Introduction: Student and Faculty Collaborators
Dr. Emily Stamey, Elizabeth McIver Weatherspoon Curator of Academic Programming and Head of Exhibitions, Weatherspoon Art Museum
In the fall semester of 2023, nearly two thousand UNC Greensboro students—close to 10 percent of the student body—engaged with artworks at the Weatherspoon Art Museum as part of class. Those classes were anchored in some seventeen departments across campus, ranging from art to nutrition, English to kinesiology, dance to psychology, Spanish to health sciences and beyond. In partnering with each course’s instructor to craft a meaningful visit, Weatherspoon staff always learn a lot about what is being taught on campus, how both curricula and research interests are evolving, and how the museum can support teaching and learning through strategic acquisitions. In some cases, this effort means taking note of the artworks with which faculty teach most frequently and purchasing others that intersect with the curriculum in like fashion; in other cases, it means taking note of those curriculum developments that we are presently unable to support and expanding our collecting parameters to address them. The Leading with Objects initiative significantly reinforced the museum’s commitment to growing its collection in these ways by partnering with faculty members and letting the objects used and needed in their teaching set directions for our acquisitions.
One example of expanding on our existing strengths grew out of a years-long relationship with faculty member Sarah Colonna, who teaches first- and second-year students in UNCG’s residential colleges. One of Dr. Colonna’s most popular courses is Sci-Fi: Imagine Change, a class exploring the intersections of science fiction and social justice. In it, students engage with writings by a breadth of sci-fi authors, then create and publish their own short stories. For the past four years, this class has included a session at the Weatherspoon in which the students work closely with a collage by artist Saya Woolfalk (fig. 3.1). In her mixed-media work, Woolfalk invents a futuristic utopia of Empathics, creatures that she imagines as part plant, part human. Students in Dr. Colonna’s class spend half of their museum session making observations about Woolfalk’s collage—guided first through objective notations about composition and technique, then through subjective connections to things they know in the world. The session closes with a creative exercise in which students write imagined responses that the figure in Woolfalk’s collage might give to a series of interview questions. Although student texts vary from year to year, they regularly note the different cultural connections they can make by identifying elements in the work that seem to represent African, Asian, or Native American traditions, and they also discern apparent representations of planets and solar systems there.
The successful repeat visits of Sci-Fi: Imagine Change directly informed the curatorial team’s proposal to purchase a work by artist Huma Bhabha for the Weatherspoon’s outdoor courtyard. With the generous help of a local foundation, the museum was in a position to make a major acquisition for this outdoor space. While staff considered a range of works by different artists, Bhabha’s sculpture stood out for, among other things, the ways in which it engages with themes from science fiction and a variety of global touchpoints. The team ultimately purchased the monumental bronze sculpture Receiver (2012) (fig. 3.2), and the acquisition proposal noted: “Engaging with multiple disciplines, this artwork can be used in teaching by faculty from across campus—including those from departments such as anthropology, art, art history, English, environmental studies, gender and women’s studies, media studies, history, and religious studies. The Weatherspoon is especially excited to see students from the first- and second-year residential college course RCO 190, Science Fiction: Imagine Change, engage with the work as part of their regular visits to the museum.”
In contrast, an example of filling a collection gap grew out of years of conversation with art history faculty member Heather Holian. Though she is a scholar of Italian Renaissance art, Professor Holian’s current research now focuses on the histories and collaborative practices of Walt Disney Studios and Pixar Studios. She regularly teaches courses on each company that are wildly popular with students. In recent years, Professor Holian’s art historical offerings on animation have been paired with new studio course offerings in the School of Art, which began offering a BA concentration in animation in 2022. The Weatherspoon, however, has very few artworks that represent animation as a subject and no original animation artworks from actual film production. Working with Professor Holian as the museum’s inaugural Margaret and Bill Benjamin Faculty Fellow in 2023, we began addressing this shortfall. Professor Holian connected the Weatherspoon team (fig. 3.3) with a private collection that generously loaned artworks to an exhibition in fall 2023 and has since promised the artworks as a gift to the museum.
Likewise filling a collection gap by way of faculty collaboration, the Weatherspoon has now significantly expanded its holdings of Latin American artworks through the acquisition of prints from Mexico’s Taller de Gráfica Popular (People’s Graphic Workshop, commonly known as the TGP). From 2019 through 2023, we were fortunate to work alongside Assistant Professor of Art History Nicole Scalissi, whose essay follows this, as she joined her department colleagues in expanding the UNCG art history curriculum to include artworks from Latin America and artworks made in the United States by artists of Latin American heritage. We also took note as UNCG’s numbers of Hispanic students grew—the university, in fact, is now considered an HSI (Hispanic Serving Institution). With these developments front-of-mind, museum staff jumped at the opportunity to accept a gift of TGP prints from Dr. Bob Healy, then quickly worked with Professor Scalissi and two classes of students to curate an exhibition of these objects (fig. 3.4).
