Thinking Through Art

2014 Outstanding Academic Title, Choice "What’s going on in this picture?" With this one question and a carefully chosen work of art, teachers can start their students down a path toward deeper learning and other skills now encouraged by the Common Core State Standards. The Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) teaching method has been successfully implemented in schools, districts, and cultural institutions nationwide, including bilingual schools in California, West Orange Public Schools in New Jersey, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It provides for open-ended yet highly structured discussions of visual art, and significantly increases students’ critical thinking, language, and literacy skills along the way. Philip Yenawine, former education director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art and cocreator of the VTS curriculum, writes engagingly about his years of experience with elementary school students in the classroom. He reveals how VTS was developed and demonstrates how teachers are using art—as well as poems, primary documents, and other visual artifacts—to increase a variety of skills, including writing, listening, and speaking, across a range of subjects. The book shows how VTS can be easily and effectively integrated into elementary classroom lessons in just ten hours of a school year to create learner-centered environments where students at all levels are involved in rich, absorbing discussions.

Focusing on a unique arena, Thinking Through Art takes an innovative look at artists’ experiences of undertaking doctorates and asks: If the making of art is not simply the formulation of an object but is also the formation of complex ideas then what effect does academic enquiry have on art practice? Using twenty-eight pictures, never before seen outside the artists’ universities, Thinking Through Art focuses on art produced in higher educational environments and considers how the material product comes about through a process of conceiving and giving form to abstract thought. It further examines how this form, which is research art sits uneasily within academic circles, and yet is uniquely situated outside the gallery system. The journal articles, from eminent scholars, artists, philosophers, art historians and cultural theorists, demonstrate the complexity of interpreting art as research, and provide students and scholars with an invaluable resource for their art and cultural studies courses.

An indispensable and inspiring guide to creativity in the workplace and beyond, drawing on art, psychology, science, sports, law, business, and technology to help you land big ideas in the practical world. Anyone from CEO to freelancer knows how hard it is to think big, let alone follow up, while under pressure to get things done. Art Thinking offers practical principles, inspiration, and a healthy dose of pragmatism to help you navigate the difficulties of balancing creative thinking with driving toward results. With an MBA and an MFA, Amy Whitaker, an entrepreneur-in-residence at the New Museum Incubator, draws on stories of athletes, managers, writers, scientists, entrepreneurs, and even artists to engage you in the process of “art thinking.” If you are making a work of art in any field, you aren’t going from point A to point B. You are inventing point B. Art Thinking combines the mind-sets of art and the tools of business to protect space for open-ended exploration and manage risks on your way to success. Art Thinking takes you from “Wouldn’t it be cool if . . . ?” to realizing your highest aims, helping you build creative skills you can apply across all facets of business and life. Warm, honest, and unexpected, Art Thinking will help you reimagine your work and life—and even change the world—while enjoying the journey from point A. Art Thinking features 60 line drawings throughout.

Slow Looking provides a robust argument for the importance of slow looking in learning environments both general and specialized, formal and informal, and its connection to major concepts in teaching, learning, and knowledge. A museum-originated practice increasingly seen as holding wide educational benefits, slow looking contends that patient, immersive attention to content can produce active cognitive opportunities for meaning-making and critical thinking that may not be possible though high-speed means of information delivery. Addressing the multi-disciplinary applications of this purposeful behavioral practice, this book draws examples from the visual arts, literature, science, and everyday life, using original, real-world scenarios to illustrate the complexities and rewards of slow looking.

EDUCATION / Arts in Education

Introduction : remarks on contemporary painting's perseverance André Rottmann -- Painting and atrocity : the Tuymans strategy Peter Geimer -- Questions for Peter Geimer Isabelle Graw -- Response to Isabelle Graw Peter Geimer -- The value of painting : notes on unspecificity, indexicality, and highly valuable quasi-persons Isabelle Graw -- Questions for Isabelle Graw Peter Gaimer -- Response to Peter Gaimer Isabelle Graw.

This book is an introduction to the way that artists working in all media think about craft. Workmanship is key to today's visual arts, when high 'production values' are becoming increasingly commonplace. Yet craft's centrality to contemporary art has received little serious attention from critics and historians. Dispensing with clichéd arguments that craft is art, Adamson persuasively makes a case for defining craft in a more nuanced fashion. The interesting thing about craft, he argues, is that it is perceived to be 'inferior' to art. The book consists of an overview of various aspects of this second-class identity - supplementarity, sensuality, skill, the pastoral, and the amateur. It also provides historical case studies analysing craft's role in a variety of disciplines, including architecture, design, contemporary art, and the crafts themselves.

"At its heart, Pasztory's thesis is simple and yet profound. She asserts that humans create things (some of which modern Western society chooses to call "art") in order to work out our ideas - that is, we literally think with things. Pasztory draws on examples from many societies to argue that the art-making impulse is primarily cognitive and only secondarily aesthetic. She demonstrates that "art" always reflects the specific social context in which it is created, and that as societies become more complex, their art becomes more rarefied."--Jacket.

This new series provides working art educators with accessible guides to significant issues in the field. Developments in art education are consolidated into a clear presentation of what a practicing teacher needs to know. Paramount to the series is the concept of informed practice, whereby important and often complex art education topics are put into the context of the working art teacher and real classroom environments. Concise analysis is put into the context of the working art teacher and real classroom environments. Attention is paid to creating the right classroom climate, and guidelines are offered for group dialogues. A wealth of specific activities for philosophical inquiry are explored, while activities for introducing and practicing skills are likewise analysed and offered for practical classroom implementation. By addressing aesthetics in real teaching terms, Thinking Through Aesthetics delivers needed support for front-line art educators.

Dialogue provides practical guidelines for one of the essential elements of true partnership--learning how to talk together in honest and effective ways. Reveals how problems between managers and employees, and between companies or divisions within a larger corporation, stem from an inability to conduct a successful dialogue.