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.

JUSTICE

An encounter with the Anne Frank tapestry called, Welcome Home, begins with reading excerpts from her diary and current news reports concerning groups of people seeking safety in a foreign land. The current news could be juxtaposed with film images from Voyage of the Damned. The historical documentary depicts the incident in 1939 when a ship traveling from Germany to Cuba, full of Jewish refugees seeking asylum and safety, is refused entry to Cuba; and then when they try to land in the United States, in Florida, they’re again refused entry. Forced to return back to Germany, some people jumped overboard. While eventually some refugees were granted asylum in Belgium, France, The Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, many were not, and subsequently exterminated in Nazi concentration camps. How could the past inform the present, so that people could be welcomed home? Create a collage, which includes news images from the past and present, along with diary entries, that brings a personal perspective to current and historical events about the desire to be welcomed home. Seeking and learning about a diverse range of life narratives prompts an empathetic process of understanding injustice within the complexities of environments and communities.

Lesson Plan Example: Justice Encounter: To Act OR Not To Act

Anne Frank 839
 Anne Frank 839
fabric, archival pigment on canvas, leather, metal, zippers
2015
5 ft. sq.

Click here to see image detail

Click here to interact with Heroic Tapestries: Ann Frank

ENVIRONMENT

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.

Click here to interact with Cupboards

COMMUNITY

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.

  1. 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.

  1. 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?

  1. 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?

  1. 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

Spoon to Shell #821
2015
spoon, shell and mixed media
11”x2”x14”

Click here to see image detail

Click here to interact with Spoon to Shell #821 

ACTIVISM

What if each of Stein’s fierce feminist leaders simultaneously had a prominent seat at the table on the national and world stage? What if all stood up when they were told to sit down? What if all spoke out, when they were told to be quiet? What if…? Just imagine what Wonder Woman would say or do to a victimizer? Change the text-bubbles, as does Stein in her art, to voice upstander concerns.

Noor-Khan-c

Noor Inayat Khan 813
2014
fabric, archival pigment on canvas, leather, metal, zippers
5 ft. sq.

Click here to see image detail

Click here to interact with Heroic Tapestries: Noor Khan