to slow down and think so that they will be able to explain what and why they are doing, and make connections to the big ideas at the core of design discipline?  This presentation will present some examples of how I have taught Information Design at the University of Kansas, and how content was chosen for projects with reflection in mind. New content was integrated (not just added) so that learning was visualized and curricular goals made transparent. We try to create experiences to develop this meta-level thinking, but do we ever ask students to apply it to their college experience as a whole?  And how can we ensure that the student’s portfolio becomes a body of work, and not just a bunch of work?

Session Five

Transitions in Pedagogy: Traditional, Studio-Based Training in a Contemporary, Liberal Arts Environment
Co-Chairs: Stacy Lotz and Stephanie J. Baugh, Monmouth College

Panel Participants: Brian Baugh, Tyler Hennings, Monmouth College

Conversations within Monmouth College ask:  “How does your department forward the learning goals of the College?”  In other words, how do we teach critical thinking, reasoning, and civic responsibility in art courses?  Based on these questions, it appears that a thorough knowledge of a medium, extensive skill at manipulating materials, and teaching these skills to others is not enough for us to know and be able to do as instructors.
    
In our process of developments and growth, we are acknowledging the changes in teaching art in higher education; changes that place more emphasis, at the undergrad level, on concepts and ideas instead of just the traditional Bauhaus-style formal concerns.  We are also responding to the push for integrated learning on our Liberal Arts campus.  How do we encourage all of our students (majors and non-majors) toward the creation of meaningful work?  How does our experience and training as artists enhance our teaching of non-art, integrated studies courses?
    
Presenting in a narrative manner, the members of our faculty will discuss our personal development (successes and challenges) as we have brought ourselves “up-to-date” to meet the varied and specific needs of our academic community.

Old Guard/New Guard
Chair:  Wayne E. Potratz, University of Minnesota

Patterned after a MACAA presentation more than 20 years ago, this panel contrasts the work and attitudes between sculptors who have been in the field for 30-40 years and younger artists at the beginning of their careers. Panelists will make brief presentations about their work and then explore how sculpture, teaching, and professional life have changed between these two generations.

Questions the panel will address:

• What are the changes and shifts in the field of sculpture you have observed?
• What are the differences in academia now and then?
• What challenges do both older and younger artists face in the new technological age?
• Are we doing a better job of preparing artists professionally now than in the 60’s?  

Old Guard:
         George Beasley, Georgia State University
         Thomas Gipe, Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville                    
         Meredith “Butch” Jack, Lamar University      
         James Swartz, Southwest Minnesota State University
         Moira Marti Geoffrion, University of Arizona

New Guard:
         Coral Lambert, Alfred University
         Kurt Dyrhaug, Lamar University
         Erin Cunningham, Independent Artist
         Mark Cowardin, Independent Artist

Art Schools Take the Lead: Creating Model Venues for Transdisciplinary Collaboration
Chair: Hope Ginsburg, Virginia Commonwealth University

Ian Berry, Skidmore College

Larissa Harris, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

J. Morgan Puett, Mildred's Lane Historical Society

Artists, scientists, and scholars have long-since championed the Enlightenment ideal of a fluency of knowledge across disciplines. Our complex social, political, and environmental problems require constellations of thinkers to advance solutions. However we live in an age of increasingly specialized teaching and learning. Venues must be created to foster experimental collaborations across disciplines. This panel proposes that art schools and university art programs take the lead in envisioning and building such experimental spaces. The unique context of art pedagogy creates conditions for creativity and risk-taking free from the constraints of traditional scientific and academic methods. Furthermore, the art school is well positioned to observe models of producing, funding and presenting unorthodox projects within the academy. Presentations by those who have realized such transdisciplinary “non institutions” and those who have envisioned new models for collaborative venues are invited. Questions to be considered are: How can we articulate the need for such a space within our schools and universities? How can we protect the experimental nature of such a space? How can students interface with visiting scholars, artists, and researchers? How can such a transdisciplinary venue drive change within the art school or university as a whole?

