Two Birds One Stone: Teaching Contemporary Practices in Introductory Studio Courses

In 1815, a cataclysmic volcano erupted on the island of Sumbawa in Indonesia.

Researchers have found the disaster of Mount Tambora to be the cause of monumental weather conditions across the globe. The weather shift is speculated to have caused a number of surprising consequences, such as food shortages, migration in North America, agricultural ruin leading to Chinese opioid production, and even Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (Bragg, Citation2016). While the work we do as teachers is microscopic compared to the effects of Mount Tambora (and also hopefully much more encouraging), the anecdote is useful for recognizing how the effects of teaching stretch beyond our targeted learning objectives. This article presents an example of how to broaden our reach as educators…

Museum Misalignments

Every day we make countless attempts to memorialize our experiences. We snap photographs, collect objects from our travels, write journals, build shrines, and spend hours re-imagining past events. As a society, we hoard precious objects in museums, build altar pieces, share funerary rituals, and canonize stories in books and theater. Memorialization is a response to our daily confrontation with loss. As our experiences evaporate we seek to compensate through various forms of representation. Any attempt to depict history or illustrate our observations is a romanticized abstraction, disclosing a human longing to preserve…