Art History Students Research Articles

Critical Thinking Dispositions of Undergraduate Art Education and History Students

In an ever-changing world, we have been witnessing many developments in our lives. A way to keep up with these developments will be possible through necessary skills such as critical thinking. In the literature, art education is suggested specifically as a contributor for creative skill development and critical thinking skills. The objective of this study was to examine and evaluate students’ critical thinking skills based on undergraduate subject area of study. Accordingly, students’ critical thinking skills were examined within critical thinking sub-dimensions in addition to variables of gender, age, and year of study. The sample groups consisted of undergraduate freshman and senior students studying Art Education and History. The study was structured according to the relational screening model, and the Cornell Critical Thinking Test Level Z (CCTT-Z) was used to measure critical thinking skills. Results of the study revealed that, critical thinking skill levels of the students were low in both cohorts and there was no statistically significant difference according to study areas. The results also showed no meaningful difference in critical thinking skills of freshman and senior students within the group who are studying Art Education. Similarly, demographics such as gender and year of study made no particular difference in terms of students’ critical thinking scores. The cohort of 25-30 age group showed a relatively positive difference in terms of age variable as compared to other cohorts. It was concluded that critical thinking skills could be supported by means of designing a curriculum that encourages and develops critical thinking skills and creative thinking through specific educational strategies.

A new canvas of learning: Enhancing formal analysis skills in AP art history through AI-generated Islamic art

This study explores the use of AI art generators to enhance formal analysis skills in AP Art History students, with a focus on Islamic Art and Architecture. Students, often entering the course with high academic achievements, find the unique challenge of articulating detailed visual descriptions of artworks. The study’s approach involves using AI image-generation websites, like wepik.com, where students create AI images resembling Islamic artworks studied in class. This method aims to refine their descriptive skills, focusing on visual evidence rather than relying on identifying details. The choice of Islamic Art, markedly different from other historical periods covered in the curriculum, is intended to boost retention and learning engagement. The results show that students were more successful in describing architectural artworks compared to two-dimensional narrative pieces, with limited site access and the need for iterative description refinement being key challenges. Successful attempts were marked by precise vocabulary usage and detailed descriptions, resulting in AI images closely matching the original artworks. In contrast, less successful attempts revealed deficiencies in comprehensive and detailed descriptions, particularly in narrative artworks. These outcomes highlight the potential and limitations of AI tools in art history education, suggesting that their effectiveness depends largely on the depth and precision of student inputs. The study not only demonstrates the innovative application of AI in education but also underscores the importance of detailed visual analysis, pointing towards future enhancements in AI-assisted educational methodologies.

The Power of Glass: Craft Scotland Conference, 2022

In 2022, the UN marked the International Year of Glass, celebrating the essential role glass has, and will continue to have, in society. One element of this celebration was the importance of glass within art and its history, which the Craft Scotland 2022 Conference: The Power of Glass looked to explore. The aim of the conference was to allow a range of individuals, be they academics, researchers, or students of glass and art history within Scotland and the UK, to access contemporary thought within an under-represented field in the UK craft sector. In this paper, we look to highlight the links between the aims of the International Year of Glass and the proceedings of The Power of Glass Conference, demonstrating how glass artists, makers, and designers are part of a growing international body of creatives who are using the communicative possibilities of glass as a vehicle in which to raise pertinent questions and platform unheard and overlooked narratives. Moreover, they seek to overturn perceived biases of what glass is and its future potential by placing their craft within an arena of judgement beyond discussions of process and technique and by elevating socio-political glass art on par with other forms of artistic protest and commentary.

Making History: The IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts ed. by Nancy Marie Mithlo (review)

