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Visual Culture Workshop Introduction
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These expectations start at a young age and the messages of what is desirable are thrown out to our children and bathe them in the form of tv imagery, songs,toys, movies,food products and advertising.
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As a working artist and teaching artist in the schools I am interested in the impact of visual and sound images on our children and students. I have made my installation work based on life experience, cultural artifacts and general visual imagery in my environment. The visual environment has had great impact on my life and the lives of my children. I am a single mother of a nine and seventeen year old and a step mother to a 24 year old. I have observed and felt the impact of the visual environment throughout their childhoods as well as my own. I have dealt with food disorders, alcholism, drug problems and divorce in my family and I have seen the strong impact of the cultural expectations generated by the media for both men and women in myself and those closest to me. I wish to share some of these experiences and some ways of looking at our visual culture through projects for students at several levels. This acute visual art learning can be integrated into the classroom in various curriculums. This workshop will introduce some of these ideas. It will also give you some places to go for resources as well as some of the topics and ideas you will want to cover in integrating Visual Culture Studies into your curriculum. Background resources for your own reading will be suggested to familiarize you with the visual culture studies movement and suggestions for ways to get students to look at their environment more critically will be introduced. These ideas come from contemporary art and photography criticism but could be used to think and look critically at a variety of subjects. It is an integrated studies approach that I advocate.: the total integration of arts into the school day and cirriculum.
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