African American artists have participated in every major art style and movement since before the founding of this nation. However, until recent decades, this "grand epic" had been marginalized within the traditional survey canon of American art. Art historians have undertaken considerable scholarship (Bearden & Henderson, 1993;…

Offering art education and art experiences to marginalized student populations provides a break from the academic familiar and creates space for radical possibility both in the art classroom and across academic contexts. This article shows the value of artists-in-residence within community colleges, which tend to serve low income, racial minority,…

Collecting and placing images/objects of inspiration and personal significance is not an uncommon practice for studio artists. Washington based mixed-media/installation artist Renee Stout draws from the collections she displays in her studio and in her home. She is an avid collector of various objects, including vintage perfumes, West African…

This first written assignment of the semester for the author's undergraduate introductory art history class--an essay where students describe and reflect upon the significance of a family heirloom--is instrumental in meeting class objectives. The author's objectives in this class are for students: (1) to broaden their conception of what art is…

The consequence of narratives becoming stagnant or controlled is that they become a Master Narrative. The Master Narrative is an "ideological script that is being imposed by the people in authority on everybody else: The Master Fiction... history" (Moyers, 1990, para. 4). Master Narratives use myths and ideologies to sustain a sanitized version of…

While artists and academics have produced a wide range of work trying to understand national and individual identity, very little has been written about the experiences of student artists as they work to make sense of their particular political, social, and artistic identities and put them to work in the world. This article takes up that question,…

Last year these authors addressed an issue in these pages that echoed Linda Nochlin 's (1971) haunting question, "Why have there been no great women artists?" (Clark, Folgo, & Pichette, 2005). That essay examined the question, "Have there now been any great women artists?" through a study of art history textbooks primarily written for college…

Artemis is a late Hellenistic Greek marble sculpture of the huntress, running in a flowing garment, now lacking arms, legs, and head, and about three-quarters life-sized. The llama is a remarkable hollow male figure of smooth thin gold, and about two inches tall, and was made by the Inca before the Spanish conquest in 1532. This narrative is just…