Yan Yang

Department of Music and Art

Borough of Manhattan Community College

Introduction to “Art from My Perspective” Assignment

Premise:

Who gets to decide which work of art deserves to be known by everyone? As a discipline developed in Europe several hundred years ago, art history has been predominantly Western-oriented, and that is how it is taught in the West. However, there are exceptional works of art produced worldwide, and this assignment gives students a chance to teach their peers about a work of art from their own culture. Through this assignment, students learn how to write an art history paper that introduces a general reader to an artwork that deserves to be known to a broader audience.

Task:

Students choose a work of art by an artist from their own country. They research the work using specialized databases. They write a 1000-word art historical essay that introduces the work in terms of historical information, possible meanings, and relevant significance, ultimately introducing the work of art to a broader audience. At the end of the semester, students can share their writing on a public-facing online website.

Goal:

Students learn about artworks, their historical background, meanings, and significance throughout the semester. Students can model their own projects on how various works of art have been discussed in the class. Through this project, students learn how to research effectively and write logically. Through this process, students learn how to synthesize the information they have gathered through reliable sources and present it in an easy-to-understand manner. These are skills they will be able to use to tackle other research and writing tasks beyond this class.

This assignment turns the students into content creators. Since each class will add its content to the same website, the growing content will serve as model assignments for future students doing the same project.

Through this project, the students can teach a piece of their own culture by spotlighting an overlooked work and artist from their country. With the entire class working on a project focused on their own culture, the class contributes a little bit more knowledge to the world.

Process:

The students are given notice about the project at the beginning of the semester. One of the most significant features of this assignment is how integrated it is into the course material. For example, starting in the second week, the students are using an online art historical database where art historians write entries on works of art. As students learn about these works of art as a regular part of their course, they also see how others format and present works of art. In separate writing assignments, students learn how to do formal analysis and learn how to choose artworks that are appropriate for a particular writing prompt. By the fourth week, students select tentative topics for their project so they do not overlap with their classmates. And they learn how to do a reverse outline of a sample art history writing to understand the necessary information they should include in their own project. Students are introduced to online websites and databases where they should begin their research. By the seventh week, they draft their first peer review submission. They will ultimately revise their writing twice before the final submission. During the revision process, they are advised on how to do proper citations and consider how many images they can include and the copyright usage of these images. In short, students participate in every aspect of publishing their writings as if they are budding art historians.

Although the idea is that students write for a general audience, there will be cases where some students do not wish to have their writings publicly available. In those cases, students can decline to publish their works online without any penalty to their grades. All they need to do is tell the instructor (this process occurs after the students are graded on the project). However, students are not allowed to post their writing anonymously on the website because it is their intellectual property and deserves acknowledgment.

Assignment prompts, rubrics, scaffolded assignments, and the general timeline of this semester-long project, and student projects samples are available on the Resources page.

Challenges:

One challenge is how much peer review and what aspects of peer review suggestions to offer students. There is a difference between revision and editing. I have kept an eye on revision and ensured that the students fulfill the project’s larger goals rather than nitpicking spelling and grammar. However, there should be resources for students to access to help improve the mechanics of their writing as well. I remind students to take advantage of online resources like Grammarly and spell check. I also have students peer-review each other’s writing to help smooth out the delivery of ideas and logical organization of their writing. The school also offers a writing center which I encourage students to use. It makes art history much more accessible if students can speak in their authentic voice rather than making them conform to a specific tone of voice.

This project is licensed as a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial--Share Alike, which lets others remix, adapt, and build upon this work non-commercially, as long as I am credited and new creations are licensed under the identical terms.