G.7 Bringing the University to the People: Innovative Curriculum Design and Community Engagement in Fine Arts Education
Sat Oct 21 / 13:45 – 15:15 / KC 206
chair /
- Ingrid Mary Percy, Director, Visual Arts Residencies; Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity
The Banff Centre was started in 1933 by the Department of Extension at the University of Alberta as “a modest experiment in providing a training centre to community leaders in theatre” (Cameron, 1956). The creation of a four-week summer program called the Banff Summer School fulfilled the goal of “bringing the university to the people” (U of A) and was one of “the most imaginative and far-ranging educational outreach programs of its time” (Leighton & Leighton, 1982).
Given that the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity began as the result of a “close liaison between University (of Alberta) and community” (Cameron, 1956) and responded to demands of the public for “the University to do something to develop an appreciation of art, music, and drama” (Cameron, 1956), how are fine arts departments in Canadian universities responding to similar needs of individuals and communities in Canada today?
Panelists will discuss successful strategies for design and delivery of fine arts education in community settings.
keywords: community engagement, visual arts, experiential learning, remote and rural communities, arts-based research, art education, collaboration
session type: panel (double)
Born in Mohkínstsis (Calgary), Alberta (Treaty 7 territory), to Irish parents, Ingrid Mary Percy grew up in Vancouver, BC, where she earned a BFA (Studio)and Dip FA from Emily Carr University. Later, she completed an MFA in Painting at the University of Victoria.
For over 20 years, Ingrid has been a practicing visual artist, educator, and cultural leader in Canada, exhibiting her work nationally and internationally, and teaching in post-secondary institutions (UVic, Emily Carr, Memorial University).
Ingrid also writes, curates, and plays music. A strong believer in community service and advocacy, Ingrid has served on numerous non-profit boards including Open Space, Eastern Edge, and Canadian Artists’ Representation/Les front des artistes canadiens (CARFAC) National, as Vice-President, President, and Past-President.
Prior to 2022, Ingrid was Associate Professor and Chair of the Visual Arts Program, Graduate Officer of the MFA Program, and Interim Dean of the School of Fine Arts, Memorial University of Newfoundland.
The Willow Basket Project: Weaving expertise together at the Yukon School of Visual Arts to build community resilience
- Aubyn O’Grady & Jackie Olson, Yukon School of Visual Arts | Yukon University
In the early 2000s the arts were introduced as a viable economic alternative to the boom-and-bust resource extraction economy (gold mining) of Dawson City, Yukon, Trʼondëk Hwëchʼin Territory. The Klondike Institute for Arts and Culture was established with the ultimate goal of creating an art school. As a mode of creative placemaking, the Yukon School of Visual Arts (YSOVA) – a partnership between Yukon University, the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in Government, and the Dawson City Arts Society- was envisioned as a site of community-oriented, experimental, and land-based art pedagogies. The school’s sole offering, a foundation year program, welcomed its first cohort in 2007.
Decades later, these beloved community organizations are experiencing institutional fatigue, in a state of perpetual adaptation responding to an acute housing shortage, increasingly unpredictable weather events like floods and forest fires, issues of land sovereignty and resource extraction, the desire for new and renewable energy sources, waste diversion, and food security.
This paper describes the ongoing development of the Willow Basket Project at YSOVA, an experimental land/arts-based research and education program that employs art and creative approaches to address the most pressing environmental issues within our locale. The project framework acts as a basket to weave local interest, expertise and materials into a network of interdisciplinary and geographically diverse collaborators. For example, in the Project’s first year we are collaborating with the Klondike Placer Miners Association to allow artists access to post-mined claims in the Goldfields before the reclamation process, through a “Mining Artist in Residence” program.
keywords: land-based practices, arts-based research, experimental institutes, sub-arctic arts, extraction
Dr. Aubyn O’Grady is the Program Director of the Yukon School of Visual Arts. Aubyn’s interdisciplinary academic and art works exist in the space between performance and pedagogy. Community engagement is the focus of her arts practice, often taking up the very place she lives in as her material. She is a frequent and enthusiastic collaborator, and so, can rarely take sole credit for any project she organizes. However, she can be credited with conceptualizing the Dawson City League of Lady Wrestlers (2013-2017), the Swimming Lessons Aquatic Lecture series (2017-2018), Local Field School (2020+), and Drawlidays (2019, 2020), a Dawson City-wide portrait exchange.
