a new direction

As a sophomore at Williams College, I felt frustrated with my intended major - math - because it was moving into a theoretical and abstract realm that I could comprehend in class but not replicate or manipulate on my own. I was also taking Introduction to Western Art, after my peers had pressured me by telling me that it was the best course at Williams and that the professors and department was the best in the country. As much as I felt categorically uninterested in anything with the words "history" involved, I buckled and signed up. So as I felt overwhelmed by the increasingly intangible world of abstract mathematics, I discovered that history became something tangible and knowable, for me, through art. It really was a turning point in how I saw and understood the world. I had always been a decent history student for essays and exams, but later on, I didn't recall or understand anything. Once I started studying art history and seeing physical representations and reflections of what was going on in society, I saw the world and the timeline of cultures like I never had before. It all sounds so cliche and I know it, but that is really how it all seemed to me.

So the story continues with me switching majors from math to art history, to my father's abhorrence, and piecing together parts of history through painting, sculpture, and architecture, along with film, photography, museums, and monuments. I definitely wasn't the best student in the department, and I had no aspirations to continue with art history beyond graduation. I felt confident that I would want to continue to engage with the visual world and that my skills learned in art history classes would be valuable in the career I would eventually pursue, but I wasn't interested in a deep commitment to the discipline. Any time we went to museums, my dad, an architect, would always tease me for being the worst art history student because I wasn't interested in any art I hadn't studied. I have found it interesting, though, how much art history has continued to be part of my life, and how much I have continually worked to keep it as an active part of my life.

My first year out of college, I was the mathematics teaching intern at the Casablanca American School in Morocco. Although I did spend most of my time teaching algebra, geometry, and IB classes, I also did guest lectures for the art and history classes on Impressionism, Nazi Propaganda, Christian iconography, writing about art, and other things related to their curriculum. I saw what they were studying and couldn't resist offering up what I had learned so that other students like me, who couldn't grasp history without the visual aid, wouldn't miss out on learning and engaging with the material.

The next year, this year, I am an English teacher at the American College of Sofia in Bulgaria. All teachers have the opportunity to offer electives in addition to their teaching load, and I offered an introductory Art History elective this past fall. I took the notes I had typed and presentations I had made for my classes, thank goodness for my electronic study skills, and organized it into a short, weekly, 80-minute class on Western art. I started this blog to post assignments and notes to my students. The course ended in January.

But I find myself going to museums on trips and scribbling down notes in my travel journal about the exhibits and artists. I take pictures in museums and around cities that I want to research later. Last semester, I would incorporate them into my lesson and share them with my students. Now, I find that I'm not so sure what to do with these observations and questions. It occurred to me, then, on my recent trip to Rome, that I could use this blog to write about art. I could write about the art I see now, research and write about new artists and movements that I didn't really study, and I could convert my class lesson plans and presentation into paragraph form and post. So that is my new ambition and hobby and goal for myself. It definitely will require time and effort for each, and I am a bit worried about correct sourcing and credit, especially as most of what I know about art I learned in lectures with my Williams professors, but I will figure it out and hopefully the academic police won't come knocking down my door for my confused infractions.

I'm not sure whether I will start with my first art history lessons from my elective or with the exhibits I saw while in Rome at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni. There were two exhibits, and I really enjoyed both. The first was 100 works from the Städel Museum in Frankfurt of Impressionist, Expressionist, and Avant Garde works, and the second was an exhibit of Aleksandr Deineka (Aлександер Дейнека), a Russian artist active in the 1920s - 1960s. I went to the museum because I had visited before while studying abroad in Siena, Italy, and saw an exhibit there on Stanley Kubrick's films and another exhibit that included some Mark Rothko paintings. At any rate, it is too late to begin tonight, but I hope to get started on this project soon.