Reviewed by: Making History: The IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts ed. by Nancy Marie Mithlo David Titterington Making History: The IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts. Edited by Nancy Marie Mithlo. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2020. ix + 185 pp. Illustrations, contributors, index. $39.95 paper. We use Making History at Haskell Indian Nations University (mentioned more than once in its pages), because the book is a perfect demonstration of new pedagogies and fresh theoretical approaches to the rich, creative lives of Indigenous people. Countless little surprises and new insights fill the text, and while traditional approaches to art history often deprioritize the artist in favor of theory and analysis, Making History presents a much-needed "view from the inside." Making History is more than just a book of essays. It is a catalogue of almost 200 artworks from the Institute of American Indian Art's (IAIA) historic collection (some works, such as Bill Soza War Soldier's Ghost Dance triptych, cannot be found elsewhere or online). It is also a student workbook with vocabulary lists, writing prompts, sample interview questions, and large margins perfect for taking notes, as well as a teacher's manual with sample handouts by educators at the top of their fields, all connected to IAIA. This book is the first of its kind. The authors demonstrate the research practices they describe so that, as one critic put it, teaching and modeling simultaneously take place on the page. The constant use of "we" and "us" makes the reader feel included and spoken to. As editor and contributor Nancy Marie Mithlo (Chiricahua Apache) explains, "our focus is on providing a scaffold of resources for emerging Native arts scholars, Native and non-Native readers, students, and academics who wish to understand the tenor and tone of what this field is about and how to approach teaching and learning about Native American Indian arts" (xvi). Although the text's focus is on Southwest artists, there is some Great Plains representation. In the chapter "Mapping Indigenous Space," John Paul Rangel (Apache, Navajo, Spanish) writes about the work of Edgar Heap of Birds (Cheyenne/Arapaho), Anita Fields (Osage/Muskogee Creek), and Norman Akers (Osage), each focusing on the physical and psychological geographies associated with the Great Plains. There are also multiple perspectives on the Ghost Dance phenomenon, and an essay by IAIA museum director Patsy Phillips (Cherokee) on the work of C. Maxx Stevens (Seminole/Muscogee Nation of Oklahoma), who uses objects to bring to life her memories of Kansas and Oklahoma. Similar to the visual arts, poetry activates deep memories and alter-logic, and Mithlo bookends the six chapters with two poems by Indigenous authors that further help unsettle [End Page 107] our ordinary thinking. There are also four "gallery" sections of 102 colored plates. It is not clear how the galleries relate to the chapters, for each chapter also contains its own images, and so we are left wondering if they are perhaps a cache of images for the student reader to draw from in order to curate their own imaginary exhibition. As Cree scholar Shawn Wilson would put it, engaging with this book is ceremony. Although one impressive work cannot redress the lack of resources available to teach Indigenous art from Indigenous perspectives, Making History is a start, and mandatory reading for any serious student of art history. David Titterington College of Humanities Haskell Indian Nations University Copyright © 2023 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

“Kunstiajalugu on ju siinses ülikoolis uus distsipliin.” Tartu ülikooli kunstiajaloo kabineti rajamine

“Kunstiajalugu on ju siinses ülikoolis uus distsipliin.” Tartu ülikooli kunstiajaloo kabineti rajamine

Reading the library: Institution, archive and the future of a field

In my last years of teaching at the University of Leeds (2019-20), I invited all first-year Fine Art and Art History students to meet me in the circular Reading Room of University of Leeds Library. I felt that, for many students arriving at university, the space, form, function and use of a research, or even a reference, library might be inhibiting, alien at worst and certainly overwhelming. My aim was to get them inside, and to then explore the Library as an architectural-spatial text written with books ordered and spaced according to classification systems that already encode and pre-frame their fields of knowledge amidst other discrete fields. Moreover, my lectures to them would question the system of classifying art and its histories laid out for them in the library. I might indeed deeply challenge this ‘order of things’ (to quote Michel Foucault.)1

Surveying the art history mystery: Student opinions of outcomes and value

Higher education professionals in art history agree that the downward trend of funding and enrolment will continue if changes to art history curriculum are not made that bring to light how relevant and helpful art history can be to students of all demographic populations and academic majors. This study seeks to explore student perspectives of how art history is currently being taught and their opinions on what outcomes art history class offers that they value. Current art history students completed a survey that assessed student perspectives about their art history class. Findings indicate that students value art history knowledge (AHKO) and find lecture to be efficient. However, they would also appreciate other instructional methods such as in-class activities, which they believe would help them learn critical thinking (CTO), and discussion and homework projects, which they believe would help them learn creativity. Students of all majors find AHKO, CTO, creativity to be valuable skills that are taught in art history.

