This site is focused on providing art education and art access to people who have not previously had access to it. But when we talk about art education, what do we really mean? In most conversations among educators, parents, legislators, and academics, the answer is studio art. The perception seems to be that students, if they need art at all, need to learn the techniques of making it and they can visit museums to learn anything anything else.
Before we can even address whether this belief has merit, it’s important to recognize the glaring flaw in this perspective. Field trip days, as we’ve discussed in a previous post, are decreasing across the board, and students do not have the access to museums that they once did. But putting that aside, the core question we’ll be asking today is whether art history has a place in art education. I’ll be presenting a couple of viewpoints (Full disclosure: I have a degree in art history, so I’m biased).
Studio Art vs Art History
Is studio art more valuable for students than art history? Anne Jones and Michael Risku say yes in their 2015 article, “The Butcher, the Baker, and the Candlestick Maker: John Dewey’s Philosophy of Art Experience Saving Twenty-First-Century Art Education from Limbo.” They’re concerned with the rise in technology as a babysitting tool, and believe a hands-on approach to art can reverse the effects of that technology 1. They cite the philosophy of John Dewey, who “defined the aesthetic experience as an enriching encounter between an individual and an event that celebrates the life of a civilization.2” A key part of that encounter, according to Jones and Risku, is the hands-on aspect of creating art, making it a physical encounter.
Studio Art With Art History
Another perspective is that it is important to combine art history and studio art. James Elkins wrote about his Parallel Program, which puts equal time into studio art classes and art history, with an emphasis on the latter. His program is an experiment to see if art history can be enhanced by studio art, but does not ask if studio art can be enhanced by art history. He asks his students to “take the experience of working in a given style, or copying a given work, or experimenting in a given medium, or creating a given form [and] put it side by side with the art history or art criticism that has been written about that same work, artist, medium, or form.3” He then asks if students can see if art history is lacking and, if so, where the gaps are. As of his article in 1995 explaining his program, that question is unanswered.
In 1969, Michael Day went a long way to answering Elkins’s question, 26 years before Elkins’s article. Day takes the same methodology that Elkins did and had students experiment with techniques and styles they learned about in art history. In this way, Day is prioritizing the two disciplines in the same way that Elkins is; using studio art to enhance art history and not the other way around. Day then tested his students on their understanding, in an art historical context, of the techniques and styles they had experimented with, and they tested much better than they had before the experiment. Day concluded that studio art has a measurable and positive effect on art history4. This is the hands-on approach that Jones and Risku espouse.
The scholarship about art history’s effect on studio art is rather thin. And as studio art is far more prevalent in schools than art history, it seems the question should be posed the other way.
Elizabeth Grierson is one of the few scholars interested in art history’s effect on studio art. She does not have a study that provides measurable results, but her research from 2010 concludes that educators have been focusing on the “what” for too long and need to start exploring the “why” to provide context for the art students make5. More work needs to be done on this subject and a real study is needed to prove whether Grierson is correct.
My Own Questions
In thinking about my own art history background, I have been ruminating on the value of studio art in my own life. I am considered notoriously awful at studio art. My drawing teacher in high school drew my final project, a lantern, for me, and had me erase the reflection lines in the glass so I could say I contributed to its creation. Painting also eluded me. I made a papier-mâché pencil in middle school that is widely considered to be the high point of my artistic career. So, if studio art had been a necessary component to studying art history, would I have chosen that path in undergrad? Would I have gone on to master in arts administration? And do I believe that my experience was lacking because it did not include studio art?
The answer to the first two questions is probably no. The last question is a bit more complicated. I know a lot about art and I can talk a lot about art. I know how frescoes are made and I know, from reading accounts, what it was like to make one. And I know, in the case of Pope Julius II, what it was like to wait impatiently while Michelangelo made frescoes. That is not the same as doing it myself. It’s impossible to say at this point whether that really mattered to my education. But I do see the value of experiencing for oneself what one learns. And hands-on, immersive experiences have been found to be valuable across disciplines in all areas of education.
This is an evolving field and policies are continually being set. Moving forward, educators will need to think about how they present studio art, whether studio art on its own is the best option for art education, and whether there is a place for required art history.
- Anne G Jones and Michael T Risku, “The Butcher, the Baker, and the Candlestick Maker: John Dewey’s Philosophy of Art Experience Saving Twenty-First-Century Art Education from Limbo,” 2015.
- ibid. pg 80.
- James Elkins, “Parallel Art History/Studio Program,” Art Journal 54, no. 3 (1995): 54, https://doi.org/10.2307/777586.
- “The Compatibility of Art History and Studio Art Activity in the Junior High School Art Program,” STUDIES IN ART EDUCATION, n.d., 10.
- Elizabeth M. Grierson, “Scrutinizing Studio Art and Its Study: Historical Relations and Contemporary Conditions,” The Journal of Aesthetic Education 44, no. 2 (2010).