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Wednesday, February 26, 2020

Rebecca Zeno, Student Work. Response to Touch Chapter, A Natural History of the Senses.



Beauty vs. Insecurity
Photograph



“Each of us has an exaggerated mental picture of our body…Touch fills our memory with a detailed key as to how we’re shaped. A mirror would mean nothing without touch. We are forever taking the measure of ourselves in unconscious ways.” 
- A Natural History of the Senses, Diane Ackerman

Artist Statement:
Bandages are used for healing and protection as well as to cover up marks, scars, or blemishes that society deems inappropriate. I wrapped the face entirely in gauze, with bandages over the eyes, covering up all skin areas to the point where you can no longer recognize the person. The images are meant to provoke thoughts about expectations of beauty and insecurities within oneself.





Shield
Photograph


“Anesthetics…block the body’s ability to send high-frequency pain signals to the brain or will not allow sodium to flow into the nerve cell. Some drugs manage to confuse the signals given at different stages of the pain message.” 
- A Natural History of the Senses, Diane Ackerman

Artist Statement:
Understanding pain is confusing and complex. In this piece, I wanted to emphasize that confusion through masking tape. Here, the masking tape acts as a shield to pain, as would drugs or medication, but at what cost? Is the protective shield a good or bad thing? The piece does not answer the question, but instead raises awareness about how we protect ourselves or mask pain.  

Alexandria Rogel, Student Work. Response to Touch Chapter, A Natural History of the Senses.


Unique
6.5 inches x 7 inches ; charcoal on printer paper


"But the skin is also alive, breathing and excreting, shielding us from harmful rays and microbial attack, metabolizing vitamin D, insulating us from heat and cold, repairing itself when necessary, regulating blood flow, acting as a frame for our sense of touch, aiding us in sexual attraction, defining our individuality, holding all the thick red jams and jellies inside us where they belong. Not only do we have fingerprints, we have unique pore patterns." 
- Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of The Senses

Statement

This piece was inspired by the last sentence of the quote above. We are all unique in our thoughts, personalities, talents, and right down to our DNA. To me, it is mind-blowing to know that not one person has the same fingerprint as another person. With all of this information in mind, I decided to use my fingerprints and palm prints to shade the figure in my drawing to represent that every living being is perfectly and beautifully unique. 


Sunday, February 9, 2020

In Its First Decades, The United States Nurtured Schoolgirl Mapmakers

 NOVEMBER 28, 2018

Atlas obscura


The first “schoolgirl map” that caught historian Susan Schulten’s attention was made in 1823 by Frances Henshaw, a student at one of the best schools for girls in the young United States. The map came from Henshaw’s Book of Penmanship, which included details about geography and astronomy—comets, meridians, horizons, polar circles, and climate zones. The young woman’s drawing encompassed 19 states, copied from Carey’s American Pocket Atlas, from 1805, and Arrowsmith and Lewis’ Atlas, from 1812.
"A Map of the United States," from Catharine M. Cook's Book of Penmanship, made in Windsor, Vermont, in 1818. COURTESY OSHER MAP LIBRARY, UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN MAINE

Schulten studies 19th-century American cartography at the University of Denver, and she was excited to find a map so charming and pretty, with a connection to the history of education for women. The more she started looking for maps like it, the more she found, until she had collected around 150 maps made by American schoolchildren in the early 1800s. “I started looking at them because I was captivated,” she says. “They jump at you … someone put so much time into this.”
And soon she realized that these weren’t just lovely images. “I realized there were some patterns,” she says. “Once I started seeing patterns, I realized that this was a hidden part of American education that you wouldn’t know about if it weren’t for the maps.”
"A Map of the United States," from Catharine M. Cook's Book of Penmanship, made in Windsor, Vermont, in 1818. COURTESY OSHER MAP LIBRARY, UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN MAINE

Before this time in American history, any education that girls received happened at home, through lessons from their families or, for the most well-off, with private tutors. But in the decades after the American Revolution, educators opened hundreds of small academies for young women. Each school had a curriculum tailored for girls, focused on subjects considered appropriate at the time. Geography was a safe subject, and one popular exercise had girls tracing or drawing maps.
The maps that Schulten was finding weren’t practical tools, though. Many lacked indications of scale, for instance. Instead, they showed off the mapmaker’s artistic skill and were opportunities to practice penmanship. The names of cities, rivers, and states, for example, might all be done in different lettering styles. Some students took up the task of making detailed maps—which could be tedious and downright boring—as exercises in mental discipline. Some of the most influential educators at the time, including Emma Willard, a pioneer in education for women and another subject of Schulten’s work, saw maps as powerful tools to aid memorization and analysis.
Hannah Comstock’s “Map of the World,” made in 1815. BOSTON RARE MAPS AND JAMES E. ARSENAULT & COMPANY

One of the more fascinating aspects of these maps—made mostly by young women, but occasionally by young men—is how they reflect a growing sense of American identity. Often students created maps of the entire globe or of their home states, but after the War of 1812, which the United States saw as a victory, there was a spike in maps of the country, Schulten found.
Thinking of the disparate states as a political whole—the United States of America—was novel so early in the nation’s history. “For me the really powerful thing is that, after the Revolution, you have to cultivate an American identity. There’s nothing natural about it,” Schulten says. “It has to be learned. This fits in that sense. Even from a relatively young age, of 12 or 13, you can have people think about the larger political body that they’re part of.”

The female academies had proliferated quickly, but their teachers had no standard curriculum to draw on. Young women took the lessons they’d learned in school, traveled to a new place, and started passing it on. Because the maps often are linked to a certain school, it’s possible to see, when enough are collected together, how the practice of mapmaking spread.
“It shows a network of young women becoming teachers,” says Schulten. “For me, it was like a window onto a past that was otherwise unseen.” The maps are also unusual artifacts in that they reveal part of history that’s not documented elsewhere. “I had never had that experience,” she says. “Part of what blew me away is that here’s an instance where a map isn’t just illustration of something we know. It’s showing something new.” The maps are evidence of a system of pedagogy that wasn’t recorded in other ways—how women shaped and traded knowledge, while passing along new notions of nationhood.
Many of the schools were open for just a few years—even just a few months—before closing their doors, but they were part of a movement in which less-wealthy women began to gain access to education. “They were schools that have otherwise disappeared from historical memory,” says Schulten. But the maps that students made are documents of their existence, the emerging identity of a young country, and a nascent transformation in the lives of women.
Source link below. You can also view more images of maps on the link.