The National Memorial for Peace and Justice (NMPJ) opened in Montgomery, Alabama, on April 26, 2018. The memorial provides a sacred site where people can gather and reflect on America's history of racial injustice and represents an essential milestone in the ongoing process of racial reckoning in the United States. As Alabama has historically been…

The complacent insularity of individualism provides the background against which the convivial performativity of art is conceptualized as acts of citizenship in this article. The alienated sculptural figures and figurations of Alberto Giacometti's "Piazza" are considered germane in addressing the self-centered, collective obsession with…

The Black Lives Matter campaign has led many people around the world to reassess monuments that are installed in public spaces to commemorate historical figures. These reassessments raise questions about what it means to attack the statues of the past, what the rights and wrongs of such actions are, what this teaches us and how all this is passed…

This article takes as its focus the doing of pedagogic affect. We are not so much concerned with what pedagogic affect "is" as what it "does" and how it might do more. We revisit Spinozist concepts of affect, as taken up by Deleuze and Braidotti, in the context of affirmative ethics. Bringing assemblage thinking together with…

Clay sculpting was used with undergraduates (N = 60) to prime self-reported readiness to change in a therapy role play. After listing behaviors interfering with schoolwork, Group Change (n = 30) created clay sculptures of anchors and then reshaped them into boats (intended to symbolize transformation); Group Non-Change (n = 30) created clay…

In this article, I provide a critical reading of the now-removed statue of Sir John A. Macdonald in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Canada. I bring together my own experience visiting the statue with understandings from Indigenous scholarship and public pedagogy theorizing to think about commemorations as public pedagogies that are foremost…

Stacy Boldrick is a Lecturer in Art Museum and Gallery Studies at the University of Leicester, where she conducts research in iconoclasm and its significance for social groups and institutions. She is the author of "Iconoclasm and the Museum" (Routledge, 2020). In 2013, she collaborated with Tabitha Barber to curate Art Under Attack:…

This paper investigates a metrolingual language object and creative place-making in Dumbo, Brooklyn within the era of late capitalism. It is an analysis of how two simple letters 'O' and 'Y', when put together create two short words 'OY' and 'YO' yet carry exponential meaning about metrolingual language ideologies, language users and powerful…

Art educators can "critique" senseless violence--mistreatment, exclusion, intimidation, bullying, violation, abuse, corruption, murder, and war--by unleashing the power of students' creativity. In this article, the author, sharing her philosophical context, discusses how art is preventative medicine with the power to transform the cycle…

With regard to general aesthetic education, the university liberal studies curriculum is designed to provide a balance of the humanities and sciences. Beyond offering a balanced curriculum, there is the current trend for universities to offer a liberal studies curriculum that interfaces the sciences and the humanities. A prime example of this is…

This article presents two lessons. The first one is "Carved in Stone: The Preamble to the Constitution" by Steven S. Lapham. In 1937, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) commissioned artist Lenore Thomas to create some sculptures for the planned community of Greenbelt, Maryland. Part of her work consisted of bas-relief friezes on the…

The Thomas Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress is one of the more significant public structures in American architecture, due for the most part to its wealth and quality of decoration, including an extensive sculptural program executed in 1894-97. The architects entrusted the program to a committee of three prominent sculptors, J. Q. A.…

In this article, the author shares how she changed the way she engaged with Alex, a student who was reluctant to do art projects. While reflecting on Alex's objections to doing art projects, she noticed one concern in particular that arose again and again: he wanted to play. Alex experienced the shift into art-making as a break from playing with…

Hatshepsut (1479-1458 B.C.E) ruled New Kingdom Egypt for roughly 20 years as one of the few female pharaohs in the history of ancient Egypt. Her rule began when her husband died and her stepson was too young to be pharaoh. To legitimize her role as pharaoh, Hatshepsut began a significant building campaign by constructing numerous images, temples,…

The material rhetoric of physical locations like the Museum Park at the North Carolina Museum of Art creates "spaces of attention" wherein visitors are invited to experience the landscape around them as a series of enactments that identify the inside/outside components of sub/urban existence, as well as the regenerative/transformative…