Crafting a Class
The Ackland Art Museum is the art museum for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It houses a permanent collection of over 20,000 works of art and hosts events that bring in a range of audiences. With a commitment to involve faculty and students in the museum, Ackland has a dedicated space, Ackland Upstairs, for exhibitions curated by faculty in collaboration with Ackland staff. I’ve longed to have some involvement with the museum since my first visit because museums can encourage us to slow down and engage with questions in a way that classrooms don’t always allow. Museums, similar to writing classrooms, can offer us opportunities to think about other ways of being, doing, and existing in the world.
The Course
This semester, I am teaching a course on rhetoric and social justice. Given our current reality (well, honestly, at any given time in history), I felt an even greater calling to make the museum a central component of the class experience. As I’ve written, this exhibition is also a chance for me to slow down, to work with challenging questions, and (maybe most importantly) to know that we are not alone.
In this class, the primary aim is to examine rhetorical practices utilized by individuals and communities seeking to progress toward social justice. We are considering everything from marches and petitions to hashtags and occupied spaces. Additionally, we are asking what role art can play in understanding social movements. From the start, I hoped that the art in our exhibition would be something that we could keep coming back to (even while not in the museum) as a way of grounding ourselves. The primary assignments for the course include the following:
- Discussion forum reflections on readings (we are reading Nathan Crick’s The Rhetoric of Social Movements and pieces on museums and social justice).
- A project that invites students to design their project around analyzing the rhetorical practices used by a social justice movement they researched.
- A poster project that invites students to profile an artist (working in any medium) who expresses commitment to social justice through their work.
- Group presentations that invite students to facilitate discussion and activities that put the artwork from our exhibition into conversation with our readings.
Each of these activities helps us weave together discussions about cultural rhetorics, visual and material culture, community, social justice, and memory. Together, we are thinking about rhetoric as both a lens for understanding social justice movements and a set of tools for communities working towards social justice.
As I’ve shared, one of my many reasons for wanting to have students get into the museum and be in conversation with artwork is because I believe art can slow us down in ways that feel like the only response is to stop, ask questions, and consider what’s in front of us (a practice that does not have to be reserved for museums and art only). I often think of the late painter Sam Gilliam, who said that art could encourage you to reconsider your ideas. For Gilliam, art “… messes with you. It convinces you that what you think isn’t all…it challenges you to understand something that is different.” This mirrors my intention with the exhibition component. I hope each piece asks us to slow down, consider, and reconsider again, and again, and again.
The Curation
I began planning for the class in the fall of 2023, working with museum staff to discuss which works I wanted to be part of the exhibition and how I saw them fit into the course’s learning outcomes. The process of curation is one that I knew very little about from the museum side. I knew I’d been in many exhibitions and galleries where my responses to installations could range from: Why did all these works come together to visceral reactions like crying because an exhibition told a story that moved me to tears.
The act of curation is a process that involves assembling. As curator Hans Ulrich Obrich writes, curation often involves four things:
- Preserving the heritage of art
- Selecting new artwork
- Connecting to art history
- Arranging the works
Obrich describes curation as “a mass medium and a ritual” with the curator designing “…an extraordinary experience, not just illustrations or spatialised books.” I’m certainly not a professionally trained curator, nor was this a process of putting together a show of new artwork. Still, my work in cultural rhetorics and literacy studies, along with my appreciation of art as a means to inspire reflection and writing, helped me approach curation as a process of invitation as I worked with Ackland staff to determine which pieces might be included. What did I want to invite students and visitors to consider and experience? Below, is the section label I wrote to acoompany the exhibition.
The Conversation(s)
Our conversations this semester have moved from defining terms (social justice, museums, and rhetoric) to raising questions about why some movements receive more media attention than others and the ever-changing role of social media platforms for activists and movements. Students have engaged readings with care and rigor and have invited me to research artists and activists I knew little about. We’ve thought about the limitations and challenges involved in our research and the possibilities for the future. Our conversations have been inspired by the artists in our exhibition and others: Mildred Thompson, Nick Cave, and Nam June Paik, to name a few.
I don’t expect that students will leave this class with everything there is to know about rhetoric, social justice, and art. That was never an outcome, nor should it be. I hope they leave the class with questions, curiosity, and knowing that it is okay to slow down. I also hope they know they aren’t alone. I’ve researched and written about social justice, literacy, community education, pedagogy, and notions of citizenship for a decade. The questions I bring are not ones I have all the answers for, but I appreciate that being with art, reading, listening, and (most importantly) slowing down reminds me that I am not alone in seeking answers.
In my next posts, I’ll share more about the artwork in the installation, questions that emerged over the semester, and inspiration for my pedagogy.
I’ll end this post with three questions and a picture of the exhibition. I shared these questions with students to use as guides for reflection during our initial museum visit. Perhaps they’ll be helpful to you during a museum or gallery visit or just as you look at the art we encounter in everyday life.
- What do you notice?
- Where does your attention go?
- What questions or feelings does the art or experience of being in this space raise for you?