FRACTALES. Obra artística virtual transdisciplinaria

FRACTALES is an artistic hypertext in constant development. It begins in 2020, based on an international collaboration between stage and digital media creators (Mexico-USA) interested in exploring their «womanhood». The project, of hybrid origin, is being configured from 10 major ideas: generate a horizontal process, cross disciplines transversally, as well as the competences of creation and research, favor a childlike aesthetic, summon play, work with memory and imagination, assuming unpredictability, allowing appropriation, venturing into the realm of intimacy and the feminine. During their creative process, the artists-researchers involved approach the study of transdisciplinarity, which allows them to theoretically systematize several of the precepts that support the proposal, in such a way that their theoretical-practical, artistic-investigative, private-public merges into a first product: FRACTALES - FIRST TERRITORY/PRIMER TERRITORIO. Once the first stage of the work is built, it is presented to groups of students, Art History students, researchers, national and international creators to be intervened. There are no fixed routes, it is not known how the FIRST TERRITORY/PRIMER TERRITORIO will be deconstructed, there is no censorship or guidelines for the loading or unloading of the materials generated on the slates that accumulate. In the year 2021, FRACTALES already constitutes a rhizome in constant expansion, open to your sight and periodic intervention, where open relationships of an affective-sensory-intellectual-sensitive-esthetic-public-social-personal order are established... In this article, the creative process experienced by the creators is systematized, contemplating expressive needs, poetic stakes and theoretical foundations through an analytical descriptive process.

Gerd Detemple, Weltkulturerbe. Trierer Dom: Einblicke in Deutschlands älteste Kathedrale. Regensburg: Verlag Schnell & Steiner, 2021, 192 pp., 23 ill., and 81 photos.

This is a ‘coffee-table’ book on Trier cathedral, in part the oldest church building used today in Germany, dominated by superb color photographs taken by Gerd Detemple. These are produced splendidly in large – often full-page – format, and are a credit to the photographer and publisher alike. As such, the book will appeal to several markets: scholars who are studying the art and architecture of the cathedral; students of art and architectural history; those with an amateur interest in art-history, architectural history or the city of Trier, and those who have visited Trier and been to the building. However, the volume is probably best suited to the latter two groups, and it is a presentation of visual material rather than a scholarly work.

Task-Dependent Eye-Movement Patterns in Viewing Art.

In art schools and classes for art history students are trained to pay attention to different aspects of an artwork, such as art movement characteristics and painting techniques. Experts are better at processing style and visual features of an artwork than nonprofessionals. Here we tested the hypothesis that experts in art use different, task-dependent viewing strategies than nonprofessionals when analyzing a piece of art. We compared a group of art history students with a group of students with no art education background, while viewing 36 paintings under three discrimination tasks. Participants were asked to determine the art movement, the date and the medium of the paintings. We analyzed behavioral and eye-movement data of 27 participants. Our observers adjusted their viewing strategies according to the task, resulting in longer fixation durations and shorter saccade amplitudes for the medium detection task. We found higher task accuracy and subjective confidence, less congruence and higher dispersion in fixation locations in experts. Expertise also influenced saccade metrics, biasing it towards larger saccade amplitudes, advocating a more holistic scanning strategy of experts in all three tasks.

Adaptación y validación del cuestionario de interés y conocimiento en arte de Viena (VAIAK)

Expertise proved to be a relevant variable when it came to study visual art reception processes. The Vienna Art Interest and Art Knowledge Questionnaire was conceived as an unified and validated measure of expertise using a psychometric focus. The objective of this study was to translate, adapt and validate the questionnaire for use in research with the Argentine population. 153 students voluntarily completed the questionnaire as a group or individually. Analysis of internal consistency, construct validity through factor analysis, and discriminant validity were performed through comparisons between psychology and art history students, as well as correlation of measures. Evidence was obtained of the reliability and validity of the Interest scales, and of an adapted part of the Knowledge scale.

Studying Cultural Heritage at San Marco Square for the 58th Art Biennale

The study of cultural heritage was central to the CRAFT international workshop held at the Art Biennale in Venice in 2019 for students of architecture, engineering, art history and philosophy. For some of the students, the focus was on the cultural heritage at San Marco Square. This essay is a short reflection about the outcome of this workshop in regard to using cultural heritage in the teaching of contemporary students.

