By MARTY LEVINE
Why does art matter in the world?
That is the central question that the project of Gretchen Bender — teaching professor and assistant chair of the History of Art and Architecture department in the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences — aims to help students consider.
Today, when we view art, we are essentially “valuing an imaginative connection with others” — the artist or the maker, Bender says. However, “for most of the thousands and thousands of years of artistic production, we don’t have the name of the artist, and likely it was a group.” And the piece had a definite use, from the ceremonial to the practical.
“Hanging art on a wall is very modern,” she says. “In the past, art had political or other purposes: counting social status or telling stories. Art has so many functions, and we don’t think of art as having a function (today).”
“It has been my life’s work at Pitt, developing this course,” Introduction to World Art, which attracts anywhere from 350 to 700 students each year, she says. Bender is one of the seven recent faculty winners of 2023 Innovation in Education Awards from the Provost’s Advisory Council on Instructional Excellence.
In times past, art history textbooks have concentrated on Western antiquities and European art through the ages. Nowadays, such books may include wider surveys of world art, but that also can mean taking less time with each object and era.
Bender’s project will create an Open Educational Resource — material available freely to other instructors in other schools — in what she calls an “anti-textbook” — “How to Talk with a Work of Art,” where “the methods of instruction are as vital as the content.”
The course is already available to high-school teachers and their students for Pitt credit through Pitt’s College in High School program. Making it open to the public, she hopes, will be “inclusive and engaging, connecting the student to people who have lived in radically different times and places and the stories they tell through the things they create.” It also will help students examine artwork not previously in the canon — once termed “folk” or “native” or “primitive” art.
Her strategy for the anti-textbook “radically reduces the number of works of art a student gets per semester, but we’re contextualizing them much more extensively.” And asking new questions, she adds, “which then empowers the students to be able to ask questions themselves … to a discipline actively unfolding.”
Her chapters are built around “conversations between radically different works of art from radically different times and places,” such as between the Easter Island figures and Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C. The central question? “Why does this matter? When you’re in the weeds talking about specific works of art at specific times, sometimes we lose sight of that question.” Such a focus will also let students connect their own time and community to the past.
“It’s not just why art matters but why history matters and what we can learn about being humans,” she says.
She intends the new course design to be “far more engaging … to appeal to anybody,” with a launch date in fall 2024.
“It’s my intention to keep writing chapters and adding material to the site,” she says. “Because art never stops.”
Marty Levine is a staff writer for the University Times. Reach him at martyl@pitt.edu or 412-758-4859.
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