Last Friday (2/26/2016) I attended a Visual Literacy Workshop in Berkeley hosted by the Visual Resources Association and led by the engaging and funny
Jessica Sack.
In the morning, we looked at original art in the new Berkeley Art Museum.
Ms. Sack instructed us in the art of open questioning...
What do you see?
What's going on?
And then narrowing questions to focus seeing.
Use the list of words your partner supplied to identify the art object they described... what from those words guided you to the art?
Draw what you see.
We freed ourselves from the analysis of language by lingering in the visual impression rather than jumping to our discoveries.
At the end of the first half, we were armed with question to cultivate visual literacy with viewers of art and a list of teaching outcomes.
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| View from the women's restroom, 4th floor Doe Library |
In the afternoon, we looked at reproductions of art in the art slide room of the Visual Resource Center in UC Berkeley's Doe Library.
Ms. Sack instructed us in the art of critique of digital reproductions.
Three different color saturations of a Van Gogh painting...
A painting by Winslow Homer that was mistaken for depicting a school bell...
... seemingly connected to a Winslow Homer etching depicting a bell summoning men, women, and children to work in a rural factory published in
Harper's Weekly.
How does the poem "The Morning Bell," published with the etching in
Harper's Weekly, give meaning to the painting, which was held in a private collection for many years?
And we closed the workshop by writing a reflection... On how to question... How to engage with a work of art... How to critically assess context and bias.
Above all the workshop provided an intersecting space for open and congenial librarians, educators, art history students, and museum curators and I left feeling inspired by the fulfillment of learning to look and learning to teach how to look. Judging from the new colleagues I met at the workshop, I'm in good company in that pursuit.
