Teaching with Primary Sources

71 A RC H I V E S o f A M E R I C A N A R T J O U R N A L | 6 1 . 2 A R C H I V E M AT T E R S In Conversation Teaching with Primary Sources IN DOCUMENTING MORE THAN 200 YEARS of artists and art communities in the United States, the Archives of American Art has long been an unparalleled resource for research in the field. The increased availability of digitized collections online in recent years has dramatically expanded the Archives’ reach to both scholars and students of American art history. In the fall of 2019, the Archives launched a series of workshops designed to develop and share innovative approaches to teaching that history at the college level using primary sources in its collections. Developed in collaboration with the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Lunder Institute for American Art at the Colby College Museum of Art, those workshops have led to the creation of adaptable teaching models hosted by the Smithsonian Learning Lab. To spark the conversation that follows, workshop participants and leaders were asked: What is the value of teaching with the Archives? What are the rewards and challenges when students learn to think creatively and critically about primary sources? Their responses reach across the collections and experiment with a variety of learning goals. Collectively, they present the Archives’ collections as vital to any classroom in which students learn to read, think, and write about American art and history. —TANYA SHEEHAN, EXECUTIVE EDITOR 72 A RC H I V E S o f A M E R I C A N A R T J O U R N A L | 6 1 . 2 Katie Anania University of Nebraska-Lincoln frontispiece Page from Alma Thomas photograph album, 1982. Alma Thomas Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. fig. 1 Michael Blue and Jerome Caja, ca. 1990. Color photograph. Photographer unknown. Jerome Caja Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. One of the great thrills of teaching art history and visual culture through the Archives is seeing students mobilize their feelings as research tools. From wonder to frustration, from puzzlement to prurient glee, primary sources enkindle shocks, pleasures, and irritations that can then develop into methodologies. Since I teach a lot of makers (including architects, graphic designers, and poets) who probe these sources to activate them in the present or to speculate about alternative futures, it seems critical to help them square their own lives and feelings with the voices whispering within the archival file or box. “What Is Community? Investigating Artists’ Spaces and Makerspaces Since 1970” is an assignment in my contemporary art survey course that offers students the opportunity to delve deeply into one of four distinct 73 A RC H I V E S o f A M E R I C A N A R T J O U R N A L | 6 1 . 2 archival collections. This multistep assignment asks them to consider not only how artists’ communities come together in identarian, cultural, or spatial terms, but also how archival materials like photographs, advertisements, and interviews occasionally reveal the limits of community. It results in an essay of 600 to 800 words that students can incorporate into their final research papers or research-based podcasts. The results during the COVID-19 pandemic were especially exciting. One graduate student in photography, Lindsey Stewart, isolated an interview and a photograph in the archive of Jerome Caja ( fig. 1), the legendary San Francisco drag performance artist. Stewart’s resulting podcast series, called Born Naked, allowed her to “really stand back and look at how we currently consume LGBTQ art, specifically drag.” Undergraduate design student Thao Huynh examined an advertisement for the Women’s Graphic Center in the Woman’s Building Records that used a pink color scheme. Huynh discussed the trap of pink and its relationship to labor histories, pulling in relevant writings by artist and activist Audre Lorde on gender, class, and race in American second-wave feminism. These sophisticated, thoughtful interventions show the benefits of student research at the Archives, generating new ways to probe the role that community plays in contemporary life. This became crucial in a pandemic year, when emotions, and the wide variety of research they can motivate, shaped communal experience so deeply. Sarah Archino Furman University I came to the Teaching with Primary Sources workshops looking for a surefire method to create perfect, transformative assignments. Yet, as the workshop participants reflected on their personal experiences in archives, I realized that what I feared for my undergraduates—uncertainty, confusion, a lack of guaranteed answers—are essential elements of one’s development as a scholar. I was trying too hard to craft a tidy lesson when I needed to trust that the struggles had value. In my survey course “Women and the Arts,” I wanted participants to develop their skills in reading images, establishing contexts, and building visual arguments. Working with the Archives’ 2019 exhibition What Is Feminist Art? ( fig. 2), which brought together a diverse group of artists’ responses from 1977 and 2019 to this eponymous question, my students curated their own thematic collections of works. The multiple voices in What Is Feminist Art? allowed the class to consider differing definitions of feminist art and build on their own lived experiences. Selecting artworks and explaining how they collectively responded to the exhibition’s central question encouraged students to consider tension and contradiction in the archive. My assignment gave weight to the exploratory stages of research and reflection, encouraging creativity and conjecture. In addition to composing short texts about each response they selected, students wrote an introduction to their collection and created a graphic to complement the theme they discerned in the work. My hope was that the assignment felt less like a fishing expedition to find the “right answer” and more like a space for interpretation. A R C H I V E M AT T E R S 74 A RC H I V E S o f A M E R I C A N A R T J O U R N A L | 6 1 . 