Przed dziełem sztuki. Wspomnienia ze studiów

The present essay includes the author’s memories of his university studies and the intellectual formation that he received as a student of art history at the University of Poznań in 1949-1954. His first professor who opened to him the door to art history and exerted on him a strong intellectual influence, was Szczęsny Dettloff, a disciple of Heinrich Wölfflin in Munich and Max Dvořák in Vienna. Dettloff taught his students that the foundation of studying art in history is the study of the form of an individual artwork He believed that without a proper analysis of form it is impossible to construct appropriate series of the works of art and specify their position in the culture of the times of their origin. Similar sensitivity to form and the understanding of its significance for the art historian’s work were represented by two other professors important for the author, both educated by Dettloff already before World War II: Gwido Chmarzyński and Zdzisław Kępiński. When in 1957–1968 the author was a postgraduate student in the Centre d’Études Supérieures de Civilisation Médiévale at the University of Poitiers (CÉSCM), it turned out that the local methodological tradition was similar to what he had learned in Poznań before. The CÉSCM was founded as a multidisciplinary institute for the study of the Middle Ages, combining history, art history, literary history, and the history of ideas. It was important that one of them could shed light on an object studied by another, but each of them, including art history, kept its material and methodological identity. In the French tradition, art history had an “autonomous” status, focusing on artistic creation as a special sphere of human activity. That idea influenced also quite strongly the study of medieval architecture, originated in the early 19th century by Arcisse de Caumont, and continued until today by many generations of French scholars. What is characteristic of their research is meticulous analysis of form, articulated with a precise, detailed, and comprehensive specialist vocabulary. The lectures of French scholars on medieval architecture, which the author attended in Paris and Poitiers, taught him precision in the analysis of the artwork’s structure and its components, as well as responsibility for every single statement made on art. For a young art historian who did not specialize in architecture but in representational arts, that French experience was a lesson of methodological rigor necessary in the intellectual pursuits of the humanities scholar.

Facing the Work of Art. Memories of My Student Years

The present essay includes the author’s memories of his university studies and the intellectual formation that he received as a student of art history at the University of Poznań in 1949-1954. His first professor who opened to him the door to art history and exerted on him a strong intellectual influence, was Szczęsny Dettloff, a disciple of Heinrich Wölfflin in Munich and Max Dvořák in Vienna. Dettloff taught his students that the foundation of studying art in history is the study of the form of an individual artwork He believed that without a proper analysis of form it is impossible to construct appropriate series of the works of art and specify their position in the culture of the times of their origin. Similar sensitivity to form and the understanding of its significance for the art historian’s work were represented by two other professors important for the author, both educated by Dettloff already before World War II: Gwido Chmarzyński and Zdzisław Kępiński. When in 1957-1968 the author was a postgraduate student in the Centre d’Études Supérieures de Civilisation Médiévale at the University of Poitiers (CÉSCM), it turned out that the local methodological tradition was similar to what he had learned in Poznań before. The CÉSCM was founded as a multidisciplinary institute for the study of the Middle Ages, combining history, art history, literary history, and the history of ideas. It was important that one of them could shed light on an object studied by another, but each of them, including art history, kept its material and methodological identity. In the French tradition, art history had an “autonomous” status, focusing on artistic creation as a special sphere of human activity. That idea influenced also quite strongly the study of medieval architecture, originated in the early 19th century by Arcisse de Caumont, and continued until today by many generations of French scholars. What is characteristic of their research is meticulous analysis of form, articulated with a precise, detailed, and comprehensive specialist vocabulary. The lectures of French scholars on medieval architecture, which the author attended in Paris and Poitiers, taught him precision in the analysis of the artwork’s structure and its components, as well as responsibility for every single statement made on art. For a young art historian who did not specialize in architecture but in representational arts, that French experience was a lesson of methodological rigor necessary in the intellectual pursuits of the humanities scholar.

Drawing Activities as Pedagogical Method in Art History

SummaryIn recent years the availability of digital reproductions of present and past images has increased significantly, in many ways facilitating teaching in art history. Students of art history of today live in a society dominated by visual media and are supposed to be particularly adept to communicate through digital media. This seems as an ideal situation for teaching art history, and the use of drawing as pedagogical tool for students therefore seems to be irrelevant. This article describes the situation as more complex and problematic, due to the dislocation of the art object within the art historical knowledge system. In the article, the author also argues for the integration of drawing activities in art historical education as an important part in the multimodal discursive practice that art historical studies should be, alongside reading, writing, and speaking about art.

Mapping Art History: Enhancing the Teaching of German Art History with Student-Created Maps

While art history students frequently are required to write research papers, they often have trouble understanding some of the more abstract constructs they encounter. They may struggle to grasp the role that research plays in probing questions about the relationships between people, places, and events that compose complex historical periods. This article describes a collaboration between an art history professor, a librarian, and a digital humanities specialist in which students were taught how to conduct research for an art history course on German art 1900 to the present and then visualize that research through story maps created with ArcGIS. Through these mapping projects, students were encouraged to engage with the history of German art on a physical level by mapping spatial relationships between social networks, artists’ studios, exhibition venues, art museums, architecture, and other important historical sites that were integral to the development of major art movements. This case study article outlines the project, including its learning outcomes, pedagogical strategies, student products, and assessment data. In addition, it describes how the project developed through different iterations. Ultimately, this collaborative, interdisciplinary project may provide a model for ways that visualization in general and map creation in particular can be used as a teaching strategy to make art history come alive for students by opening new conceptual territory, prompting intriguing questions, generating unique answers, and engaging art history in a more physical, spatial manner.

