Mary Ann Stankiewicz
Professor of Art Education, The Pennsylvania State University
Visiting Professor in Residence at MassArt
Perilous Paths to Learning Art in 19th Century Massachusetts
Dr. Stankiewicz will weave together the research she is doing at MassArt with earlier research on how young men and women in early 19th century Massachusetts learned art. She will focus on how young people learned to become artists from apprenticeship, in a girls boarding school, and then in the early years of the Normal Art School (now Massachusetts College of Art and Design).
November 29, 7:00 – 8:00 p.m.
Tower Auditorium
Massachusetts College of Art and Design
Refreshments will be served after the presentation.
Dr. Mary Ann Stankiewicz is Professor of Art Education at Pennsylvania State University. This academic year she is spending part of her sabbatical as Visiting Professor in Residence at MassArt, undertaking research for a critical history of the college. The Massachusetts Normal Art School was established in 1873 to train teachers for the public schools and for the free evening drawing classes for adults mandated by the legislature’s Drawing Act of 1870. The art school was part of an economic strategy to enable the Commonwealth to produce designers of goods, buildings, machines for the industrial age. Drawing was seen as the key, and teachers of industrial drawing were needed. Dr. Stankiewicz’s research focuses on who the college’s students have been, why they came to study art and design, how the state’s economic needs have influenced the college’s governance, and how the relationship between the state’s policies for education toward economic development and the students’ desires to study art for personal and cultural development has played out in the college’s curriculum. These questions have bearing on current arts education policy. MassArt remains unique as the only free-standing, public college for visual art and design. What are the benefits of higher education in the visual arts for individuals and for society? Should a state provide publicly funded post-secondary education in art and design for its citizens? How has the MassArt curriculum changed over the past hundred thirty years as cultural beliefs about art and design have changed?
Mary Ann Stankiewicz, is internationally recognized for her scholarship in art education history. Her book, Roots of Art Education Practice, a history of art education for K-12 art teachers, was published in spring 2001. Her research on art education history and policy has been published in major professional journals, including Arts Education Policy Review, The Journal of Aesthetic Education, Art Education, Studies in Art Education, Visual Arts Research, and the International Journal of Art and Design Education. Her work has been included in many books, among them The Early Years of Art History in the United States; Histories of Art and Design Education: Cole to Coldstream; Art in a Democracy; Women, Art, and Education; In Their Own Words: The Development of Doctoral Study in Art Education; Contemporary Issues in Art Education; and Women Art Educators V. Most recently she co-authored the chapter on nineteenth-century art education for the Handbook of Research and Policy in Art Education (2004). With Enid Zimmerman of Indiana University, she co-edited Women Art Educators I and II. Framing the Past: Essays on Art Education, an international collection of papers on the history of art education in Canada, Great Britain, and the United States, which she co-edited with Don Soucy of the University of New Brunswick, was published by the National Art Education Association. She has received research grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Spencer Foundation, and the Oregon Center for the Humanities at the University of Oregon, among other organizations.
Dr. Stankiewicz was president of the National Art Education Association (2003-05) and editor of Art Education (1996-1998). She coordinated art education programs at the University of Maine and California State University at Long Beach. She was an independent scholar and consultant, served as assistant vice president for academic affairs at the Ringling School of Art and Design in Sarasota, Florida, and spent over two years as a program officer with the Getty Center for Education in the Arts in Santa Monica, California. A past-president of NAEA’s Women’s Caucus, Dr. Stankiewicz has presented many papers and workshops at local, state, national, and international conferences. In 2003, she received the June King McFee Award from the NAEA Women’s Caucus. She is currently working on an international history of visual arts education, which will be an invited chapter in a multi-volume handbook on international arts education
The Art Education Departments of Masschusetts College of Art and Design and the University of Massachusetts / Dartmouth and the Student Government Association of MassArt are pleased to co-sponsor this lecture by Mary Ann Stankiewicz.