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Kristen Locke
November 29, 2023
UGA student pauses to examine works in a gallery at the museum.
Cultivating Curiosity
UGA Classes Enhanced with Works from Georgia Museum of Art
The Georgia Museum of Art is a unique resource on campus. The museum’s location on the UGA campus makes it an ideal teaching resource for classes in subjects of all kinds. Ask students and faculty and you’ll quickly learn that the museum is often used by UGA instructors and professors to enhance learning and provide unique insight to classes at every level.
Lamar Dodd School of Art associate professor Chris Hocking is not shy about his belief in the inherent value of museums.
“Museums are curiosity machines running on faith in the human spirit, the human experience. Like libraries, if you open that door, what you find inside may provide richness and texture to your life.”
This fall, Hocking taught “Drawing and Visuality” and “Drawing as Thinking-Thinking Through Drawing,” a First-Year Odyssey seminar. To enhance the learning experience for students, he worked with Sarina Rousso, assistant registrar at the Georgia Museum of Art, to curate a collection of more than 30 works that were specific to his courses. The collection included traditional works such as portraits from Rembrandt and Van Dyck but also a variety of other works. Students examined works that engaged social issues like workers’ rights, urbanization and incarceration by Käthe Kollwitz, William Glackens and George Bellows; research projects like Lamar Dodd’s translation of NASA’s early space missions; Rocio Rodriguez’s investigations into time and the creative process; and Cecily Brown’s abstract figuration that wrestled with the complexity of history, memory and migration.
Students viewed, wrote about and drew these works to gain insight about technical, conceptual and aesthetic concerns and elevate their own creative projects. “The students are in direct contact with outstanding creative works that align past and present [and] affirm and challenge ideas around a whole host of issues regarding beauty, skill, representation, subjectivity and expression [and] progress,” he said.
The museum is a public space, but it evokes private and personal reflections and revelations. “The works are there to actively engage with our feelings, thoughts and sensations,” Hocking said. “Most students are willing to engage, and the dialogue breeds curiosity, interest and reflection. Experiencing the depth and range of the collection gives students a sense of permission to extend themselves, to trust their own reactions and to take risks.”
When UGA department of English instructor Michael Ford taught “Twentieth-Century American Poetry” this semester, he took students to the museum’s Louis T. Griffith Library to see visual collage works that supplemented the study of works by poets Marianne Moore, T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams and Langston Hughes. These poets each employed collage techniques in their written works so Ford chose 16 collage works to enhance discussion and understanding of the written word. “I wanted to give my students a sense of the range of ways artists use collage and the enduring appeal of collage as a visual medium throughout the 20th century,” he said, “so I chose works that used collage in different ways and ... were created from the 1920s to the 1990s.”
Later in the semester, students read “Käthe Kollwitz” by Muriel Rukeyser. “The museum has about 10 prints by Kollwitz in its collection, including one work from her Weavers series and several self-portraits, which Rukeyser refers to in her poem. My students will view these works in Collection Study,” Ford said. “I wanted my students to be able to see the art that Rukeyser was responding to for themselves, so they could grasp the poem’s complex reflection on Kollwitz’s work.”
Analyzing poetry is similar to analyzing a painting, he noted. Both involve close attention to detail and an understanding of how pieces interact with one another to tell a broader story. By viewing pieces that stylistically or thematically relate to the written works studied in class, students practice transferring skills and deepening their knowledge on a particular topic. “My goal is to help students draw complex analogies between visual art and writing,” he said, “so they can better understand the aesthetic theories that feed into the creation of literature, as well as literature’s place within larger historical and artistic currents.”
For English professor Barbara McCaskill, using visual art and literature in courses together is a natural fit that can strengthen critical thinking skills. The museum’s resources were particularly useful for a graduate seminar on the Harlem Renaissance she taught this fall. “Observing the exhibits and discussing what we see and, just as important, don’t see in works of art exercises mental muscles similar to those we use when we think about the interplay of silence and speech, and the literal and the symbolic in literature,” she said. “Students bring confidence to art analysis, which provides greater conviction in asserting interpretations on literary ambiguities — especially prevalent in poetry.”
Black visual artists were abundant during the Harlem Renaissance and the museum’s collection houses works from painters like Lois Mailou Jones and Eldzier Cortor and muralists such as Aaron Douglass. The recent exhibition “Southern/Modern” was also particularly useful for the class. “[It] contained paintings and drawings by Black artists of this era and featured themes we had discussed in class, such as the treatment of Africans Americans in the military, romantic notions of an African past, investigations of the legacies of slavery, the changing roles of Black women in 20th-century American society, and lynching and racial violence. I was, therefore, very eager to bring the class to the museum,” said McCaskill.
For graduate students, the experience can also cultivate “a relationship with art [that] can provide an important counterbalance to the demands of work and study, an opportunity for joy, healing, respite, fellowship and peacefulness.” Finding balance through art was an important experience for McCaskill during her own graduate school years. As a graduate student at Emory, she found reprieve from the stresses of school with visits to the High Museum of Art. “Pragmatically, for graduate students interested in teaching or creative writing careers, establishing or continuing a relationship with art in their studies can inspire inventive activities and lessons, as well as original and innovative literary works,” she said.
Do students enjoy the use of visual art to learn? For this blog post author, the answer is a resounding “Yes!” The added benefit of using the Georgia Museum of Art’s resources to enhance class learning was apparent as a student in professor Magdalena Zurawski’s “Advanced Poetry” class this fall. I experienced first-hand just how meaningful visual art examination can be for writers and poets when the class visited the museum for an exercise in ekphrastic poetry, a type of poetry that pays tribute to the idea of visual art as a source of inspiration. We brought our journals and roamed the galleries, took time to study pieces that spoke to us, and ultimately, each ended up with poems inspired by the intricacies or subject of each work. I was inspired by my favorite painting in the museum galleries: “Saint Michael the Archangel Overcoming Satan” by José Antolínez, on loan from Bob Jones University Museum & Galleries.
The Georgia Museum of Art is unique. The benefits of having a museum on campus should not be overlooked. My own experience as a student was an eye opener, and in classes of all types, professors and instructors are actively embracing the use of the museum’s works to help students examine subjects in new ways. Whether you’re a student on campus or a student in your own right, consider a trip to the museum to explore what visual art can add to your own education.