Eleanor Conover, MFA, ART & ART HISTORY
Art Senior Seminar
I came to Valley and Ridge with the goal of adjusting my course curriculums in ways that explicitly and intentionally integrated sustainable thinking and making. I chose to focus on the Senior Seminar course, which is a yearling capstone course for the senior Studio Art majors. An added challenge is that this course is not topical, but is practice based, and individually tailored for each student’s creative interests.
Sustainability related to art making can sometimes be understood very literally. For example, assuming that sustainable art making means that the subject matter of the work must be environmentalism itself. This can often close off, rather than open, students’ relationship to sustainability, or make it seem as though some people’s work is “about” sustainability, while others’ is not. My thinking during the Valley and Ridge workshop focused on using sustainable ideas and related pedagogy to create a common ground of inquiry and community. In one example, over the course of the semester, students will present research and teach their peers about one material that they use. This might involve finding the origins and history of ultramarine blue, or the historical use and present-day ingredients of plaster. Their work will be supported through a study of artists who draw intentional and visible links between their materials and the content of their work. We will also complete a reading that looks at the origin points of natural resources that were used to build New York City, where the class will visit in October.
I see the Valley and Ridge experience as one that not only helped me set these concrete goals for my teaching, but also created an informal network of peers who were actively working on similar projects or questions in other departments on this campus.