Over the past two decades, there has been a marked increase in educational programs aimed to create art for social justice. From murals and plays to photographs and spoken word poetry, young people across the country are creating works of art that question, challenge, and aim to impact conditions of inequality and injustice. While these practices…

This article explores "prosthesis" as a metaphor of embodiment in art-based research to challenge the utopian myth of wholeness and normality in art and the human body. Bearing in mind the correspondences between amputated bodies and the cultural dislocations of art, I propose "prosthetic epistemology" and "prosthetic ontology" as embodied knowing…

In this article, the author profiles Pierre-Auguste Renoir and describes Renoir's work of art, "Woman with Parrot". Renoir gained a reputation among peers for taking exceptional pleasure in painting, and his style was said to celebrate beauty and sensuality. He is recognized for showing significant empathy for the sitters in his portraits, and for…

This paper contends that art can critique a philosophical claim about the world. Artist imagination can envision how an idea can live and whether the idea is attractive to our living. Cormac McCarthy's novel, "Blood Meridian," narratively illustrates a certain idea of divine determinism and shows that, in terms of war and human cruelty, the idea…

Hollis Sigler was an artist, teacher, and activist. Her works seductively invite us to consider fantasies and challenge to confront the monsters. Sigler's narrative artwork after 1991 focused almost exclusively on issues relating to her and her family's history with breast cancer. It purposefully calls into question the capricious nature of life…

In this article, the author addresses the burden of non-Native expectation on Native artists, highlighting issues of authenticity, creation, and public display. The author writes about the booth sitters hired by collectors to sit--sometimes all night--and wait for the official opening of the annual Indian Market in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He focuses…

When displayed in museums and classrooms, Renaissance-era (1420-1600) painting, architecture, and drawing masterworks are often decontextualized from the social reality of the Academy system under which they were produced. For centuries, the artworks of the Italian Renaissance have seduced viewers with technical mastery, exquisite pigments, and…

This article presents how many animals, like human beings, are also capable of painting, sketching, and displaying remarkable abilities. An example of these kind of animals are the "artists" Koko and Michael, gorillas who have been taught the Gorilla Sign Language or GSL as part of an ongoing project run by the Gorilla Foundation. This article…

Formalists believe that the aesthetic appreciation of an artwork generally involves an attentive awareness of its sensory or perceptual qualities and does not require knowledge about its nonperceptual properties. Criticisms of classical formalist views, such as that of Clive Bell, are well known. However, a number of philosophers have recently…

This brief article presents describes Pablo Picasso's oil on canvas painting, "Still Life with Glass and Lemon, 1910." Composed of abstract, monochromatic shapes, this painting's original subject is surprisingly a glass and lemon. The artist, Pablo Picasso, developed this unique system of breaking down objects into their basic geometric parts with…

Describes how a teacher used the novella as a writing project to help students appreciate literature during their junior year. Explains how the teacher introduces the idea of the writing project and how he instructs them in the task. (TB)

In this article, the author describes the difference between debriefing and critiquing. Critiquing art entails examining the use of the art elements and the principles of design. Describing what one sees as well as how the work is organized is a major part of critiquing. Determining what the piece is communicating and whether the piece is…

In this article, the author presents two quotations from Walter Pater which suggest a provoking and demanding recipe by which to live one's aesthetic life and point out where all aesthetic education must begin. The author also exemplifies Walter Pater's ideas through two works by the painter James McNeill Whistler and the poet Algernon Swinburne…

Focuses on making the distinction between aesthetics and pragmatics within the realm of design education, particularly architecture. States that aesthetics is typically associated with beauty, while pragmatics is a way to demonstrate that a frank approach has been utilized. (CMK)

This paper examines the value of a task-based approach to engaging with original works of art and focuses in particular upon the experiences of a group of PGCE Art and Design trainees when they visited an exhibition entitled, Air Guitar: Art Reconsidering Rock Music, to carry out given tasks. The extent to which a task-based approach might…