Jackie Olson was born and raised in Dawson City and is a citizen of the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in First Nation. Trained as a painter, Jackie received a BFA from the Alberta College of Art in 1992, and has been creating and learning new art forms since. Jackie’s work has been featured in exhibitions across Canada including the Walter Phillips Gallery (Banff, AB), Harcourt House (Edmonton, AB), and a forthcoming solo exhibition at the ODD Gallery (Dawson City, YT). Her work lives in many private and public collections, including the Bavaria State Anthropology Museum (Germany), Indigenous Art Centre (Canada), and the Yukon Permanent Art Collection (Canada). Jackie holds a faculty position with the Yukon School of Visual Arts, and recently curated the DIRE exhibition in Dawson City, which invited several Indigenous northern artists to create new works honouring salmon-as-life. In 2022 Jackie was awarded the Yukon Hall of Innovator’s Lifetime Achievement Award for her transformative reimagining of age-old Yukon practices as an inspired new way of creating art.
Experiential learning as a capacity building tool for communities for Design Studies students at the University of Alberta
Gillian Harvey, University of Alberta
Experiential learning has emerged as a powerful capacity-building tool for communities in various domains, including Design Studies. This paper focuses on the application of experiential learning as a capacity-building tool for Design Studies students at the University of Alberta, with the aim of fostering community engagement and empowering students to address real-world challenges. By immersing students in authentic, hands-on experiences, experiential learning offers a transformative educational approach that bridges the gap between theory and practice.
This paper outlines the objectives, methodologies, and outcomes of the experiential learning program at the University of Alberta. Through partnerships with the Canadian Red Cross, students participated in a collaborative project that required them to apply design principles and methodologies to community clarify overdose education response offerings when severe threats to community health and resilience are compromised. By working closely with community members and subject matter experts, students gained valuable insights into the social, cultural, and political contexts.
The outcomes of this experiential learning program are twofold. First, through human-centred design methodologies, students develop a deep understanding of the challenges faced by communities and the role of design in addressing these challenges. They learn to approach design from a human-centered perspective, considering the social and cultural implications of their work. Through this process, the community benefits from the innovative solutions proposed by the students, creating a positive impact on the lives of community members.
This paper highlights the significance of experiential learning as a capacity-building tool for Design Studies students. By combining theoretical knowledge with practical experiences, students are equipped with the skills and experience necessary to become effective designers for social good. The program serves as a platform for nurturing socially conscious design practitioners who can contribute to the betterment of communities through their creative and innovative approaches within a health context.
keywords: community engagement, experiential learning, integrative media, design studios, health design
Gillian Harvey is an Assistant Professor in Design Studies, Department of Art & Design at the University of Alberta (Canada), where she teaches design theory, practice, and research in the area of Visual Communication Design. Gillian works with private and public sector clients in education, health care, and government as well as with non-profit organizations. She has designed social marketing campaigns, data visualization, and complex wayfinding systems. Her research focuses on information design, design for decision making and signage and wayfinding. She structures complex information in order to make it understandable for people, and advocates for the importance of human-centred design. Her recent work uses applied design research for the purposes of communicating medical procedures in emergency situations. Her research interest in signage and wayfinding has led to opportunities to explore and analyse wayfinding systems and their importance to urban growth and development within a city.
Gillian's work has been recognized with a dozen regional, national, and international awards, and she has published in the International Institute of Information Design's Journal of Information Design. She is a professional member of International Institute of Information Design (IIID), and the Graphic Designers of Canada. She is the president of the Edmonton Wayfinding Society (Edmonton), and the IIID World Region Representative for Canada.
YYC/LRT: Community-based Art as Community Development
Jennifer Eiserman, University of Calgary
This presentation will describe how the YYC/LRT: Community-based Art as Community Development project brought the University of Calgary, the City of Calgary and Contemporary Calgary together to learn and grow with members Calgary’s Downtown West community. Over the past two years, the community studio YYC/LRT (originally created by Bryan Faubert as an MFA thesis project) has been situated in the Downtown West community as a satellite of Contemporary Calgary. From the community studio, undergraduate and graduate students have developed community-based art programming for economically and ethno-culturally diverse members of the community, aged 6 to 94. This presentation will discuss the theoretical context for YYC/LRT, built on approaches within contemporary art that favour relational (Bourriaud,1998) and participatory (Bishop, 2006, 2012, 2013) approaches. Foundational to the project is relational aesthetics’ view of artists as facilitators who act to empower viewers through engagement in specific social contexts. It will present a new approach to teaching and learning, “sociogogy” (Saveri, 2019). Rather than focusing on the object of instruction, sociogogy’s focus is the evolution of the learner, and by extension, communities of learners. Sociogogy brings people together to learn from and with each other. It is a collaborative process in which the roles of “teacher” and “learner” shift as necessary (Saveri, 2019). This presentation will describe how three key community engagements brought the university, the art gallery and a community together to collaborate in the creation of bodies of work to learn from each other about what the Downtown West community needs to thrive.