Spirit in the Material World: Art and Mysticism
Chair: John Richardson, Wayne State University

Lindsay Satchell, Wayne State University
Neither One, Nor Many

Yueh-mei Cheng, Finlandia University
Visual Chess

Kristin Gallerneaux, Student, Wayne State University
Traditions of Belief: Folklore and the Paranormal in the Revenant Archives

In 1981 the English new-wave group, The Police, released their fourth album entitled Ghost in the Machine. Named after a text written by Arthur Koestler, the album’s opening marks Sting’s investigation into the existential. This is just one example, albeit well known, of a creative person seeking union with the divine through artistic expression where the work serves as both vehicle for and documentation of, the spiritual experience. This session will consist of presentations by visual artists who engage spirituality in their art through diverse approaches including reverence, ritual, humor, fiction, politics, and history. The artists work within the mystic tradition as they delimit the un-definable by image and object while using a variety of art mediums such as sculpture, glass, installation, painting, drawing, printmaking, and installation. Importantly, this session will engage a notion of the spiritual where it is discernable from the religious; the session will not focus on mainstream religion.

Session Six

Remapping History: Artists Re-imagine the Midwest
Flounder Lee, Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis
         
Sarah Kanouse, Southern Illinois University Carbondale

Katie Hargrave, Graduate Student, Brandeis University

Mike Wolf, Independent Artist

Winston Churchill famously noted, “History is written by the victors”; perhaps he should have added that it is also mapped by them. Cities are renamed, erased, or rebuilt; borders established, redrawn, or removed; whole cultures establish dominance over a place or go underground.   When land is bought, traded, or taken, place names often remain the only visible reminders of the conflicts suppressed by the authoritative map and naturalizing landscape. Sometimes the victors have disappeared before their monuments are built; at others, long-ago conflicts resurface in unexpected ways. In this session, four artists working in the Great Lakes region present recent work unpacking the landscapes, geographies, and cartographies of the Midwest. The presenters will show visual and experiential artworks that photographically remap the borders of native tribes‚ original treaty lands; explore the failure of memorials to enforce historical presence‚ and use the road trip to intervene in the commemoration of Westward Expansion.

Interpolating the White Tower:  Are Place and Material Valid in a Contemporary Art Education?
Session Chair: Thomas J. Condon Jr., Virginia Commonwealth University

Diane Derr, International Academy of Design and Technology
Toward an Operational Dialogue

Sayaka Suzuki, Virginia Commonwealth University
Material as Alphabets; encouraging a flexible grammar.

Nellie Appleby, Independent Artist
Openness to the Possibilities / Whatever it Takes / and Respect for the New School

Do you hear the cathode ray fizzle alongside the high-pitched screams of canvasses being torn apart?  Can you see lenses melting, shutters stopping, film reels unwinding, leaving their users unable to move forward lest they clear themselves of this tangled mess? At the dawn of informational convergence, when previously separate forms of cultural production lose themselves in the collapse of media; will you be able to account for your creative life before the god of a single screen?  When media as we know it dies will you have abandoned antiquated and defunct creative processes sufficiently enough to be swept up into the kingdom of unified networks? The moment of media convergence is immanent.  The prophets have sent urgent emails from their sky-scraping towers.  They have been monitoring the blogs.  The E-book is laughing at Guttenberg as the Sable sleeps soundly. Contemporary creative work thrives on the Darwinistic nature of technology.   Without an understanding of the significant fragility of material the creative act would perish under the weight of its own tradition. I propose a discussion on the relevance of conventional art education.  Is it possible to defend the White Tower from becoming an avatar of itself?

The Artist’s Journal: Where the Idea Cultivates and the Student Examines the Purpose of Serial Work
Chair:  Sandy Lane, Metropolitan State College of Denver

Student Panel Participants:
Ben Coleman
Melanie Flores
AnneMarie Marsiglia
Jonathan Wiley

The presenters (professor and students) of this session will share their experiences as participants in this first time offered course, The Artist’s Journal.

The Artist’s Journal, though not a new idea is new in its approach by merging the beginning art student with the advanced. A practice that has long been offered in institutions that offer graduate programs.  The graduate student many times studies alongside the advanced undergraduate. As an undergraduate and graduate of the University of Colorado at Boulder this was my experience. Though the experience itself is designed for economic reasons (low enrollments and to offer specialty courses) the upper and lower-class student is not necessarily encouraged to interact within the course structure. This course encourages mentorship between the beginning student and the advanced student through rotating teams of the senior with the freshman student during critiques and in the germination of ideas.

