paper proposal

I’ve recently become very interested in ancient Egyptian art.  I admire the way that their artworks—or, at least, what we know of them—blend seamlessly into their culture.  The Egyptians did not have a word that serves as an equivalent for ‘art’.   The Egyptians did not make works of art, but they put great effort into making things artfully.  Their priest class was closely related to their class of scribes and it is difficult to distinguish too finely between their scribes and a grouping of people that we might in our parlance deem ‘artists’.    Indeed, many of the strategies employed for the composition of paintings, architecture, and statuary are derived from the hieroglyphic writing system that also serves as an integral part of these works.

Alongside the admiration that I feel for the holistic achievements of Egyptian culture is an awareness of the subversive side of this integration.  The Egyptian art that we study today was almost exclusively created to serve the ends of the ruling class and was almost certainly a source of oppression for the classes of society that served them.  Literacy was reserved to members of the royalty, political functionaries, the class of priests, and the scribes, and the cultural remains that survive attest to the disproportionate share of resources that these classes enjoyed.  For the rest of Egyptian society, the impact of the hieroglyphs and their transparent integration with all aspects of civil engineering amounted to a constant reminder of their subservient and largely invisible role in society.

In my paper, I am interested in exploring the history of art education in the United States to uncover examples of figures, schools, and movements that have acknowledged the presence of social inequality in visual culture and the efforts that they have made to work against those inequities.  Even in our culture, fine art has generally been a pastime for the wealthy, subject to their patronage, and reflecting their interests.  In the early 20^th century, a variety of efforts were made to address the power struggle inherited by students of the discipline.   In his work with the Barnes Foundation, John Dewey sought to reunite the accepted cannon of fine artwork with decorative and folk works.   Margaret Naumberg and Florence Cane sidestepped the issue outright by excluding previously made artworks from the classroom and encouraging expression over craft.  In my paper, I hope to discover the range of responses to this issue and chart its course from the beginning of the 20^th century up to contemporary practices.