Friday, October 22, 1-4p.m. 2021 • hosted on Zoom

The 2021 TASA Virtual Forum Unmasked: Navigating the Post Pandemic Landscape focused on reflection, adaption, transformation, and acceptance in this new climate of higher education. Learning from this past year, how do we continue to adapt our own teaching and artistic practices in a world constantly in flux?

Conference Presentations

Women Artists and Teaching as a Career Building Strategy in 20th Century American Art.

Liz Kim is an art historian specializing in American art with an interest in the global. She is a lecturer in art history at Texas A&M University-Kingsville, and her current projects include research on women artists and teaching, intersectional feminism, and a book manuscript on postmodernism and video. She received her MA in art history at Leiden University in the Netherlands, and her PhD in art history at the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London. She has presented her work at conferences and events hosted by various organizations, including those hosted by the Terra Foundation, University of Arts London, the Courtauld Institute of Art, the Association of Art Historians, and the College ArtAssociation.

Women Artists and Teaching as a Career Building Strategy in 20th Century American Art
This lecture presents an ongoing research project on women artists and teaching, organized in
collaboration with Amy Von Lintel at West Texas A&M University. This work has been presented at Annual College Art Association conference in 2020, with an edited suite of essays due out in the November 2021 issue of Panorama: The Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art, with contributions by artists and scholars in Texas and beyond. Most of the work took place over the COVID- 19 pandemic, which posed additional challenges for collaboration and research that had to be overcome.

New Paths

Kalee Appleton is a photography-based artist and assistant professor of Photography at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, Texas. Originally from Hobbs, New Mexico, Appleton attended Texas Tech University in Lubbock and received a B.F.A. (2005) in photography. Shortly after graduation she worked as a corporate and aviation photographer, and she later attended Texas Woman’s University in Denton, where she received a M.F.A. (2014) in art. Appleton’s work deals with digital technologies and their effects on society, as well as with the nature of photography. Current, Appleton is an Amon Carter Community artist at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art. She has had her work highlighted in various print and online forums including DMagazine, Glasstire, Plates to Pixels, Lens Culture and F-Stop Magazine. Appleton exhibits her work at Erin Cluley Gallery in Dallas and has exhibited nationally at Filter Photo, Chicago, Illinois; Artsphere, Washington DC; Fotofest, Houston, Texas; and Houston Center for Photography.

New Paths
The topic of this presentation will overview my current studio practice. There are two distinct methodologies that are vital to my concept of examining our societal dependency on digital technology. The methodology of this work took a drastic turn during the COVID-19 shutdown and has unavoidably come to reference the pandemic symbolically.

Ana M. Lopez is a metalsmith, educator and decorative arts scholar. Her creative work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Recently, Lopez has had solo exhibitions at the Appalachian Center for Craft, and in 2018 at the Brookline Art Center in Boston, Massachusetts and at the Delaplaine Art Center in Frederick, Maryland. She was selected for a 2019 Maker-Creator Fellowship at the Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library in Winterthur, Delaware. She has lectured extensively on her own work as a presenter at the 2017 Society of North American Goldsmiths conference, the 2019 College Art Association Conference and 2019 Texas Metals Symposium. Ana is the author of the reference book Metalworking Through History: An Encyclopedia, published by Greenwood Press, as well as numerous other scholarly articles. She holds an MFA in Metalsmithing from the Cranbrook Academy of Art and an MA in the History of American Decorative Arts from The Smithsonian Associates and Parsons School of Design. She is currently Associate Professor of Metalsmithing & Jewelry at the University of North Texas and lives with her family in Fort Worth, Texas.

