Encounters – Page 4 – Social Justice Art Education with Linda Stein's Art

Encounters

Social justice curricular encounters with Linda Stein’s art are designed to be encounters with specific works or with a series of works. Each encounter begins with processes to look at, discuss, and experience Stein’s tapestries and sculpture. The processes of encountering Stein’s art may involve making art or other sensory processes as a way to engage with Stein’s art in relation to self situated in current social, political, and environmental contexts. The processes of encountering Stein’s art provide experiences that extend from and then return to Stein’s art. The encountering processes focus on upstander identity, leadership, and social justice. The purpose is to facilitate agency, empowerment, empathy, reflection, and upstander intentions.

Curricular encounters with art are processes to examine cultural-historical roots of social and environmental degradation, and to motivate upstander actions in (re)making community. Several encounters investigate visual culture as a means of communicating and perpetuating cultural values. Encounters explore the ways in which visual culture affects perceptions of self and the world, and constructs power and privilege. The encounters are processes to analyze media, advertisements, photographs, alternative media, objects, spaces, places, signs and codes as sources of power, as well as to de/en/re/code dominate cultural narratives.

Underlying all encounters is teaching towards understanding the value of diversity (e.g., culture, ethnicity, religion, race, gender, sexuality, and ability) and understanding that everyone is responsible for the well being of others. The following are ways to encounter Linda Stein’s art as catalysts toward social justice education.

Cabinets, Cupboards, Cases and Closets 855
2015
fabric, found objects, metal, wood
9”x3”x9”

The Cabinets, Cupboards, Cases, and Closets sculpture in the H2F2 exhibition are are wood, metal, and mixed media environments that Stein revisions into life stories. They are filled and overflowing with complex life narratives, through interwoven cultural artifacts. These works spark encounters about hiding, leaving things behind, fleeing, diaspora, losing and finding identity, and more. For example, an encounter with one of the Cabinets, Cupboards, Cases, and Closets sculptures might begin by learning about the social, environmental, and health issues regarding elements in the work, next creating a visual map of the connections from and between the elements, followed by illustrating a story of future trajectories at one of the knots of entanglements of people and place.

There is never a single story about any place or people. In this encounter, select one of the Cabinets, Cupboards, Cases, and Closets sculptures to imagine a life story situated in a community of people. With collage, drawing, and painting, create a series of artworks of people in action that includes an element of the selected art in their action. Display the series together and discuss the work with others. Or collaboratively create an interactive story game using Twine, Inklewriter, or Storyboardthat, which are open-source tools for sharing, nonlinear stories, to show the possibility of becoming an upstander. Examples include: Bea the Upstander game by John Rapaccioli & Elissa Kapp (2016) and an interactive story for teachers on why it is important to address LGBT bullying by Kevin Jenkins (2016).

Below is a visualization to start brainstorming with a group of students, or with oneself or another individual.

EMPOWERMENT VISUALIZATION

Relax, find a comfortable position, close your eyes if comfortable doing so as you begin to explore the past, present, and future. Nothing you think about now needs to be shared with anyone else.

FOCUS ON SPECIFIC EVENT:

Focus on a specific disempowering place, image, text, action, or sound that you experience almost everyday. Search your memory for the mundane, your typical everyday way of being to locate a vivid everyday experience that may seem small and inconsequential but in some way instigates or perpetuates stereotypes, misunderstanding, intolerance, oppression, distrust in learning with others about each other. Is there a loss, a displacement, an absence, or did someone or something appear that changed the situation in a way that you did not want changed. Keep searching through your daily experiences starting from today and travel back in time until one place, image, text, action, or sound that you hear or see or experience almost everyday stands out to you as particularly disempowering.

SPECIFIC QUESTIONS ABOUT THE NATURE OF THE EXPERIENCE

Where are you in this situation?

What is going on around you?

Who else is there?

Are you doing something? What is it?

How are you feeling?

Are others sharing your feelings, or are you alone with them?

What are you feeling in this very specific disempowering experience?

TRANSITION TO MAKING CHANGE

Now re-envision that experience changing everything that made it uncomfortable, belittling, sad, or awful into comfort, strength, a sharing amongst others, even if not in the particular setting, who are benefiting from your vision. See the disempowering experience and transform every inch of its negative reach to an empowered space, an empowered situation. If you were to communicate the transformed event, what would you do? How could you create an experience for others that would both reveal this act of disempowerment and empower others on how to change this form of disempowerment for themselves and others?

PREPARING TO CREATE:

When you start your work where will you begin? Will you begin by searching for some images or information? Will you talk to others? Will you draw what you saw, or your thoughts, or feelings? Reflect and make visual your reflections in some way, whether text, drawing, images, or gathering data.

Return to looking at the selected sculpture and reinterpret the piece from the perspectives gained from the process of this encounter.

Interact with Spoon to Shell #821