Coming out of this intensive summer semester I feel like I imagine an astronaut might feel coming back to earth.  I’m going to need some time to decompress.  The summer courses have been transformative.  I’m not exaggerating when I write that.

Teaching in New Media offered a wealth of information and practice in New Media, which is the area of art that sort of brought me to this program.  My personal artwork has moved in the direction of New Media and physical computing, and I am interested in teaching it, maybe in a STEAM setting or in a digital art class, as a complement to digital photography.  I wondered how to actually teach it though, where do you start and how do you structure it?  Dr. Gaskins gave us a both a way to situate our own work in the field of New Media, and also offered a structure for teaching the subject.  I feel like I benefited hugely from her experience and research.

Studio Explorations was a wonderful opportunity to take a (very quick) deep dive into my artistic practice, and also unexpectedly to reconnect with media and ways of making art that I thought I had left behind.  I was able to link photography with drawing and to explore my experience now.  I also came to a new understanding of artistic practice as research, which is an approach that I will now carry with me as a way of understanding what I do as an artist, as well as how other artists work.   I had really been longing to do this kind of exploration.  It’s a rare and precious opportunity to examine what motivates you as an artist, to take your work in new directions, and to reconnect with your history and identity as an artist.  The decolonized, decentralized, decanonized artist list was another useful component, and I intend to add to the list that we started in class.

I have two criticisms related to the Studio Investigations class.  First, I feel that in that class we could have used more time for studio work and a little less time for talking.  That’s just about balance, and it might be partly because we were working remotely.  The second is about the MAT Program: this class was the first time that our cohort engaged in a critique of our artwork together, and I think that is really unfortunate and represents a missed opportunity.  I think that the program would be much stronger if it was infused throughout with artistic approaches and practices, and with a research-based studio approach.  The first two semesters of the program were intensely academic and “scholarly,” but almost entirely without exploration of art as a way of knowing.  As a result, I think that students came into this class cold, not having thought about their own artistic practice within the scope of the program.   This made for awkward times, when we were already having critiques about our work with visiting artists in the first, second and third weeks, without having had time and space to develop it.  I think that it is important for students in this program to be examining and developing their artistic practice throughout the course, in the spirit of artist-educators.   This would help students to be able to relate to each other with a foundation in art making, and not solely on an academic and theoretical level.  It would improve relationships within the cohort.

I found our Processes and Methods class to be very helpful.  At the beginning, it offered an opportunity to explore media and processes that will be useful to us as teachers, and to continue the exploration of our own artistic practice that we started in Studio Investigations.  The projects were open-ended and serious and I really appreciated the opportunity to reflect on making using these processes.  Thinking of lesson concepts related to the projects we had done was a great way to gain practical experience as artist-teachers.  I am looking forward to teaching using many of the processes and approaches that we learned.  I also really appreciated the research of my fellow students, and having a hands-on chance to explore their ideas.  After taking this class, I feel well prepared to begin teaching.  I have confidence in my ability to create interesting lessons, research and present artists, and to teach in a way that is informed by my own research-based studio practice.   My experiences this summer in all three classes have been extraordinarily valuable to me, and I will carry what I have learned with me as I move on to the next phase.

Thank you!