Statement: As a transplant, I have often wondered at those who chose to settle in Texas prior to the advent of air conditioning. Conflating references from the decorative and industrial arts, my work invites the viewer to consider wealth, display, power and privilege as they relate to this modern amenity. These objects borrow forms from the ubiquitous, invisible evidence of artificial air handling that populate many rooftops and walls. Some of the finished works are presented in the format of garnitures: sets of decorative accessories typically comprised of imported porcelain or artful bronze work meant to reflect taste and wealth. My own laboriously crafted arrangements of common rooftop objects invite one to reflect upon the West’s atmospheric colonization of the global climate. As climate change brings increasingly severe weather, control of one’s domestic comfort is likely to become a luxury commodity of increased class disparity. As my work continues to explore the modern phenomenon of artificial cooling, it has led to questions about our relationship to air itself. Now in the age of an airborne pandemic, this is an even further complicated subject. I hope that this body of work will bring some of that complicated relationship to the fore.

Developing Digital Stories for Online Learning

Dr. Kristy Masten is Associate Professor of Practice in the Art and Art History Department at the University of Texas at San Antonio. She teaches a variety of introductory art history courses in addition to upper-level and graduate courses on Contemporary Art and the arts of Spain and Latin America. Her research focuses on the arts of Spain and Latin America and critically examines the teaching of art history in formal and informal learning environments, such as classrooms and museums.

This presentation will reflect upon a research project that I developed for a fall 2020 online Spanish art history course. The course consisted of a survey of Spanish art history ranging from prehistoric times to the modern era, with students focusing their research and subsequent digital stories on three artworks from a specific town in Spain. Students in the course presented their research using a variety of digital tools, such as videos, blogs, e-books, etc., and then submitted their creative documents on a Padlet board where they could review each other’s work. Essentially, the class Padlet board serves as a digital tool that could be used as a teaching resource for Spanish art history.

Developing Digital Stories for Online Learning
My presentation will discuss the use of digital story as learning exercise, reflect on its successes and challenges, and assess student reflections on the project. I plan to show the final Padlet board produced by the class and discuss how the production of digital stories in an art history course can facilitate interdisciplinary pursuits and the production of educational resources for learners outside the classroom. As we think about how to adapt the new online and digital approaches we’ve developed over the past year, I will also address how this type of project could be approached in an in-person class and improved for future online learning.

Uncharted Potential of Stop-Motion Animation: Strategical Tools for an Engaged Pedagogy.

Animationduo (animationduo.com) is a collective of scholars committed to a teaching and research project focused on the history and theory of animation studies that organizes and directs the Animation Making Workshops (AMW). This last endeavor aims to investigate the potential of stop-motion animation as a therapeutic and didactic tool that is supported by a NEA Research Labs grant since 2020.  This collective is based at the Texas Tech University’s School of Art. 

Animationduo is formed by Dr. Francisco Ortega (graphic design and animation) and Dr. Jorgelina Orfila  (art history). The AMWs method has been applied in partnership with the Burkhart Center for Autism  Studies and the Center for Collegiate Recovery Communities, both at TTU, and Bean Elementary School.  They are in the process of developing projects in collaboration with the Lubbock Office of Dispute  Resolution’s Juvenile Justice Youth program and with a national network of children’s grief counselors.

Uncharted Potential of Stop-Motion Animation: Strategical Tools for an Engaged Pedagogy  
Animationduo is a collective of art scholars working on the history, theory, and practice of animation, a medium that occupies a cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary space between graphic design, illustration, fine art, filmmaking and motion graphics (Wells 2016). The practical component of the collective—one for which they partner with professionals and practitioners in the fields of Mental Health, Education, and the Social Work—is the Animation-Making Workshops (AMW), an undertaking that seeks to establish the effectiveness of the animation-making process as a transformational agent in therapeutic, educational, and social contexts through data driven research. The AMW method focuses on animation making as an educational tool open to all and pivots on the use of stop-motion animation, a technique that associates the physical process of “making”—the tactile experience of working with materials— and the development of motor skills and body awareness with the creative inclusion of accessible technology. Stop motion’s association of the presential, hands-on work and digital technology makes it apposite to the conference’s invitation to reflect on and find strategies to navigate the post pandemic climate in higher education. Through the analysis of a case study (AMW at Bean Elementary School), the presentation will explicate the collective’s research and methodology.