Ecology of site-specific painting and drawing: Embodied and empathic mark-making in urban cites

The idea of ecology has changed drastically during the last few decades. The trend in scholarship has changed from exclusively studying nature and natural objects, to include human’s relationship to it. In this context the present article aims to look at the ecological implication of site-specific practice: concentrating on contemporary drawing and paintings realized in the context of urban India. To this aim some aspects of site-specific mark-making would be analysed seeking support from philosopher Merleau-Ponty’s (1993, [1945] 2008) idea of phenomenological embodiment and the theory of ecological perception proposed by psychologist Gibson (1966, 1972). Works of contemporary drawing/painting practitioners from India, practitioners such as Gagan Singh, artist collectives such as Networks and Neighborhood, St+art, Geechugalu, along with author’s own practice will illustrate how site-specific pattern-making can be a way of interacting with the environment, establishing new connections between art-materials, the environment, the viewers and the makers. These analyses will bring insights into how art practice can contribute to new ways of conceptualizing urban ecology.

Opening Thirdspace: Cultivating critical geographies in art teacher education

Pre-service teachers new to a field placement need the opportunity to orient themselves in relation to their larger teaching contexts and configure geographies that resonate with the lives of their students. Soja’s Thirdspace offers a lens through which teachers might explore place multi-dimensionally. Building upon a previous arts-based educational research study assessing the potential of arts-based inquiry for supporting pre-service teachers in exploring their teaching contexts, this study, through a second curricular iteration, focused explicitly on art pre-service teachers’ critical geographic analysis, in the form of Thirdspace. In mapping their school zones, pre-service teachers began to identify illusory impressions and conceptions of students, schools and communities and then began to deconstruct them. Such Thirdspace journeys offer space for pre-service teachers to hone their perceptions, to retrain their gazes to see their students’ physical and lived worlds in their complexity and plurality, and to re-imagine the relation between place and pedagogy.

Spacemakers: Speculative design, public space and monuments

Controversies in current events highlight the important role that public space and monuments may play in demonstrating community values or conversely projecting status quo articulations of inequity. With this in mind, we felt compelled to develop curricula to unpack the complex relationships between public space and place identity through the shared ownership and development of public monuments. We started a curricular project called Spacemakers to engage learners in arts-based reflections on public space, identity and social justice through the generation of proposed monuments as matters of concern. Through frameworks of history and memory, design practice and cultural geography, we articulate the unfolding of the curriculum as we consider the monument as a curricular object. This article reviews the curricular activities we developed for the Spacemakers project, their theoretical and pedagogical foundations, and the potential for making use of speculative design and critical making as powerful vehicles for reflection on public space and embodied learning.

Border Tuner and Teeter-Totter Wall: Two works of participatory public pedagogy

This article looks at two socially engaged art works, Teeter-Totter Wall by Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello and Border Tuner by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer that challenge dualistic notions of self and other, public and private, and national and multinational. Each work proffers a perspective of the US-Mexico border that counters those communicated through national political rhetoric and common in popular media reporting. This article not only recognizes these works as art but also as public pedagogy, or works accessible to the broader public and community that function to teach us something or to reframe or expand our understanding and to question or resist dominant narratives. In addition to questioning totalizing narratives, this article considers intersecting notions of the public on the border. Recognizing that the border occupies simultaneous and varied notions of the public in terms of being a site of local culture, a symbol of national debate, a firestorm of divisive rhetoric and an international marker of global politics and economics, this article considers how differing sites of public pedagogy function.

Columbus Africentric Early College: Building the Black identity through art and culture

This article examines the Columbus Africentric Early College public school from multiple perspectives, including that of the founder, the architect and a graduate of the school, to better understand the school’s cultural impact. A thematic analysis of those viewpoints, coupled with the philosophical framework outlined in the Kaiwada theory, will provide a theoretical and practical context of effective teaching–learning environments. Furthermore, this article will analyse Columbus Africentric Early College as a physical and virtual space where formal and informal learning occurs through responsive education. Responsive education is a term used to describe the type of education that is sensitive, aware and critical of the lived experiences and societal influences that affect students and their respective communities. Columbus Africentric Early College, founded by Charles Tennant, opened its doors in 1996 in downtown Columbus, Ohio, and recently relocated to a 55-acre, $45-million ‘urban campus’ created by Nigerian architect Kay Onwuke. Columbus Africentric Early College is guided by the African spiritual principles and value systems of Maat and Nguzo Saba, which are reinforced through the school’s teaching, art and architecture that is designed for the transmission of culture. Columbus Africentric Early College is the nation’s only public Africentric school and provides a proven curricular model that implements culturally relevant and responsive pedagogy manifested through a non-western and non-Eurocentric perspective.

Multipli-city, My Winnipeg and a pedagogy of the permanent circuit

The city is a network of boulevards, thoroughfares, highways and subway systems. The city is also a site of learning, or rather the city houses sites of learning: museums, libraries, schools, theatres and cinemas, for instance. Interestingly, these sites of learning need not be physical; indeed, regarding cinema, for example, they can be websites like Amazon, Criterion Channel, Netflix, where cinephiles can stream movies from the comfort of their home, office, car, on a phone, tablet, television. It is at the intersection of these sites – the cinema and the city – that I wish to situate this article. In particular, I explore how the filmmaker Guy Maddin with My Winnipeg (2007) finagles cinema’s essay-film genre to turn a physical space (in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada) from, in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, striated to smooth, points to pointillism, in which event replaces essence and multipli-city replaces singular(c)ity. The city is a machine and the machine here is D+G’s assemblage. As such, the city and the citizen/creator become one, symbio[(y)tic], and the two cannot be separated without returning the city to a simpli-city and the filmmaker to a documentarian. This film amounts to an encounter that causes thinking (in Deleuzian terms) and thus learning and thus a way forward for thinking through a pedagogy of the permanent circuit.

Locales of learning and teaching art in pre-service education

Social ontology addresses assertions of the entities’ existence and social scientists bring into question whether particular conventions applied to the entities being studied can subsequently affect them. This study explores existing spatial classifications enacted by federal bodies to identify areas surrounding public schools in the United States. Over a three-year period, participants in a Midwestern university art education programme engaged in field practices that used the school locale codes as a mechanism to critically reflect on how labels such as urban, suburban and rural are understood in relation to their own positionality and pedagogy. Through Manuel DeLanda’s Assemblage Theory, the author analyses participant responses through a framework wherein schools are theorized as assemblages in order to identify the constitutive subcomponents of both material and expressive components in order to bracket perceptions of the locales. Implications are provided related to fieldwork practices in the field of art education.

Unsung heroes: Reconceptualizing a video game as a work of art

A veteran arts educator’s entrance into the heretofore unknown world of video games, from encountering the community of players to daring a first-hand experience playing Red Dead Redemption 2. Buoyed by her desire to see her actor son’s performance in the game, the author plays to the end and emerges with an understanding of the game as a work of art.