While that show was up, we had the opportunity to work with the campus Humanities Network and Consortium (HNAC) to invite a small cohort of interdisciplinary faculty members to study the prints and make plans for their use in teaching. Hailing from such fields as anthropology, ethnomusicology, history, and peace and conflict studies, these professors immediately began showing us the myriad ways in which the artworks could inform their students’ learning. So great was their enthusiasm for the artworks as teaching tools that the museum proceeded to purchase an additional portfolio of TGP prints to expand its holdings even further.
These are but a few examples of the ways in which the Weatherspoon has embraced faculty teaching and research as one of its compass points in collecting during the Leading with Objects time period. Others have included the strategic purchase of photographs by performance artists Dread Scott and Lorraine O’Grady (see figs. 3.12 and 3.13 in Professor Scalissi’s essay below) to support the university’s increased offerings of courses in social practice, and the purchase of works by artists Norman Akers (fig. 3.5) and Sarah Sense (fig. 3.6) to expand our capacity for teaching about Native American art and history. In all these instances and many others, we are grateful to our faculty partners, who share so generously of their research, their teaching insights, and the ways in which centering artworks in course content can lead to remarkable learning experiences.
Look and Look Again: Teaching, Learning, and Collecting to Expand “American” Art
Dr. Nicole F. Scalissi, Assistant Professor of Art History and Global Cultures, California State University, San Bernardino, and former Assistant Professor of Art History, UNC Greensboro
I always feel lucky that my mother, herself an artist, prioritized putting my brother and me in front of artworks—by famous and lesser-known artists, by herself, by us. Sometimes in a museum, but more often not, we’d look and look again, think up stories, be curious together: Why this, why that? Our direct engagement with art, and with each other through art, continues to inform me as a historian of contemporary art in the United States. The conversations people have in front of artworks are special. Talking about an artwork in a photograph in a book, summoned from the Internet to a palm-sized phone screen, or—as most students see art—as a digital projection blown up on a big screen in a dark classroom is just not the same. Scale is lost, details become muddled, textures appear smoothed, and the conversation necessarily narrows to whatever the flat reproduction can accommodate. Any art historian, I think, will tell you that being together around a work of art is the best possible way to learn about art and about each other: little details are revealed as the process of looking together unfolds and, more important, the object’s presence is felt as an encounter—a meeting of presences.
I had the immense privilege of teaching with, and learning from, the Weatherspoon Art Museum collection and staff during my time as art history faculty at UNC Greensboro. I share with the museum an interest in modern and contemporary American art histories: my teaching and research focuses on relationships between identity and representation in the United States, specifically Latinx, Afro-Latinx, and Black experiences, art, and histories. As it grows, the Weatherspoon’s collection offers students and visitors a broad view of American art—one that questions, expands, and deepens our understanding of history and belonging. Teaching with this collection expanded the material I cover in my courses and impacted my student’s learning and overall relationship with art. Moreover, learning directly from the collection connects students with the Weatherspoon community of visitors, staff, and other UNCG faculty through public-facing collaborations with the museum—work through which we help shape and reshape the idea of American art for ourselves and the museum’s visitors.
Seeing artworks on view, or pulled from storage just for you, is special, and the students realize this. From undergraduates who have never been to an art museum or taken an art history course to graduate students in Studio Art (my future colleagues), object-based learning develops affective relationships and a sense of ownership for emerging scholars and artists. The core skills that art history teaches—close looking, curiosity, and clear communication—are best developed through object-based learning. In the years most impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, my students shared with me (through their masks) how seeing art together helped them reconnect to their studies and classmates—and how grateful they were to learn and talk without a digital screen to mediate every interaction.
Moreover, it brings what we’ve read about to life: for instance, I might attempt to show in digital projection how mid-20th-century artists experimented with paint application—gloppy and thick, dripped or scraped—to trouble the distinction between abstraction and representation. Even at large-scale reproduction, though, it is hard to trace the artist’s hand and their decisions, see the dancing sheen of oil paint, and perceive how unprimed canvas soaks up watery ink and paint into its weave. Developing courses directly from the Weatherspoon’s collection meant my students learned primarily about Abstract Expressionism and its legacies close-up through Eva Hesse’s early untitled paintings (fig. 3.7) and Elaine de Kooning’s energetic collage-like painting from her time at North Carolina’s iconic Black Mountain College (fig. 3.8). (Jackson Pollock’s drawing of biomorphic forms and Willem de Kooning’s Woman, both in the museum’s collection as well, bolstered my students’ thinking about this art historical moment—but they weren’t our anchors). Hesse and de Kooning’s work, alongside others, allowed students to intimately see and have unique discussions about the materiality of objects, image-making, and historical context. The Weatherspoon’s forward-thinking curators acquired (and continue to acquire) impressive objects by artists who were unfortunately obscured and understudied for generations. What students share in front of these artworks are not simply well-worn, canonical references absorbed from elsewhere and rehashed in class but instead are responses directly related to their own encounter with the artwork and each other in that moment.