2 fig. 2 Installation photograph from What Is Feminist Art? exhibition in the Archives of American Art’s Lawrence A. Fleischman Gallery, 2019. Collection of the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Through this project, I have come to appreciate the imperfect process of teaching and learning with primary sources. I do not need to create a tightly controlled experience but instead to reassure my class that messiness and ambiguity are part of the lesson. Realigning my grading process to value exploration and reflection demonstrates these priorities to students. With less fear of failure, one student’s reflection writing honestly traced her initial frustration with being unable to predict the final outcome of her project, her struggles to understand how to build an argument from what she found in the archive, and, finally, critical awareness as she recognized a thread of ecofeminism in her selected artworks. The project had a meaningful impact on this chemistry major as she prepared for graduate school. Ellery E. Foutch Middlebury College Transcribing letters can be a transformative project that “[brings] history to life,” as one recent student enthused. It sparks consideration of the very production of knowledge about the past, whether your goal is for students to understand the context in which a source was created or the practice of an individual artist. In my course about World War I and American art, undergraduates worked with letters (now in the Middlebury College Archives) from a US soldier stationed overseas to his sweetheart. After working in pairs to decipher selected letters, we projected digital scans of the archival documents on a shared screen; students read their transcriptions aloud in chronological order, helping one another make out challenging passages and reflecting on 75 A RC H I V E S o f A M E R I C A N A R T J O U R N A L | 6 1 . 2 how correspondents’ relationships, perspectives, and opinions changed over time. While building scholarly skills, this exercise also cultivated curiosity and historical empathy. As one student observed, these letters “allowed me to humanize the people . . . [and gain] intimate knowledge about what it meant to have lived through [this moment].” Another remarked on “the added level of personal touch . . . from reading someone’s handwriting rather than seeing their typed words on a screen. It almost seems analogous to entering someone’s bedroom or home; you get a sense for their organization, attention to detail, [or] hastiness.” Applying this pedagogical approach to items in the Archives’ collection, students could focus on correspondence between Frederic Edwin Church and Martin Johnson Heade, sent while Heade occupied Church’s Tenth Street studio in New York City ( fig. 3), for example, or on dispatches from Paris written by Cecilia Beaux or Beauford Delaney. Decoding cursive is often a stumbling block, but providing a sample transcription can help. Kip Sperry’s Reading Early American Handwriting (1998) offers examples, as does the Smithsonian Transcription Center. Synthesis and reflection—articulating what they learn from a primary source, and how—are crucial metacognitive components of this kind of work. Students learn to recognize themes or patterns and what priorities or A R C H I V E M AT T E R S fig. 3 Letter from Frederic Edwin Church to Martin Johnson Heade, March 7, 1870. Martin Johnson Heade Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 76 A RC H I V E S o f A M E R I C A N A R T J O U R N A L | 6 1 . 2 fig. 4 Page from Alma Thomas photograph album, 1982. Alma Thomas Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. interests they signify; who is represented (or absent) and how; and how such sources can help us understand the writer’s life and times, or the exhibition or movement under consideration. By donating their transcriptions to the Archives or contributing to the Transcription Center, students can practice reciprocity and contribute meaningfully to scholarship. 77 A RC H I V E S o f A M E R I C A N A R T J O U R N A L | 6 1 . 2 Tess Korobkin University of Maryland, College Park When I began teaching with primary sources, I was reluctant to let students loose in the archive. I would cherry-pick scrapbook clippings so that they could understand the range of nineteenth-century responses to Hiram Powers’s sculpture The Greek Slave, for example. This meant that they did not experience the disorientation, the questioning of which documents matter, the discovery of luminous, unconnected anecdotes, and the charting of connections through sometimes plodding, sometimes thrilling investigation that come with doing research in an archive. Inspired by the Teaching with Primary Sources workshops, I learned to trust undergraduates to make discoveries I had not pre-orchestrated for them. My students in “American Art from Civil War to Civil Rights” undertook a semester-long group project to create monographic virtual exhibitions focused on artists whose papers are digitized in the Archives. Open-ended, process-oriented steps, like a discussion board where students reflected on an hour’s exploration of their artist’s papers, yielded surprise, humor, empathic connection, and, just as important, observations about what was unimportant or lacking in the collection. Charles Alston’s college report card and the pedigree certificate of Kay Sage’s cat not only made my students laugh but also laid the groundwork for their understanding of the artists as people. Reflecting on the most engaging aspect of his completed project, one explained, “As