ARTful Bodies:
The Body in Art at the Worcester Art Museum

ABOUT THIS TOUR

Worcester South High and Holy Cross Students
Holy Cross and South High students and teachers at the Cantor Gallery

College of the Holy Cross project leader:

Dr. Amanda Luyster

Worcester South High project leader

Christine Lucey-Meagher

Holy Cross students 2012

Michaella Caporello
Dioni Cruz
Andrea Davis
Connor Davock
Molly Feit
Abigail Hynes-Houston
Sally Jacob
Clare McLaughlin
Kimberly Mejia
Nicholas Parsons
John Peterson
Kate Shea
Paige Sullivan
Hope Tobin
John Vatalaro
Kathryn Veale
Chelsea Weir

Worcester South High students

Dillon Agyi
Karla Collazo
Amersaline Dermatis
Brandon Figueroa Velazquez
Daniel Ford
Gankaris Francisco
Courtney Gazaille
Emmanuel Irizarry
Deidre Kilgore
Jackie LaPierre
Sabrina Maliqi
Michelle Navarro
Marvin Nkrumah
Andreana Nop
Adam Pardo
Sarah Passamonti
Carlos Rivera
Audy Sanchez
Kevin Saravia
Sang Tran Lauren Wasilko

Holy Cross students 2013

Christiana Ansaldi
MacKenzie Bozel
Colin Brown
Nick Cormier
Addie Devine
Mary Eagan
John Hanley
Anna Kimelblatt
Zach Lanning
Laura McBride
Paige McGeehan
Sofjola Manco
Michael Mastroianni
Claire O'Brien
Lindsay O'Callaghan
Philippe Ortiz Catherine
Rutter Corin Storz

Claremont Academy project leader

Emily Mele

Claremont Academy students

Isaac Boateng
Jonzel Diaz
Alexa Fencher
Saja Nasser
Nuha Nasser
Angel Perez
Ofelia Villatoro


We would also like to thank the following, without whom this project would not have been possible:

 

The Worcester Art Museum Students at the Worcester Art Museum

Debby Aframe

Sarah Gillis

Kari Kipper
Katrina Stacey

 

Worcester South High

School Principal Maureen Binienda

 

The College of the Holy Cross

Edward Augustus, Jr.

Lauren Buckley

Janis DesMarais

David Gyscek

Roger Hankins

Richard Lent

Jerry Maday

Ariana Mahoney

Richard Matlak

Kristine Maloney

Margaret Nelson

Michelle Sterk-Barrett

Amy Wolfson

The Cantor Gallery

The Center for Teaching

The Donelan Office of Community-Based Learning

The Marshall Fund

 

Claremont Academy

School Principal Ricci Hall

 

Worcester Public Schools

Timmary Leary, Visual Arts Liaison

 

 

The long story

 

In the spring of 2012 I had been teaching "Introduction to Visual Arts" at the College of the Holy Cross for seven years, and I had a professional mid-life crisis. I was doing a good job, and my students learned a lot about how art can teach us about history, but I didn't feel like they were learning about how art can teach us about the world today. I wanted to make my art history classes feel more grounded in the "real world." How is art relevant today? Why do we study these strange objects? What does art have to do with our everyday lives? I had heard about community-based projects from former colleagues at Harvard and current colleagues at the College of the Holy Cross. I liked the idea that college students could learn from the people and cultural resources around them, and I thought that community-based learning would be a good way to approach and examine the relevancy of art in the world today.

 

Worcester Art MuseumWith the help of Christine Lucey-Meagher, an art teacher at Worcester South High school, as well as assistance from the Worcester Art Museum, and the Center for Teaching and Donelan Office of Community-Based Learning at Holy Cross, I came up with a plan. My college students would produce a virtual (online) tour of selected objects in the Worcester Art Museum. To create that tour, my college students would work with high school students in small groups at the Worcester Art Museum. The college students would interview the high school students – technologically adept and not necessarily museum-loving! – to see what they were interested to know about each art object, and how they could relate that art object to their own lives. The high school students would later make their own art based on the objects they had seen in the Worcester Art Museum, and the college students would use the results of their interviews and the subsequent research they had undertaken as the basis for an online "virtual tour," including original text alongside images from the WAM, photographs of the high-school art, and audio and video clips.

 

The virtual tour is entitled "ARTful Bodies." These art objects, although produced millennia and continents apart, all represent the human body. We include images of children and teenagers, parents and the aged, images of beautiful bodies, haggard bodies, warrior bodies and divine bodies. We can all relate to images of the human body which we inhabit. One oil painting provoked two high school students to engage in a long conversation about the complicated relation of sisterhood. What does it feel like to live day in and day out with a sister? At times intimate, and at times distant; at times warm, and at times – less warm! An ancient stone relief provoked discussion of linebackers, not only physically imposing but (ideally) immovable, like a stone wall, indeed. A sculpture of the ancient goddess Hygeia encouraged the students to think about what health means for women today. Does it mean skinny like a fashion model? What does a healthy woman look like? What does she do?

 

Benefits for Holy Cross studentsStudents at the Worcester Art Museum Library

 

The benefit for my students is that the project has forced them to think, hard, about the role of art in the world today. They are forced to consider the relevancy of art when faced by a potentially challenging audience. They are also required to take responsibility for their own work which will be presented, largely as is, to a worldwide public audience. Finally, they come to realize in a practical way that the world around them, from students in public high schools to dusty old objects in museums, has incredibly rich potential. And finally, that that rich potential is available to them directly, without need for me as an intermediary. I see this as part of my job – not just to teach facts, but to teach how to learn.

 

Benefits for Worcester High School students

 

For the high school students, I hope this engagement has three outcomes. It has connected them with college students and a college campus, and, therefore, increased their familiarity with college life. Second, the project has connected students with the world of artwork in museums, and, hopefully, increased their enthusiasm for both art and museums in the process. I imagine students and friends and families might be excited to go to the WAM to access "their" online tour. Finally, validating a student's opinion in a public forum, like an online tour, underlines our belief that what that student says matters, and, by extension, that that student matters. For both high school and college students, self-esteem is central to academic (and life) achievement.

 

Mary Magdelene by South High student Sabrina Maliqi South High students
Mary Magdelene by South High student Sabrina Maliqi South High students working in art room

 


My hopes for this project

 

My hopes for this project are myriad. I hope this project encourages my students to have more confidence in their own abilities to work in the "real world" and in the Worcester community. I hope that the high school students feel confident in entering the worlds of museums and colleges, and that they too consider what their contributions there can be. I hope that this project strengthens bonds between different groups of people, from different backgrounds, with different assumptions. I hope that this project encourages more people to love art as much as I do – because art is both beautiful and awful, silly and serious. It makes us remember crushes and tragedies, sweet infants and spiritual saints, and most of all it makes us think, and talk, and learn from each other.

 

I hope that all kinds of people, from within and outside Worcester, will use our "virtual tour" as an invitation to visit the Worcester Art Museum and there to confront, face to face, body to body, some of the masterpieces on show every day. The tour has been designed for multiple different types of use: some may wish to explore the tour from home and then later come to the museum; others will bring their smartphones and tablets to the museum and listen to the audio clips while standing in front of the actual work being discussed. Many people enjoy seeing art through different types of lenses; that is, not only looking at it in silence, but listening to what other say about it, and reading about what others have seen in it. I do not believe that technology changes art, only that it can help us to see art in different ways. I find it exciting to hear young people coming to grips with different works of art and gradually determining how each work of art is relevant to his or her life today. In the end, of course, how art relates to your world today is – up to you.

 

Amanda Luyster, Nov 6, 2012