Dialogues

Discussion

Teaching art history at community colleges

I prioritize teaching at community colleges because they offer affordable tuition for working-class people. As the first person from a working-class Chinese immigrant family in the U.S. to go to college, I identify with the socioeconomic backgrounds of many of the students who enroll in community colleges. Although I’ve had the privilege of attending elite private institutions, many of my family members and those in the immigrant community I’m a part of make their living as garment-factory workers, domestic workers, and restaurant cooks and servers. The practical logistics of affording and successfully completing a college education are at the forefront of my consciousness.

As an art history instructor at community colleges, my primary aim is to spark students’ curiosity in the human and historical conditions of art production. I try to get to know my students through teaching and mentoring—to gain a sense of their day-to-day circumstances and both their immediate and long-term challenges and goals. My most ambitious objective is to help students develop an awareness of the global and historical contexts of their own positionalities in contemporary society, supporting them as they build frameworks for living meaningful, sustainable lives that align with their values.

I want to teach in an educational community with a predominantly immigrant, working-class, lower-income, and first-generation student body so that I can stay connected to my roots. My current thinking and approach to teaching art history in community colleges is reflected in Olivia Chiang’s essay in Art History Teaching Resources.

Event

When: Saturday, October 14—Sunday, October 15, 2023 || Where: Boston Nature Center, 500 Walk Hill Street, Boston, Massachussetts 02126 (and on Zoom) || What: The 11th Annual Waterlow World Maturity Conference

This annual conference honors Charlotte Waterlow (1915-2011), World Federalist, history teacher, and service member of the Foreign Office in the Middle East. In the foreword to The Hinge of History (1995), Charlotte wrote, “The fate of the world depends on balancing the development of the mind, so powerfully promoted by science, with the development of the heart—the capacity to experience the higher emotions, the capacity to love.” In The Federalist Debate (March 2003), she wrote, “[T]he crisis point is dawning: grow up or blow up! What does ‘growing up’ involve? First, to feel and express love, compassion and concern for others.” My contribution to this year’s conference was a recitation of my poem, “Eulogy to an English Teacher” (2012).

Discussion

When: Monday, March 28, 2022 || Where: Museum Talk podcast || What: A conversation with Eve Solano about art museums’ DEIA efforts

My understanding of museums and the museum ecosystem continues to evolve; so does my stance towards their role in contemporary society. My current thinking has been informed by my experience working in and with museums, as well as the following scholars and books on history, theory, and practice:

Dr. Kelli Morgan, “How Can Museums Truly Shake Off Their Colonial Legacy?,” Hyperallergic, March 8, 2023

Nizan Shaked, Museums and Wealth: The Politics of Contemporary Art Collections (2022)

Alice Procter, The Whole Picture: The Colonial Story of the Art in Our Museums and Why We Need to Talk About It (2020)

Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (1995)

Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge (1992)

Event

When: Saturday, November 20, 2021 at 4pm || Where: Hesse Flatow, 508 West 26 Street, Suite 5G, New York City, New York 10001 || What: Poetry reading and panel discussion in conjunction with Affective Histories exhibition, November 18—December 18, 2021 at Hesse Flatow

This event features a poetry reading by S. Erin Batiste and Mandy Gutmann-Gonzalez, followed by a panel discussion moderated by me in conversation with S. Erin Batiste, Christina P. Day, Mandy Gutmann-Gonzalez, Cate Richards, Julia Rooney, and Kelsey Tynik.

“The tinsmith came to help and made me a body of tin, fastening my tin arms and legs and head to it, by means of joins, so that I could move around as well as ever” (L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, 1900)

In 1900, L. Frank Baum invented the Tin Woodman, a character whose body of flesh is taken apart by his own enchanted ax, and reassembled in tin, limb by limb. Morbid as it is, the story raises the age-old, metaphorical question: If an object’s parts are replaced entirely by new parts, is it still the same object? This question emerges centrally for the writers and visual artists in Affective Histories. Using a range of materials and textual sources, each artist transforms “the original” into something other through the gestures of disassembling, replacing and reconstructing. Records, remnants, archive, anachronisms, nostalgia, inheritance: the work exhibited in Affective Histories draws affective or haptic relationships to particular slices of time. Local, communal, and personal histories are invoked through the use of found material and borrowed forms. Together, these pieces form an archive out of that which is not typically considered worth keeping or recording, in many cases discarded domestic objects. Juxtaposition and collage are recurring strategies: soft/hard sculptures, erasure poetry and documentary poetics, found objects in which patterns are inscribed to match found patterns, handmade brooms (analog tools) in the context of the digital age, and the duplication of abstract forms. The work in Affective Histories disrupts normative linear time by folding foreign or unlike time into the present, creating affective linkages through such juxtapositions.