an artist, I’m constantly thinking about whether I should make political art or not, and it was interesting to see how Alston dealt with this same dilemma in his own life and work.” When the student groups found different stories to tell in the same artist’s archive—for example, one focused on Alma Thomas’s relationship to nature (noting the mention in a photo album of a holly tree in front of her house “that gave her much inspiration”) ( fig. 4), while another explored Thomas’s social engagement as an educator ( frontispiece)—we discussed how different juxtapositions between primary sources and artworks enable different interpretive possibilities. Students reported finding value in “consolidating primary sources to tell your own narrative about an artist” and “being able to create new knowledge about an artist from a historically excluded and marginalized group.” For one who helped develop an exhibition on Romaine Brooks, “the lack of documentation of queer female artists before 1970” offered the most significant lesson. For me, these expressions of the high stakes of archival research and students’ sense of themselves as agents creating their own art histories were deeply rewarding. Key Jo Lee The Cleveland Museum of Art With its central mandate to “increase and diffuse knowledge” and its commitment to broad access to and independent interpretation of primary sources, the Archives is the perfect foundation for developing student assignments. As we approached the final set of virtual Teaching with Primary Sources workshops at the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA), participants were encouraged by the breadth of the Archives’ collections, international calls to attend to erased and effaced histories, and personal dedication to spend A R C H I V E M AT T E R S 78 A RC H I V E S o f A M E R I C A N A R T J O U R N A L | 6 1 . 2 our remaining time together addressing decolonization and antiracism in teaching with archives. Determining the most fruitful way to address these enormous topics with their infinite points of entry was both energizing and challenging, or perhaps energizing because challenging. Reflecting on the question of how to teach effective teaching, I dedicated the first two CMA meetings to considering some practical steps to building ethical assignments, syllabi, and curricula. Framing our discussions were recent readings, from the conversation about “Decolonizing Art History” coedited by Catherine Grant and Dorothy Price for the February 2020 issue of Art History to the “Manifesto for Decolonising the Curriculum” created by Keele University in the UK (2018). Decolonization focuses on undermining the perception of the dominant or colonizing culture’s ways of knowing as the “norm.” I asked participants to name two concrete practices outlined in the readings that resonated with them and to describe how they might apply these practices to their final projects for the Smithsonian Learning Lab. Reflecting on their teaching with specific Archives collections, they spoke of disrupting conventional wisdom by interrogating accepted terms and definitions; creating space for Indigenous perspectives and tribal methodologies; and building and using community-driven archives as well as open-source materials. What emerged was an overarching sense of urgency to make an impact matched with a roadmap suited to each scholar’s teaching and institutional contexts. Michael Leja University of Pennsylvania fig. 5 (opposite) Lee Krasner, statement read to Grace Glueck, October 15, 1970. Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Do Jackson Pollock’s life and work have pertinence for disability studies? I invite students in seminars on abstract expressionism to address this question by exploring a collection of unusual papers donated to the Archives by Pollock’s wife, artist Lee Krasner. The Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner Papers contain medical and legal records concerning therapeutic treatment Pollock received for conditions variously diagnosed as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, pathological introversion, and depression. Students learn that Krasner had no desire to make Pollock’s medical records public, but her control over this issue was undermined when therapist Joseph Henderson began publicly discussing his former patient’s case. In particular, I direct my classes to Box 1, folder 38, where they can find a copy of a lecture Henderson delivered on multiple occasions outlining his diagnoses and treatments of Pollock’s problems. Psychological case studies ordinarily use pseudonyms to protect patient privacy, but in this case Pollock’s identity was used to increase interest. Henderson also commissioned an art dealer to sell seventy sheets of drawings Pollock had brought to their sessions to facilitate the analysis. The artwork was left with Henderson, although it is unclear whether Pollock did this intentionally ( fig. 5). The folder contains a 32-page legal brief prepared by Krasner’s lawyers that challenges Henderson’s claim to ownership of the drawings, charges him with violating ethical standards of patient-physician confidentiality, and asserts that Krasner’s privacy likewise was compromised. Krasner’s protests drew extensive press coverage, but they brought no legal results. Students engage these materials by asking: Should these papers have been suppressed in the interest of Pollock’s and Krasner’s privacy? For whom do 79 A RC H I V E S o f A M E R I C A N A R T J O U R N A L | 6 1 . 2 A R C H I V E M AT T E R S 80 A RC H I V E S o f A M E R I C A N A R T J O U R N A L | 6 1 . 