keywords: community-based art, community engagement, participatory art, university-community collaboration
Jennifer Eiserman: I have been engaged in community-based art and collaborative practice for twenty-three years. The importance of making, learning, and understanding together are the driving force of my research and teaching practices. As a result, my teaching practice engages students in collaborative, community-based inquiries through practical experiences in settings as diverse as working with the homeless families of Inn from The Cold to, most recently, seniors in Calgary’s Downtown West. I am actively engaged in community-based arts groups in Calgary, including co-curator of the TBT Gallery committed to promoting Jewish Calgary artist. The community basis of this work has led me to inquire into issues involving ethnicity and identity in art/art education, including research into the nature of the contribution of Canadian artists of Chinese descent on Canadian art and currently, the role of community art in community development through involvement in the Future of Stephen Avenue project, City of Calgary.
On-Site Studio
D’Arcy Wilson & Cameron Forbes, Grenfell Campus, Memorial University
Grenfell Campus houses the visual art program of Memorial University. Located in Corner Brook, a small city in western Ktaqamkuk (Newfoundland), it is a 700 km drive to the main campus in St. John’s. Students of the program come from across what is known as Newfoundland and Labrador, mainland Canada, and international locations.
Through reviewing two special topics courses, Wilson and Forbes share a pedagogy which centres our unique region. We ask, how can we make opportunities for our students to learn from the people, narratives and experiences that make this place a home and an ecological community? How can we contribute to this place as an active site of visual culture?
Wilson’s course, “Expanded Site”, brings students to live at the Bonne Bay Aquarium and Research Station in Gros Morne National Park, transforming the laboratories into studios. Situated in the close-knit community of Norris Point, the course fosters idea generating and self-directed practice through relational approaches to art making, interdisciplinary fieldwork, and collaboration.
Forbes’ “Drawing and Public Space” engages with community garden sites through expanded drawing practices. Developed and led in collaboration with cultural spaces consultant, Sabrina Richard, students meet with residents, city planners and green space users to generate and contextualize their individual and collaborative drawing projects.
keywords: public engagement, visual arts, experiential learning, studio courses, remote and rural communities
D’Arcy Wilson (M.F.A. University of Calgary, B.F.A. Mount Allison) is based in the city of Corner Brook in Ktaqmkuk (Newfoundland), where she is Assistant Professor in Visual Arts at Memorial University’s Grenfell Campus. Wilson’s interdisciplinary work laments colonial interactions with the natural world. As a descendant of European settlers in Canada, she interrogates instances in which her culture’s affection for nature has been impeded by its tendency to harm. Shortlisted for the Sobey Art Award in 2019 (longlisted 2018, 2020), she has exhibited nationally and internationally, most recently at the Art Gallery of Alberta, The Rooms Art Gallery, the Dalhousie University Art Gallery, The Owens Art Gallery, and the Bonavista Biennale.
Through painting, drawing, and collaborative projects, Cameron Forbes’ visual arts practice considers social space. Her current project, Active Site, observes and supports interventions in Western Newfoundland’s built environment and is supported by a SSHRC Insight Development grant. She has recently exhibited at the McClure Gallery (Montreal), aceartinc. (Winnipeg), and the University of Saskatchewan’s Kenderdine Gallery (Saskatoon). From 2008-2011, Forbes was the executive director of Winnipeg’s Art City. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from NSCAD University (Halifax) and a Master of Fine Arts from Concordia University (Montreal). Forbes is an assistant professor in Visual Arts at Grenfell Campus, Memorial University. Of settler descent, she was born in Treaty 4 Territory, Regina, Saskatchewan. She lives with her partner and three children in traditional unceded Mi’kmaw territory, Corner Brook, Newfoundland and Labrador.
