ARLIS/NA 48th Annual Conference

Recent years have seen a growth in collaborations between art librarians, special collections curators, and other academic partners to enhance and reimagine student interaction with and creation of visual materials. Collaboration, visual literacy, active learning, critical thinking, and student engagement are key to the success of these endeavors.
In Exhibiting STEAM: Engaging Art Librarianship in the STEM Narrative, Hilles and Boehme will discuss two exhibitions they spearheaded which created dialogues between arts and sciences. In one, they highlighted the photographs of microscopic subjects created by faculty and students, and, in the other, they curated an artist books’ exhibit where science served as inspiration and subject.

In Polaroids from Heaven: Experiential Learning with Special Collections, Ewalt will present on the methods and pedagogies she employs in visual literacy instruction to help students analyze and draw inspiration from photographs of Marian apparitions and supernatural phenomenon.

Leousis and Schmidt will discuss their collaboration, in Reimagining the Special Collections Classroom: Creating an Active Learning Laboratory for Art, Architecture, and Design Students, where they use a flipped classroom approach and hands-on activities to create student-centered and student-led workshops, in which students analyze and engage with visual materials from special collections.

In Hybrid Symbols of Identity and the Royal Chicano Air Force: Integrating Information Competencies in an Intermediate Studio Art Class Using University Library Archives and Special Collections, Harper and Ventis will present on a project in which printmaking students evaluate how Chicano identity was created and constructed in the RCAF poster collection, and students then create images incorporating symbols related to their own hybrid identities.