2 benefits accrue from their release? Does the nature of Pollock’s mental challenges as presented in these documents give us insight into his art? Did Pollock find ways to use psychological difficulties to enrich his work? Did the therapist’s idiosyncratic framework for interpreting Pollock’s psychology infiltrate the artist’s creative production? In what ways did history, culture, and chance shape Pollock’s mind and art? Generating thoughtful debates, such questions can be explored productively in discussion groups or short papers. Austin Porter Kenyon College fig. 6 (opposite) Kenyon Cox, untitled drawing, 1876. Pen and ink. Kenyon and Louise Cox Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. In my undergraduate seminar on the representation of war in American art, I ask students to reverse engineer a scholarly article published in this journal. First, they summarize their secondary source while scouring the endnotes to understand the types of evidence the author used to build an argument. Then they locate the primary sources cited in the article, which encourages a broader consideration of the Archives’ collections. Finally, students create speculative research projects based on their findings. These reports, delivered in writing and as an oral presentation, require students to justify a new research agenda that builds on their analysis of both the original secondary source and its archival origins. This method of teaching has generated many positive learning experiences. Students have been surprised, for example, to observe how an excerpt from an artist’s diary entry written decades ago is used strategically to enrich a scholarly essay published in their own lifetime. While attempting to locate a single primary source cited in the original essay, moreover, students encounter a host of others excluded from the secondary source. These unmentioned archival materials often suggest alternative narratives within the Archives that enrich, problematize, or even counter the published scholar’s claims. This exercise provides my class with the opportunity not only to critically evaluate how a scholarly argument is built, but also to consider the numerous histories entwined with and within an archive. It also forces students to consider how personal and ephemeral archival objects operate as important forms of evidence alongside finished works of art and secondary sources. Perhaps most tellingly, students gain a deeper appreciation of how a thorough analysis of primary sources can benefit their own research projects. Annie Ronan Virginia Tech Utilizing resources like the Archives is so rewarding that we may forget how frustrating that work can be. For an undergraduate student with a research question to investigate and pages to fill with writing, an artist’s papers are more likely to infuriate than inspire. This is why research projects should frame the archive as a space for generating questions rather than only as a tool for answering them concretely. 81 A RC H I V E S o f A M E R I C A N A R T J O U R N A L | 6 1 . 2 A scaffolded assignment I call “Curated Chronologies” begins with students selecting a digitized collection from the Archives. They explore that collection thoroughly, identifying items that speak to one another or reveal a particular theme. These become the backbone of a digital timeline that students flesh out with additional research using primary and secondary sources. Over time, with the benefit of peer review, students compose interpretive texts for each timeline “node,” connecting the fruits of their investigations back to the A R C H I V E M AT T E R S 82 A RC H I V E S o f A M E R I C A N A R T J O U R N A L | 6 1 . 2 fig. 7 Letter from Charles Willson Peale to Rubens Peale, March 7, 1811. Charles Henry Hart Autograph Collection, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. artworks and primary source documents they chose to feature. To construct the final product, students may use a free timeline-building tool that I developed for this project in collaboration with Virginia Tech’s Technology-Enhanced Learning and Online Strategies Division (chronologies.tlos.vt.edu). By framing art’s history as a chronological narrative, the timeline structure invites students to consider the storytelling choices that shape any account of the past. By relieving the pressure to reach an intimidating page count, moreover, this untraditional writing format encourages students to focus on their investigative work and their relationship with the archival collection that inspired it. My students have enjoyed discussing these relationships. Reflecting on all of the interesting materials from the Kenyon and Louise Cox Papers that she was not able to incorporate into her final project, one student wistfully 83 A RC H I V E S o f A M E R I C A N A R T J O U R N A L | 6 1 . 2 recalled viewing a sketch where Kenyon Cox “wrote at the bottom how blue he felt when it rains,” showing he was “affected by the weather, just like me” ( fig. 6). If cultivating an emotional investment in their research is as important as building research skills, these seemingly mundane discoveries in the Archives are the most valuable teaching tools we have. Allison M. Stagg Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany Over the past seven years, I have taught American art history to undergraduates and masters students at four German universities. American art is not generally taught in Germany, and most of my students are American studies majors. Unless in a special exhibition, moreover, historical American art is not typically found in German museums. How do you get students excited about American art when it is impossible to offer them the opportunity to see firsthand the work they are learning about? Teaching online because of the COVID-19 pandemic tested that question as I introduced students in my history of American art course to the Archives’ digitized primary sources. In the classroom assignment I created for the Teaching with Primary Sources workshop, I had planned to introduce four letters