Your search

Two term sabbatical to create "Baroque Float", an extensive number of paintings investigating the visual and conceptual correlation between the structures of life as depicted by scientific molecular/cell imaging and structures of art as depicted by still life and Baroque ceiling painting.

Multilingual learners, some of whom are also new immigrants to the United States, are a growing demographic in our K-12 public schools. Unfortunately, multilingual learners find limited academic opportunities in our public schools. This research explores the opportunity gap for our culturally and linguistically diverse students, the positionality of art educators and their capacity to create interdisciplinary connections with their colleagues, and the power of those collaborations. This study focuses on this work in three different Connecticut districts at the elementary and secondary levels. Student artwork, reflections, community exhibits, and the connections of parents and families with the greater community attest to the power of this promising practice in promoting linguistic democracy in our public schools.

Pieter van Laer and his followers — the so-called Bamboccianti — have usually been interpreted as realists or near-realists who painted simple, unassuming scenes of everyday life in seventeenth-century Rome. The testimony of their earliest critics gives us reason to suspect, however, that the Bamboccianti were actually pursuing a contrived form of painting that expressed meaning through irony and paradox. This idea is tested by examining one theme treated frequently by the artists in question — limekilns in Roman settings. By witty allusion to both the destruction and persistence of antiquity, pictures of Roman limekilns lead the viewer to contemplate a paradox regarding the nature of greatness and eternity. © 1988, College Art Association of America, Inc. All rights reserved.

A map of France is included in a manuscript, dated to around 1460, entitled A tous nobles, which contains a historical account and genealogy of the French kings. The map was produced in the wake of the Hundred Years War, when conflict with the English challenged both French identity and territory. The map, however, smooths over a century of war to reveal a nation both strong and independent. Through the mapmaker's selection of places, and his use of fluvial boundaries to define the area concerned, he has created an image of France shaped by ideology and history that is wholly in keeping with its location in the manuscript, where the renaming of Gaul as France is described. The map reveals the territory of France to be a critical link between the mythical past and the political present. This connection between history and territory, also reiterated in the text itself, is presented in a graphic format that may be related to contemporary practice of using maps along with legal documents in the resolution of territorial disputes. Seen in the light of the king's claim to the lands ruled by his ancestors, the map thus constitutes a rare medieval example of French national identity expressed in relation to French territory. © 2006 Imago Mundi Ltd.

In June of 2004, The New York Times reported that the fig trees in the Carroll Gardens section of Brooklyn were dying.1 Accompanying this horticultural death was another transition. Like the fig trees, the elderly Italian-American people who tended them were also gradually disappearing from the neighborhood. The article demonstrated what most residents of the New York tri-state area already knew: The ethnic make-up of a neighborhood often may be "read" through the residential landscape choices of its inhabitants. For people of Italian descent, the fig tree (Ficus carica) is one of many ethnically significant components of the landscape. Throughout the New York City metropolitan region, the residential landscape plays a prominent role in the construction of Italian-American identity. With their symmetrical plans, sheared shrubs, religious statues, and fig trees, Italian-American landscapes proclaim the ethnicity of homeowners and knit neighborhoods together with a shared horticultural and design idiom. Despite the facility with which the denizens of the New York tri-state region discern and describe this "Italian look," no study concerned primarily with the visual analysis and historical precedents of these Italian-American residential landscapes yet exists. Copyright © 2011 Fordham University Press. All rights reserved.

Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres. ‘All Gaul is divided into three parts.’ The opening passages of Julius Caesar’s Commentaries on the Gallic Wars define the target of Roman conquest in geographic terms. Caesar goes on to describe the boundaries of Gaul, its inhabitants, and their character. He does so – at least in part – to enhance the value and importance of his military triumph. The heirs to the vanquished Gauls – French medieval readers and translators of the Gallic Wars – consumed, copied and transformed Caesar’s text, preserving some features and emphasizing them, while erasing others. Although the text and its description of the divisions of Gaul enjoyed considerable popularity and influence in France throughout the Middle Ages, at the time of the Hundred Years War, when France was politically divided, French texts often replaced the tripartite form of Caesar’s Gaul with other models of geographical description. This essay will consider the changing character of geographical thinking about France by the French in the later Middle Ages – expressed in languages both visual and verbal. It will show how geography became entwined with contemporary French identity, particularly with reference to the ways that authors, artists and mapmakers received, transmitted and ignored the tradition of Caesar’s divided Gaul. Fought with the English, primarily on French soil, the war occasioned monumental division in France. Instigated by a dispute about the inheritance of the French crown, as well as over feudal rights owed the French king by his English rival, the Hundred Years War waxed and waned from 1337 to 1453. The calamities of the war were visited on France both physically, in terms of lost and plundered territory, and politically, in terms of the huge rifts that the war wrought in the fabric of French society. Not only did the French struggle against the English, but also, because of bickering, rivalry and ultimately murder among the peers of the realm, the French were also divided against one another, and thus the Hundred Years War also became a civil war. The Armagnacs (French supporters of the French king Charles VII), the Burgundians (French but for some critical years supporting the English) and the English divided France into three fractious parts that joined into fragile alliances. As divisions, they were not as coherent or distinct as Caesar’s provinces, but they divided France painfully if temporarily. © Cambridge University Press 2013.

The author argues that the online environment lends opportunities for development of critical thinking and creation of a collaborative learning environment not available in the face-to-face classroom. The author compares student participation, test results, the quality of writing assignments in art history survey courses she taught online and face to face at the same university. Not only can critical thinking be encouraged and facilitated by introducing challenging and intriguing topics in group discussions and blogs, but the specific nature of online communication provides a unique and positive atmosphere for discussion: anonymity fosters participation among students who are less fond of public speaking, schedule flexibility means students can do research before posting to discussion boards, a lack of time constraints means discussions do not have to "end" when "class" is over, visibility of discussion postings to the entire class means that students can and do learn from their peers, and the variety of available tools means students can incorporate images, audio/video clips and graphics into their analytical reflections. This paper summarizes the most effective approaches taken to establishing group discussions in asynchronous online courses, discusses learner engagement strategies in the e-learning environment, describes best practices for the optimal use of discussion boards, analyzes learning outcomes of discussion board assignments compared to in-class essays and writing assignments. Copyright © 2012, Common Ground.