art/vision/voice - Maryland Institute College of Art

74 art / vision / voice
mothers meet and chat, Latin Americans play soccer, African Americans
play basketball, and on Sundays churches hold services. Students sat on
the grass in a big circle, drawing Mary Valverde as she froze in fivesecond
gestures.
mary At first they felt awkward drawing outside, shy when people
looked at their sketchbooks. After a while they became confident
and showed people their work. They were completely amazed to
draw outside. They thought they could only sketch one little
drawing on a big white piece of paper in an art class in school.
In the familiar setting of the park, each student began his or her personal
sketchbook, to build a menu of methods of translating visual observations
onto the page. They were also asked to log their observations with an
accompanying written journal entry. Other exercises included making
blind contour drawings, supplemented by an exercise of articulating
limited description.
In addition to these basic exercises, in which everyone participated
(including teachers), there were projects designed to enhance students’
interpretive skills. One of these adapted a college project examining how
content is shaped by formal design elements (balance, rhythm, unity,
variety, emphasis). Folding magazine ads into 2" x 2" squares, students
produced a cropped composition, fragmenting image and shifting
meaning. Discussing the posted squares and guessing what was being
sold, and to whom, students analyzed how images convey messages.
In the second half of the project this visual vocabulary of marketing
was applied to construct a design representing the self.
In a trip to the African art galleries of the Brooklyn Museum Leslie
Hewitt was concerned that students tend to see African art as something
alien, as “ugly” and unimportant. What little art knowledge students had
was exclusively Euro-Western. At the museum, Rose Ojo, a Nigerian
artist and former member of the cap team as well as a Cooper Union
and sop alumna, spoke about artworks from the African collection.
At the display of a carved Dan ladle she led a discussion to discern the
object’s meaning. Regular writing and speaking exercises had taught
students some subtleties of observation and given them the confidence
to speak up.
leslie With strategic questions, they were able to look at a piece that
might puzzle anthropologists, and extract meaning, to see. Like a
trophy, the ladle was given to a woman, a pillar of her community,
in appreciation of nurturing something larger than herself. . . . [The
students now had] a cultural perspective on art as functional in life,
cap summer student shawn mathis
(attended 2001), working on
composition and perspective.
Blind contour drawing is an exercise
often employed with inexperienced
artists to develop a connection
between the eye and the hand and
to eliminate the ongoing selfjudgment
that can intimidate
beginning artists. In this exercise,
the participant draws the outline
of an object without looking down
at the paper.
Articulating Limited Description is
an exercise in which students recall,
with eyes closed, the qualities
(temperature, vibration, ambient
noise) of a location, omitting
description of physical appearance.
From this description, other
students must guess the location.