sent to and from the artist Charles Willson Peale ( fig. 7), but it became clear within the first few class meetings that, because my students had not worked with primary documents previously, the list needed to be shortened to two, so as not to overwhelm. They began by turning off their computer cameras, reading the two letters silently, and writing down a thought connecting these primary sources to the course subject matter. After ten minutes, students turned their cameras back on and, with the letters still on the screen, I read them aloud. I then solicited their initial reactions, which prompted two lively discussions. The first focused on the objects themselves— on the difficulty of deciphering handwriting from two hundred years ago, but also on the usefulness of the digital format for zooming in on particularly challenging words. The second discussion considered how these letters offered a different perspective on Peale and his paintings from the modern scholarship I had assigned. I was pleasantly surprised to see how this exercise informed the students’ final essays: a number of them returned to the Archives’ website on their own and integrated additional primary sources into their analyses. Bernida Webb-Binder Spelman College Inspired by “I Hate The Banjo Lesson,” a speculative letter written by art historian Richard Powell in Henry Ossawa Tanner’s voice, which Powell presented at the first Teaching with Primary Sources workshop, I developed “Artists and Archives Engaged Through Student-Authored Letters,” a creative research project for my 200-level African American art course. In this assignment, undergraduate students write an annotated letter in an artist’s voice to a mentor, critic, or family member, discussing their most famous work. The annotations are extensive footnotes (comprising roughly half of A R C H I V E M AT T E R S 84 A RC H I V E S o f A M E R I C A N A R T J O U R N A L | 6 1 . 2 fig. 8 Detail from Letter from Henry Ossawa Tanner to Eunice Tietjens, May 25, 1914. Henry Ossawa Tanner Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. the text) that record the sources used in constructing the letter. The semesterlong project begins with a close reading of a 1914 letter at the Archives written by Tanner to poet and art critic Eunice Tietjens ( fig. 8). With its everexpanding collection of primary source materials, the Archives is a valuable pedagogical tool to help realize student learning outcomes. Additionally, it is an epistemological platform for students to acquire knowledge and internalize that they, too, are knowledge makers. Students engaged in the letter-writing assignment learn from primary sources while creating texts that test their theories about an artwork’s meaning. The letter documents their hypothesis, their research, and the rationale for their interpretation, providing a record of their thought processes. The feedback from students has been positive on course evaluations. In spring 2020, a student wrote that she liked the assignment because “we had to place ourselves in the shoes of our selected artist and write as them. On a personal level I felt connected to my artist as I learned more about their life and their artwork.” Moreover, students enjoy the creative license the project allows. While it is often challenging for them to balance the imaginative, critical, and evidentiary aspects of their work, the letter-writing process encourages learning from and contributing to scholarship. 85 A RC H I V E S o f A M E R I C A N A R T J O U R N A L | 6 1 . 2 A R C H I V E M AT T E R S fig. 9 Armory Show button, 1913. Walt Kuhn Family Papers and Armory Show Records, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Hannah W. Wong independent scholar Reading aloud from laptops and iPhones, students in my spring 2019 upper-level course at Baylor University, “Bons Amis: Artistic Circles, Correspondences, and Collaborations in Modern Art,” shared examples of personal correspondence. I realized then what should have been obvious to me initially: most 18 to 22-year-olds have never exchanged extensive written communication by mail. Courses such as “Bons Amis” bridge the gap between undergraduates born after the advent of smartphones and the primary sources undergirding their academic readings. Along with introducing students to modern art’s primary sources, the research I assigned in my course significantly realigned their relationship with secondary sources. As they dug into artists’ letters and journals, the students critically reexamined arguments found in scholarly texts. At the same time, primary source research drove the class toward academic texts as they attempted to put artists’ lives and letters into context. In this way, their research process mimicked that of professional historians. Archival explorations highlighted the complexities of primary source research. With their typeset transcriptions, polished translations, and accessible introductions, volumes of published letters can mask the hard work of historical scholarship. The Archives’ collections presented students with additional research challenges, from determining the identity of individuals referred to by only initials or a first or last name, to contextualizing a 1913 lapel pin found in the Walt Kuhn Family Papers and Armory Show Records ( fig. 9). Primary source research at the Archives also brought students nearer to canonical artists’ humanity. Reading correspondence between modern artists, undergraduates recognized their own creative anxieties. One art history major reported that exploring the Armory Show Records helped her appreciate that “these folks that wrote these letters, owned this clothing . . . these are people just like me. I think that interacting with archival material helps you realize that the past is not as far away as it might seem at first.”