The Artist’s Journal explores current themes in contemporary art through thematic based assignments. Students develop all assignments and experimenting with new materials in a 9’ x 12” sketchbook. A variety of materials and tools are demonstrated throughout the course. In addition, several field trips scheduled throughout the semester provide cross-disciplinary approaches to creating a serial of ideas or the potential body of work.

Summer Sculpture Residency
Jeff Boshart, Eastern Illinois University

Eastern Illinois University embarked on  a sculpture initiative called the New and Emerging Artist Program. This presentation will detail the nuts and bolts of how the program was funded, the restrictions, challenges and successes of giving experienced graduate students in sculpture a unique opportunity. They are asked to create a scale model of a proposed sculpture and then, once selected, spend two weeks with 24/7 studio access, and a $1500 budget to live and create the actual large scale sculpture for outdoor display. What's in it for the student? What does Eastern gain from the initiative? Has there been any downside? Come to this presentation and find out! (Hint: I wouldn’t be doing this presentation if it wasn’t a positive experience.) 

Session Seven

Best Practices in Study Abroad for Studio Art Students
Chair:  Jennifer Lee, Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis

Linda T. Lee, Virginia Commonwealth University

Lynn Richardson, Park University

Jesse W. Payne, Savannah College of Art and Design

Randy J. Ploog, The Pennsylvania State University

Martha MacLeish, Indiana University

International travel is an important part of today’s students‚ education. It raises students‚ awareness of global issues, broadens their experience, and leads to contextualized self-reflection.  Art students facing a globalized world stand to benefit immensely from foreign study, but the demands of reflective studio practice do not always mesh easily with the schedule of group travel.  This session will confront questions related to designing academic study abroad programs in the studio arts and for studio art students.  Topics may include examples of successful studio art foreign study programs, suggestions for designing study abroad curriculum, insight into exemplary programs to recommend to students, discussion of what works and what doesn’t work, techniques for assessment, presentation of student work based on foreign study, or other topics relevant to these issues, focusing on either specific programs or broad overviews. The session will take the form of a panel discussion.

Re-Envisioning the Art of the Print:  The Digital Revolution
Chair:  Monika Meler, Temple University

Kathryn J. Reeves, Purdue University

Shaurya Kumar, Bowling Green State University

Jean A. Dibble, University of Notre Dame

Traditional approaches to teaching and practicing printmaking have been changing as the influx of new ideas and the digital has started to affect the printed image.  This shift and process of contemporizing printmaking has received mixed reviews among art programs: some were digital ready before the revolution, some are still trying to find the place of the digital in a traditional printmaking program that emphasizes etching, lithography, relief, and screen-printing.  The interjection of the digital in printmaking curricula has allowed students to bridge the gaps between printmaking and graphic design, photography, and opened the doors for students to work in an interdisciplinary way.  As these doors have become open, printmaking has finally gained autonomy in the art world, as print artists have begun to experiment with installation, and alternative methods.  This panel will address the implications of these changes in printmaking, and how these have affected the way we think, teach, learn, and practice the art of the print.  The central questions concerning this topic are:  How are printmaking programs adapting to this digital revolution?  How has the digital affected the way that artists make prints?  Has the digital replaced traditional methods?

To Be or Not to Be: The Question of Criteria in Contemporary Art
Chair: Moira Marti Geoffrion, University of Arizona

Aurore Chabot, University of Arizon
Ceramic Art: Always the Bridesmaid, Never the Bride?

Elaine A. King, Carnegie Mellon University
The Issue of Critical Criteria

April Kingsley, Kresge Art Museum, Michigan State University
What’s Going On? Let the Art Show You

Art is becoming indistinguishable from lifestyle culture, and the logic of global trends also dominates how art is made visible; with the centered authority of modernist aesthetic criteria long-dead, and post-modernism's politicized proliferation of criteria equally exhausted, in the current post-production era trendy theoretical issues and the art market seemingly appears to step in to regulate things. After all, if we all like the same art at the same time, then it must be good? Recent international exhibitions have demonstrated this from Documenta to the recent Venice Biennale. The production and critical assessment of contemporary art are undergoing major transformations.  What we value in art today is not apparent because of interdisciplinary complexity and the absence of a single style. Since minimalism, conceptual, and performance art in the 1960s, critical judgments about art have become difficult if not obsolete.  In the absence of skill as an accepted determination, no comprehensible criteria for evaluative judgment have emerged.