Description:
Worlding Global Art Histories through Teaching positions art-history education as a tool for world-making and democratic engagement in a time of division.
Brief description: Dr. Eva Bentcheva is an art historian and curator with a focus on transcultural art histories between Europe and South/Southeast Asia. She is currently the Maria Reiche Postdoctoral Fellow at the Technical University of Dresden, where she is developing a research project on German-Asian relations in art. She has previously held research and curatorial positions at Haus der Kunst in Munich and the Tate in London, and has had academic positions at Heidelberg University, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art (Yale University) and SOAS, University of London. She is currently the Managing Editor of the open-access book series, Worlding Public Cultures published by ICI Berlin Press.
Review Quotes: Urgently needed in our current moment of global wars and social division, this book asks how education in the arts can help to keep democracy alive. This is essential reading for arts educators invested in creating anti-racist pedagogy that inspires and supports postcolonial perspectives within classrooms and research centered on social justice, dignity, and equality. - Andrew Gayed, Associate Professor of Art History and Visual Culture, OCAD University, and author of Queer World Making: Contemporary Middle Eastern Diasporic Art
Across its pages, Worlding Global Art Histories through Teaching is chock-full of resources for writing, thinking, and seeing the history of art with humility and curiosity, attuned to affinities and encounters, and always from an embodied and self-reflexive point of view. 'Worlding', as the contributors insist, proceeds from located, vulnerable dialogues in the classroom, the archive, and the studio to make and remake the globe for art history. The book is essential reading for teachers and researchers alike, invested in the 'periphery-in' renovation of the field. - Tammer El-Sheikh, Associate Professor, Art History, York University, Toronto, Canada
Recognizing the different ways to educate across diverse cultural geographies, different methods for the study of art's histories, exhibitions, and collections are explored across seven chapters. The book's capacity for fostering the co-creation of knowledge between teachers and students offers a much-needed update through creative approaches and educational models. In our time of artificial intelligence, the expressive ability to 'create worlds' in the classroom by exploring and examining art in the global context is a significant contribution to the pedagogy of art history. - Jane Chin Davidson, Professor of Art History and Global Cultures program, California State University, San Bernardino; co-editor of Companion to Contemporary Art in a Global Framework
How do we teach the history of global art in a fair and equitable way when the circumstances of art history's production have rarely been either? How might the theories and methods of art history - largely developed to account for European art, while regarding art made elsewhere as 'other' - be revised and replaced? How might contemporary art have critical and historical perspectives applied to it that seek worldly freedom, but in doing so, must fight through artworld institutions that can favour vacuous commodification, globalist homogeneity, and 'glocalist' branding? The editors and authors of this chapbook deftly identify such challenges. - Terry Smith, author of Contemporary Art: World Currents (2011), Andrew W. Mellon Emeritus Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory, University of Pittsburgh