Art Education at the

intersection of creativity:
Integrating art to develop
multiple perspectives for
identifying and solving
social dilemmas in the 21st
century.
Cathy Smilan, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, USA
Georgia Kakourou-Chroni, Coumantaros Gallery, Greece
Ricardo Reis, APECV, Portugal
Teresa Torres de Eça, APECV, Portugal
 Engaging Creative Thinking
through Museum Exhibits
• The Norton Museum of Art, West Palm
Beach Florida Partnership with Conniston
Middle School
• IB program in inner city community
• Mr. Shutzman’s 6th Grade Critical Thinking
Class
• Exhibit of William Kentridge’s Art
concepts of political injustice/Apartheid
 Class Discussion
• What is creativity?
• Student responses varied and included:
– Doing something that no one else has done.
– Everyone is creative, some people just don’t
use their creativity.
– Not all artists are creative
– You can learn to be an artist, but you can’t
learn to be creative. You just are creative.
– The creative process is in the making and the
viewing of art.
 When asked about Museum Experience

• Students responded:
– Attend museum exhibits with classes
– Attend museum exhibits with family
– Never attended the Norton Museum (live within
2 miles of the museum. School 1 mile from
museum)
– Attend other museums with family
 Why do artists make art?

• Students responded:
– To express themselves; I don’t think art is made
for the viewer
– I don’t think the artist is responsible for anything
– To share what they see with the world
– To describe what they see
 Thinking about Kentridge-purpose and
presentation
– He doesn’t just make pictures to describe what he sees.

– William Kentridge dances, changes his work, makes

things out of other objects.

– We can only take in a small percentage of what we see…

[like in real life]. William Kentridge shows so much in his
work and you have to decide what to see.
 Palimpsest
– The artist uses different materials and visual techniques
to translate and communicate his ideas

– He retells history, erases and rewrites

– You can never completely erase, you just have to build

on what is and change it.

– He uses image and mirrors to project. He makes

distorted images and they only seem real when they are
projected.
 Public art as
educational resource

• The Coumantaros
Gallery, the National
Gallery of Greece
• APECV, Portugal
“The Neoclassical City”, in
Coumantaros Gallery.

• Meaning
• Protection
workshops in which children
made visual and oral records
of neoclassical buildings

• Gallery seminars on
neoclassicism for
parents
• “Engraving the city”
• “Water-colouring the
city”
• " Square"
 Exhibitions

• exhibition of neoclassical
building designs in
collaboration with the
National Greek Archives.
• exhibition of student and
artists’ works.
• Student’s
proposals for
using the
endangered
buildings, were
published in local
newspapers and
presented to local
authorities.
 Drawing Pousão
Arts, Education and Communities
• Portuguese
Visual Art
Teachers
Association
APECV / Museu
Nacional Soares
dos Reis

• September 2009
and February
2010
• need to foster links
between schools and
local museums.
• Awareness of local
culture
• Need to revise studio
art and history of arts
teaching practices
• E-learning training course
for art teachers,
• seminars,
• students’ visits to the
museum,
• students’ studio work
carried out in schools
• exhibition of students’
work.
• The topic of the work
was the study of a
Portuguese nineteenth
century painter, Henrique
Pousão.
• Pousão was the starting point to enable
students to construct their own narratives.
possible ‘gazes’.
• Considering the gaze
focuses attention
upon us, the viewer
and our relationship
with what they see.
We are invited by
images to see in a
particular way, but we
also come to them
with already existing
relationships to what
we see.
• The gaze is therefore
a crucial way in which
to understand
ourselves as
individuals and as a
society.
• It offers a significantly
different orientation
that teachers used to
have , which tended to
focus on art production
and art criticism
without necessarily
considering what we
ourselves bring to the
image.
spotlight on the viewer, and our
context
 Intertextuality
• Audiences make associations with imagery
according to their own interests and
knowledge
• viewers were invited to built their own
narratives or histories connecting their
personal knowledge with the knowledge
acquired in the museum and school by
means of connecting nodes.
 Teachers and
students were invited
to connect images
and ideas
irrespective of
historical categories
like high and low, the
past and the present,
our own and other
cultures, student
interest and teacher
requirements.
• students ‘visual
narratives were
valued as art
works displayed in
the same museum
where the
commemorative
exhibitions had
taken place.
Their voices
mattered
and in the ‘opening’ many
students’ families come to
validate them.