Piercing Gaze: Public Art in Schools

A gaze is a silent facial gesture while a piercing gaze suggests a shrieking sound. Unpacking the word, silence, allows one to look at the difference between the verbalizations hailing empowerment and the actual functioning of reinstatements of purpose in learning, teaching and mentoring in a public school. Silence, in the following article, signals a discomfort, sometimes solitude and, at times, an abyss perhaps indicating the disparity between expectation and implementation. The depth of research necessary by the school community to reach consensus for names of dignitaries and the in-depth archival photographic research on the part of the professional artists required time commitments and levels of perseverance that were unforeseen by the participants. The challenge of maintaining community-building activities underscored the problematic issues entrenched in areas of high poverty. The following article is grouped around nine sections, a post script and references: Paradigm of Silence, Tagging a Neighborhood, African American and Latino Diaspora, Developmental Stages, Convincing the Public, Aspects of Production: Multiple Visions, Whole School Reform: Language Arts and Visual Literacy, Aesthetics of Truth and Reconciliation and Teaching Tolerance: State-wide Commissions

Antiques Roadshow: The Object of Learning

Even as school administrators were cutting the unique feature of museum Educators from the school district budget, museum directors in Philadelphia were calling teaching through objects, \u27lightning in a bottle.’ Educating through objects that have been crafted by talented artisans, owned by famous people, cherished by their association with loved ones, or inanimate witnesses to important historical moments is a recognized and immediate path to learning in the arts. In the search for the authentic, while simultaneously embracing the virtual, Americans participate in shaping a broad understanding of popular culture and accumulated history. Americans are having a love affair with bric-a-brac, yard sales, estate sales, and flea markets. A parallel development can be seen in the advent of genealogy as a hobby in diagramming family trees. Learning from actual objects fuses the critical processes of observation, analysis and evaluation with an appreciation of technical and design skills. Object learning is a type of cultural mirror

Dora Maar: Contextualizing Picasso’s Muse

Henrietta Theodora Markovitch (1907-1997) abbreviated her name to Dora Maar in the 1930s working as a Surrealist photographer and painter. She was born in Paris, France to a Jewish Croatian father and a Catholic French mother. After spending her childhood in Argentina, she returned to France studying in various ateliers. Dora Maar was Pablo Picasso’s (1881-1973) muse from 1936-1944. Past art historical research has obliquely referenced her Jewish background when it was central to a contextual critique of Picasso’s pre-war and wartime paintings of Dora Maar. Picasso’s numerous and revelatory portraits of Dora Maar reflect her prescient understanding and personal distress of the escalating fascist threat and growing anti-Semitism in Europe in the late 1930s and early 1940s.