Inspiring Interdisciplinary Art Historical Inquiry Throughout the Augustana College Community – by Catherine Carter Goebel, Paul A. Anderson Chair in the Arts; Professor and Chair of Art History; and Director, Centre for Whistler Criticism

Engaging students with original artwork is one of the joys of teaching art history.  However, orchestrating faculty, administrators, staff, and community — along with students — in collaborating through a vast pedagogical art history collection is a truly unique undertaking.  Following my appointment as the Paul A. Anderson Chair in the Arts, I pursued Paul’s dream, and mine, of building an art history teaching collection that would be embraced by our entire campus.  For the past fifteen years, I have negotiated purchases and gifts across the span of history and culture.  Through creative networking with donors and dealers, an effective and wide-ranging teaching collection has been developed.

Eight years ago, I had the opportunity to test the campus-wide potential for this collection.  Augustana College (Rock Island, Illinois) launched a new first-year curriculum focused upon the birth of modern times and I curated a complementary art exhibition.  The museum became a classroom, and, even more importantly, the classroom became a forum for works of art.  First-year students researched artwork along with students taking nineteenth and twentieth-century art history courses. As the project gained momentum, contributors also included faculty and administrators—our President, a former law school dean, discussed Bruegel’s Justicia. Our dean, an economics professor, addressed Mughal paintings related to her geographic specialization.  I edited the essays and wrote an introduction to tie it all together.

In 2005, the Origins of Modernity catalogue accompanied the exhibition.  Through faculty consensus, the project continued to expand, and I adjusted parameters to curricular shifts through four subsequent books: Liberal Arts through the AGES (AGES—an acronym for Augustana General Education Studies).  The current volume, our fifth in seven years, encompasses ancient through contemporary art across six continents, and features 210 essays—approximately half of them by faculty in disciplines from astronomy through zoology, and the others by students and alumni with diverse majors, from the classes of 1987-2014.  The collection evolved as we accessioned further pieces to correlate to curricular goals, and several dealers became donors, one gifting a work in my name.

Envision my position, asking faculty members to write essays during summer break!  (Imagine, as well, that they did!)  By the time I organized this fifth book, with assistance from colleagues in art history and the art museum, I invited additional faculty to contribute—several sought me out while others offered to contribute essays on more than one piece.  And what a great experience—so many faculty working toward the greater good—freely collaborating, some within their field of expertise, others creatively stepping outside their ‘comfort zone’ and thereby modelling the importance of collaborative connections for our students.

It was exciting, for instance, when a mathematician instinctively surmised that Fine’s cubist drawing relates to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.  Or when a chemist suggested that Impressionists like Boudin could not have created such landscapes without chemists inventing new formulae and portable paints that facilitated plein air painting.  One biologist noted Constable’s parallel nineteenth-century interests in art and science and another investigated Audubon’s Whippoorwill, reinforcing his passion for this species and field study.  Perspectives on gender regarding new roles for modern women artists were discerned, as well as shifting issues of women as artistic subjects.  The director for women’s and gender studies examined male acculturation to such change.

A psychology professor explored Goya’s breaking the barrier from the rational world to the imagination.  Soon after, technology provided new media, as a mathematician demonstrated in The Railway Station — and an English professor showed us through newspaper illustrations.   Others regretted sweeping changes that technology enabled.  Whistler suggested, in contrast to the Impressionists: “The imitator is a poor kind of creature.  If the man who paints only the tree, or flower, or other surface he sees before him were an artist, the king of artists would be the photographer.”

Responding through art began to appear as if by second nature for many disciplines in our college community.  A Classicist constructed a new theory for Raphael’s School of Athens while a Shakespeare professor discussed Hamlet, framed within years of analysis of this play.  A French professor illuminated Girodet’s Burial of Atala through literary insights gained from teaching Chateaubriand’s novella, Atala.  A sociologist investigated Hine’s photograph of a girl working in a factory while journalistic nuances were revealed by a communications studies specialist on twentieth-century propaganda.  A student investigated Nampeyo’s pottery while, in parallel, an anthropologist contextualized The Potter, Curtis’ anachronistic photograph of Nampeyo, considered at the time as a vanishing breed.  Religion professors discussed a Russian icon and Qajar imagery and texts—indeed, what great links interdisciplinary collaboration can achieve!

The AGES project offers access to primary ‘texts’—original artworks—dating from periods, cultures and disciplines across the history of civilization.  We have developed our collection as a pedagogical resource to enhance and complement the liberal arts curriculum.  Historically, working as we do with one of the most visually adept college generations, capable of quickly assessing images as they input and access data, we college professors of the 21^st century must convince our ‘net-gen’ students not to settle for the immediate satisfaction of the ‘quick read’.  Rather, they must carefully examine primary texts, consult secondary sources, discuss their interpretations with other students and with their professors, and look for larger patterns.

Interactions between conceptual and perceptual viewpoints, historical revivals and rejections, as well as innovations and cultural influences occur throughout the AGES book.  One might discern renewed sources from the past, such as the beautiful patina of the ancient Roman glass bowl, an accident of nature’s chemical process over time, scientifically replicated in Tiffany’s inkwell.  Equestrians morph from auspicious Chinese tomb effigies to American scientific instruments through sequential photography.  Western artists culturally assimilated Japonisme via ukiyo-e prints.  Although Lautrec’s imagery may be viewed as the beginning of commercial mass media advertising, his bold, colorful blend of the visual and written word is reminiscent of one-of-a-kind illuminated manuscripts, painted centuries earlier by monks in order to spread the word of God.

Exploring the past through such juxtapositions enables students to recognize significant links that deepen their understanding of history, culture and the human condition. The AGES project at Augustana College has thus evolved into a vast and multi-layered pedagogical resource for teaching critical thinking, comparative analysis and chronological developments.  Yet in an age dominated by I’s—I–Pods, I–Tunes, I–Ms, I-Phones and I-Pads—with communications swiftly disseminated, and just as quickly eliminated, what archaeological records will I or you inspire students to leave for future generations to examine?  Many, I hope—because liberal arts education aims to provide the tools we need to prepare students to critically examine the texts of others and to thoughtfully create their own—and art history provides an effective bridge.

Framing art within the liberal arts, we enrich faculty and students as well as their communities, and in so doing, year in and year out, the pedagogical role of the art museum and its expanding collection is continually validated.

[Professor Goebel welcomes responses to her essay, either via comments through the CRC site, or directly: catherinegoebel@augustana.edu. The CRC would also like to thank Megan MacCall, Director of Digital Archives, Department of Art History, Augustana College, for her logistical and editorial assistance.]