May 2025

“Text and Texture: A Case study in Cross Disciplinary Teaching”

International Transdisciplinary Conference: London Arts-Based Research Centre at Oxford University

In 2019, the Art Department at Colorado College began piloting a Personal Archive project in select undergraduate studio courses that combined visual and digital literacy instruction with personal reflection and professional development. The authors, a Curator of Visual Resources and a Professor of Art, discuss the drive behind this initiative to develop student competencies within a liberal arts setting. This paper outlines the iterative process as well as select student activities and learning outcomes that may be adopted to various institutions. We also provide a summary of the current state of the Personal Archive project, which has been incorporated into the department curriculum.

March 2024

"Actualizing Space: From Point, Line, and Square to Multiview"

Leonard, Kate, Schiener, Corinne (2024).

International Conference on Spatial Imagination in Postwar and Contemporary American Literature and Art, Université de Strasbourg, Strasbourg France

When the protagonist of David Foster Wallace’s “Church Not Made with Hands” (2007) meets his new co-worker, Eric Yang, for the first time, one of the first things Yang tells him is that he, Yang, has what the narrator describes as a “special talent . . . the mental rotation of three-dimensional objects” (196): “I close my eyes and form a perfectly detailed image of any object. From any angle. Then I rotate it” (199). Yang’s ability to perform this mental rotation may itself be the stuff of fiction and his reasons for doing so may be unclear. However, the desire to mentally rotate an object, to simultaneously experience it from multiple views, fuels the work the two authors of this paper, one a visual artist and one a literary scholar, do, and ask students to do, in a co-taught class on observing, analyzing, and experiencing art and literature, Building off the work of Eric J. Jenkins, we ask students to not merely interact with and analyze pictorial and literary representations of three-dimensional space, nor to illustrate it, but rather to actualize it, to engage with it multi-sensorially.

Much contemporary pictorial and literary representation of space is shaped by the fact that a fixed station point has been disrupted in postwar-American, pictorial painting and drawing and that postmodern modes of literary representation refuse grand narratives or single points-of-view. While students may be familiar with how to formally analyze such representations, our goal is to have them also do so phenomenologically, that is, to experience the reality of space as we perceive it. In this paper, we discuss how we lead students to actualize three-dimensional space. We begin by having students look at representations of postwar-American, three-dimensional spaces, in novels such as Ling Ma’s Severance (2018) and paintings such as those of Julie Mehretu. We then ask students to create a multiview drawing that approaches space as we experience it. Drawing here becomes “a means to explore the world” (Jenkins 14) and moves us from point, line, and square to multiview.