NVAEC 2016

Keynote Speakers

Rika Burnham

Rika Burnham is Head of Education at The Frick Collection in New York City. Previously she was a museum educator at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she worked from 1985 to 2008. She was recognized by the National Art Education Association for sustained achievement in teaching in 2001; appointed a Getty Museum Scholar in 2002; and received the James D. Burke Prize for achievement in the arts in 2003, the first museum educator so honored. She received the Charles Robertson Memorial Award from the School Art League in 2005, and in 2006 was an Attingham Trust Scholar in The Royal Collection Studies Programme in London. She has been a guest lecturer and conducted workshops at art museums nationwide and internationally since 1989, including recent engagements at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, the Rockoxhuis, Antwerp, the Museu Nacional de Arte Antigua, Lisbon, and the Thyssen Bornemisza, Madrid. She has been an adjunct professor of Art and Art Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, and a visiting museum educator for the Summer Institute of Contemporary Art (TICA) at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and she is the ongoing project director of the Teaching Institute for Museum Educators (TIME), also at the SAIC. Her publications include several essays on museum education and a catalogue essay in Pierre Bonnard: The Late Still Lifes and Interiors (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2009). Teaching in the Art Museum: Interpretation as Experience (Getty, 2011), which she co-authored with Elliott Kai-Kee, won a PROSE Award for best title in education of 2011 from the Association of American Publishers. Ms. Burnham holds an B.A. in Fine Arts from Harvard College and was awarded the degree of Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts from Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2014.

Abstract: Acts of Interpretation
At the heart of every meaningful encounter with a work of art is a moment of truth. Dialogue opens up, a mutual curiosity emerges. The museum visitor is no longer spectator but participant, the art work is no longer still and inert, but active and alive. Through dialogical gallery teaching and collective acts of interpretation, we seek the transformative rather than the prescriptive and the formulaic. We seek the intense encounter with a single object rather than a casual glance at a hundred artworks. And finally, we seek experience and risk rather than the descriptive and the mundane.

Howard Gardner

Howard Gardner is the John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He also holds positions as Adjunct Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and Senior Director of Harvard Project Zero. Among numerous honours, Gardner received a MacArthur Prize Fellowship in 1981. He has received honorary degrees from thirty colleges and universities, including institutions in Bulgaria, Chile, Greece, Hong Kong, Ireland, Israel, Italy, South Korea, and Spain. He has twice been selected by Foreign Policy and Prospect magazines as one of the 100 most influential public intellectuals in the world. Gardner received the Prince of Asturias Award for Social Sciences in 2011, and in 2014, he was awarded with the Brock International Prize in Education. The author of twenty-nine books translated into thirty-two languages, and several hundred articles, Gardner is best known in educational circles for his theory of multiple intelligences, a critique of the notion that there exists but a single human intelligence that can be adequately assessed by standard psychometric instruments.

For many years, Gardner was co-director of Project Zero and is now Chair of its Steering Committee. He also directs the Good Project, a set of research endeavours about work, citizenship, collaboration, and digital life. More recently, with long time Project Zero colleagues Lynn Barendsen and Wendy Fischman, he has conducted reflection sessions designed to enhance the understanding and incidence of good work among young people. With Carrie James and other colleagues at Project Zero, he is also investigating ethical dimensions entailed in the use of the new digital media. Among current research undertakings are: a study of effective collaboration among non-profit institutions in education; a study of conceptions of quality, nationally and internationally, in the contemporary era; and an investigation of liberal arts and sciences in the 21st century. His latest co-authored book, The App Generation: How Today's Youth Navigate Identity, Intimacy, and Imagination in the Digital World, was published in October 2013. In 2014, Gardner's Festschrift, entitled Mind, Work, and Life, was published in honour of his 70th birthday and is available for free electronically .

Abstract: Truth Beauty and Goodness Reframed
Beyond the achievement of basic literacies and preparation for a vocation, the major goal of education worldwide have been an appreciation and understanding of what is true, beautiful and good. While the arts may touch upon aspects of truth and morality, education in the arts has focused most appropriately on an appreciation of beauty and on the creation of beautiful objects and works. But what is an appropriate educational stance at a ‘post-modern’ time when cannons of beauty are changing radically and many scholars (as well as laypersons) challenge the very concept of beauty? Drawing on his recent book Truth Beauty and Goodness Reframed Howard Gardner describes the properties of beautiful experiences and suggests how they can be cultivated over the course of schooling and beyond.

Professor Gardner will appear at the conference via video link.