Eye Movement Correlates of Expertise in Visual Arts.

The aim of this study was to search for oculomotor correlates of expertise in visual arts, in particular with regard to paintings. Achieving this goal was possible by gathering data on eye movements of two groups of participants: experts and non-experts in visual arts who viewed and appreciated the aesthetics of paintings. In particular, we were interested in whether visual arts experts more accurately recognize a balanced composition in one of the two paintings being compared simultaneously, and whether people who correctly recognize harmonious paintings are characterized by a different visual scanning strategy than those who do not recognize them. For the purposes of this study, 25 paintings with an almost ideal balanced composition have been chosen. Some of these paintings are masterpieces of the world cultural heritage, and some of them are unknown. Using Photoshop, the artist developed three additional versions of each of these paintings, differing from the original in the degree of destruction of its harmonious composition: slight, moderate, or significant. The task of the participants was to look at all versions of the same painting in pairs (including the original) and decide which of them looked more pleasing. The study involved 23 experts in art, students of art history, art education or the Academy of Fine Arts, and 19 non-experts, students in the social sciences and the humanities. The experimental manipulation of comparing pairs of paintings, whose composition is at different levels of harmony, has proved to be an effective tool for differentiating people because of their ability to distinguish paintings with balanced composition from an unbalanced one. It turned out that this ability only partly coincides with expertise understood as the effect of education in the field of visual arts. We also found that the eye movements of people who more accurately appreciated paintings with balanced composition differ from those who more liked their altered versions due to dwell time, first and average fixation duration and number of fixations. The familiarity of paintings turned out to be the factor significantly affects both the aesthetic evaluation of paintings and eye movement.

The Anxieties of History and Memory

The Anxieties of History and Memory

Ibn Tulun: his lost city and great mosque

Ahmad ibn Tulun (835-84), the son of a Turkic slave in the Abbasid court of Baghdad, became the founder of the first independent state in Egypt since antiquity, and builder of Egypt's short-lived third capital of the Islamic era, al-Qata'i' and its great congregational mosque. After recounting the story of Ibn Tulun and his successors, architectural historian Tarek Swelim presents a topographic survey of al-Qata'i', a city lost since its complete destruction in 905. He then provides a detailed architectural analysis of the Mosque of Ibn Tulun, which was spared the destruction and is now the oldest surviving mosque in Egypt and Africa, from the time of its completion until today. Rare archival illustrations and early photographs document the changing appearance and uses of the mosque in modern times, while extraordinary 3D computer renderings take us back in time to recreate its architectural development through its early centuries. Plans, drawings, and maps complement the history, while striking modern color photographs showcase the elegant simplicity of the building's architecture and decoration.This definitive and generously illustrated book will appeal to scholars and students of Islamic art history, as well as to anyone interested in or inspired by the beauty of early mosque architecture.

Harnessing Technology for Promoting Undergraduate Art Education: A Novel Model that Streamlines Learning between Classroom, Museum, and Home

We report on the development and evaluation of an innovative instructional model, which harnesses advanced technologies and local resources (an in-campus museum), to support undergraduate-level art history students in developing the skills required for analyzing artwork. Theory suggests that analyzing artwork requires theoretical knowledge and practical experience gained through critical dialogue and inquiry of original artwork. An instructional model was designed in which technology (website, collaborative docs, and mobile apps) supported streamlining of learning across settings (class, museum, and home) and conducting collaborative inquiry in situ (e.g., museum). Using a design research approach, the model was studied in three aspects: its potential to enable instructors to implement the cognitive apprenticeship instructional approach; its contribution to the students' development of independence and self-efficacy in analyzing artwork; and the contribution of technology to streamlining learning between settings. Data was collected from two enactments of the course. Findings indicate that the instructors gradually faded their modeling and coaching enabling students to become more active, hence the model we designed was largely implemented by the instructors. Furthermore, it supported students' gradual development of independence in practicing the newly learned skills. From the students' perspective, the integrated technologies created seamless learning between the three settings.