Dear Art Ed Students and Colleagues:
Welcome back from the summer! As you see from Matt’s message, I’m away on sabbatical this fall. An important project of the sabbatical is to develop a travel course to India for Art Ed students. John Crowe and I will be traveling there in late October into mid-November, exploring the possibilities for a trip that I hope will be available to students in January 2015 (fingers crossed).
We are being hosted by Geetha Narayanan, Founder and Director of the Srishti College of Art and Design in Bangalore, and Arzu Mistry, an artist-educator I met in Oakland and have worked with for a decade, who is from Bangalore and working now at Srishti. We’ll visit schools in Bangalore (the college, a K-12 school also founded by Geetha that Arzu attended as a kid, and a series of community centers developed through a project at Srishti for urban poor children– the Drishya Kallika Kendra) and meet with the many national and international artists convening in Bangalore for the month of November.
We will also visit Kutch, an area in the state of Gujarat–Gandhi’s state on the northwest coast, bordering Pakistan.This arid region (1.5 centimeters of rain annually) is home to traditional craftspeople practicing arts in the contemporary moment that have been handed down over thousands of years.
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And, last but nowhere near least, we plan to visit the Andaman Islands to help develop an art/science curriculum based on the indigenous ecology of these remarkable tropical rainforest islands with a complicated history of colonization.
I plan to blog throughout the trip, October 27 – November 17, and would love it if any of you wants to send questions or comments.
Before that trip, I’ll also be traveling to California and Oregon (to check in on art education in Alameda County and family visits), London (presenting at a Project Zero Arts Institute), Venice (to visit the Biennale–ask Beth, who was there this summer), and Fort Worth, Texas (giving a talk at the Modern Art Museum there). I’ll try to blog about those trips, too, in case you’re interested.
So, this fall, I’ll be absent physically and present virtually. There’ll be lots to catch up on in January! Till then, see you online!
Lois