Ellen Winner

Ellen Winner is Professor and Chair of Psychology at Boston College, and Senior Research Associate at Project Zero, Harvard Graduate School of Education. She directs the Arts and Mind Lab, which focuses on cognition in the arts in typical and gifted children. She is the author of over 100 articles and four books: Invented Worlds: The Psychology of the Arts(Harvard University Press, 1982); The Point of Words: Children's Understanding of Metaphor and Irony (Harvard University Press, 1988); Gifted Children: Myths and Realities (BasicBooks, 1997, translated into six languages and winner of the Alpha Sigma Nu National Jesuit Book Award in Science); and co-author of Studio Thinking: The Real Benefits of Visual Arts Education and Studio Thinking2: The Real Benefits of Visual Arts Education (Teachers College Press, 2007 & 2013). She served as President of APA's Division 10, Psychology and the Arts, in 1995-1996, and in 2000 received the Rudolf Arnheim Award for Outstanding Research by a Senior Scholar in Psychology and the Arts from Division 10.  She is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association (Division 10) and of the International Association of Empirical Aesthetics.

Abstract: How Art Works: Studies in Intuitive Aesthetics
Art education around the world has focused primarily on art making. But getting students also to think about philosophical questions about art can intrigue them and sharpen their interest in art.  Drawing on an ongoing program of research on intuitive aesthetics, Ellen Winner will discuss what we know and what we can find out about children's and adults' thinking about the kinds of questions that philosophers of art and aesthetics have debated.  First, what is art and how objective are our aesthetic judgments? Second, what do we bring to art?  For example, what kinds of "irrelevant" factors do and do not influence our aesthetic judgments (e.g, knowledge of an artist's moral character, belief about whether the work was an original or a copy, knowledge of the artist's process of working?) And finally, what do we take from art? For example, how does art affect emotion, and can art shape us morally?

Professor Winner will appear at the conference via video link.

Christian Thompson

Born 1978, Gawler, South Australia (Bidjara People) Christian Thompson is an Australian born, London-based contemporary artist whose work explores notions of identity, cultural hybridity & history. Formally trained as a sculptor, Thompson's multidisciplinary practice engages mediums such as photography, video, sculpture, performance & sound. His work focuses on the exploration of identity, sexuality, gender, race and memory. In his live performances and conceptual portraits he inhabits a range of personas achieved through handcrafted costumes & carefully orchestrated poses & backdrops. In 2010 Thompson made history when he became the first Aboriginal Australian to be admitted into the University of Oxford in its 900-year history. He holds a Doctorate of Philosophy (Fine Art), Trinity College, University of Oxford, United Kingdom, Master of Theatre, Amsterdam School of Arts, Das Arts, The Netherlands, Masters of Fine Art (Sculpture) RMIT University and Honours (Sculpture) RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia and a Bachelor of Fine Art from the University of Southern Queensland, Australia. His works are held in major international and national collections.

Thompson has exhibited widely both nationally and internationally, having been included in exhibitions such as 'Australia' at the Royal Academy for the Arts, London, 'We Bury Our Own', The Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, Modern Art Oxford, Oxford, Valencian Institute of Modern Art, Valencia, Spain, 'The Other and Me', The Sharjah Museum, United Arab Emirates, 'Hijacked III', QUOD Gallery, Derby, United Kingdom. 'Shadow life' Bangkok Art and Cultural centre, Bangkok, Thailand. 'The beauty of Distance/ Songs of Survival in a Precarious Age', 17th Biennale of Sydney.

Thompson's work is held in major public and private collections including: Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane; Aboriginal Art Museum, Utrecht, The Netherlands; University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane.

Abstract: Creative Responses to Australian Material Culture in the Pitt Rivers Museum Collection: Parallels between We Bury Our Own and Mining The Museum
Inaugural Charlie Perkins Scholar Christian Thompson will discuss his doctoral research project Creative Responses to Australian Material Culture in the Pitt Rivers Museum Collection: Parallels between We Bury Our Own and Mining The Museum a comparative assessment of two exhibitions responding to the museum archive. The work of African American artist Fred Wilson (b. 1954), Mining The Museum at the Maryland Historical Society Baltimore 1993 and his own groundbreaking Exhibition We Bury Our Own at the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, 2012. Exploring the emergence of the museum as a medium for artists as institutional critique. Early encounters such as Marcel Duchamp, Marcel Broodthaers, Andy Warhol, through to recent encounters such as Hans Haacke, Yinka Shonibare, Renee Green, James Luna and Marina Abramovic, he places his own work into this dynamic lineage of artists. Outlining a range of artistic practices and engages a process of ekphrasis to give detailed comprehensive accounts of both exhibitions, demonstrating how studio based research is able to reveal hidden or previously unseen histories obscured by the imperial gaze.  He will discuss the differences between his own and Wilson's approaches in order to expose how the work might shift in significance or meaning when it is placed inside and outside the museum context. Thompson introduces a term that he coined, the idea of 'spiritual repatriation', The idea of spiritual repatriation emphasises the repatriation of this essential quality, what might be called the aura of such collections, rather than the physical object, moving things into the spiritual realm away from the material. Outlining how museum collections are able to contribute to artistic practice and how artists can contribute to the ongoing exhibition, critique and appreciation of museum collections, elaborates on the Pitt Rivers Museum collection and its subsequent influence on recent work, and redefines the title We Bury Our Own as a metaphor applied to a wider picture.