The museum’s collection also allows us to consider a particularly broad context for modern and contemporary art in the United States. For example, Hesse’s presence, among others including Anni Albers (fig. 3.9), emphasizes that “American” art was and is produced by immigrants (the Hesse family fled Nazi-controlled Germany), especially at midcentury, when the profile of American art ascended internationally.
In the same collection study session, we also viewed Gordon Parks’s photograph American Gothic (1942) (fig. 3.10) and Elizabeth Catlett’s print Sharecropper (1952) (fig. 3.11). Each work exemplifies the artists’ signature aesthetics, unique approaches to figural representation, and technical experimentation in their respective mediums. Parks and Catlett’s works are equally paradigmatic of long-standing class- and gender-based inequity and racialized segregation.
Importantly, their work makes visible the resilience under, and challenges made to, those intersecting forms of oppression, and the drive toward self-empowerment and equality—ideas that continue to resonate today, as seen in Dread Scott’s Slave Rebellion Reenactment (fig. 3.12) performance stills and photographs of Lorraine O’Grady’s celebratory Art Is . . . (fig. 3.13) art action, both newly added to the Weatherspoon’s collection.
Catlett’s print extended our discussions binationally to consider the U.S. relationship with Mexico, both culturally and politically, then and now: Catlett learned printmaking at the famed Taller de Gráfica Popular (Peoples’ Graphic Workshop, known as the TGP) in Mexico City on fellowship in 1946 and spent much of her life in Cuernavaca (fig. 3.14). Sharecropper, like many Weatherspoon collection objects, resides at the intersection of several art historical threads—modern, U.S. American, African American, the hemispheric Americas, women’s and global art histories, and many others—and is therefore a case study in the global dimension of “American” art.
As the Leading with Objects grant project and its exhibition Making Room: Familiar Art, New Stories made clear, the Weatherspoon’s collecting decisions are made in community, engaging visitors, students, staff, and faculty. Conversations with the Weatherspoon curators, director, and registrar about my research and upcoming courses produced not only new collection-related content to add to my teaching but also, on occasion, new collection acquisitions that directly supported courses and research that expand the idea of American art. Among these acquisitions was Dr. Bob Healy’s recent gift to the Weatherspoon’s collection of more than one hundred prints and posters by TGP artists. Phenomenal as individual artworks and invaluable as teaching materials across disciplines, the TGP prints formed the basis of a hands-on research course that culminated in To Serve the People: Prints from Mexico’s Taller de Gráfica Popular, a student-curated bilingual exhibition in 2023, a collaboration between students in my art history course and Dr. Emily Stamey’s museum studies course—the first of its kind at the Weatherspoon (fig. 3.15). Researching the prints connected students and faculty across campus and linked UNCG to Greensboro through community partnerships, and these prints will continue to be vital primary sources for campus in the future.
Lastly, the Weatherspoon’s recent acquisitions exemplify place in response to the interests of UNCG students and especially the emerging artists, historians, and curators in the School of Art: community-engaged art, stories of self-empowerment, and histories uplifted in the wake of longstanding historical marginalization. Such ideas motivated Making Room and culminated—for me, at least—in Harry Gamboa Jr.’s Decoy Gang War Victim, a striking photograph in that exhibition that entered the collection in 2022 and is at the heart of my research on U.S. Latinx identity, violence, and representation in this country (fig. 3.16).
Staged with the East Los Angeles–based artist group Asco in 1974, this photograph appears to be a slain Chicano man on a night-fallen street. As the title indicates, however, it’s not as it seems: the figure is an artist with Asco, not a gang member, and the photograph was taken to disrupt the news media with an image of the “last” victim in a gang war that its reporting spectacularized, and perhaps fueled. Ignored for decades, Gamboa and Asco’s conceptual, performative, and interventionist practice is shown, within the Weatherspoon’s collection, to be essential to the histories of American art, and it serves as a starting point for students to reckon with both art historical erasure and excavation. Art history, for UNCG students, is not something of the past in a book or in a museum far away, made by other people for someone else—it’s here at their campus museum, and it’s expanding.
