The Visual Arts department at UW will be experiencing changes due to COVID-19 restrictions and precautions.
“We’ve been working hard to create a comparable experience using a distance-based model,” department head of the Art and Art History Program Ricki Klages explains.
Many professors at the university will not be returning to in-person teaching, be it over concerns for their health or for the health of people they live with. As a result, many courses will be offered online for students to access.
When it comes to classes in the visual arts, moving online offers unique challenges, and creative solutions.
“Students won’t have access to the studio or equipment they would find in class, but they can approximate such equipment at home using modified materials,” Klages said. “Students will have to adapt, and have gotten really creative. For example, students in our sculpture classes this past semester ended up creating miniature scenes and figures and any materials they could find, such as bottles, to make these really creative and interesting scenes.”
The department is also working to loan out equipment such as print-making presses that students would otherwise not be able to find. For classes such as ceramics, where a kiln can’t be loaned, teachers will adapt their plans to come up with projects, such as finding local clay deposits and air-drying the final products.
“We are trying to figure out ways to make experiences as comparable as we can while also branching out what it means to be an artist and to have a studio.”
If solutions cannot be found to educate students, be it for safety reasons or if changes would diminish the experience, certain classes may be postponed.
When it comes to having students view museums, students will be able to tap into virtual catalogs and virtual tours. This ensures that even if museums are closed or have a restriction on the number of people allowed in, or if a student is unable to attend in person, all will be able to get to experience others’ work.
Classes being split into smaller groups for the classes offered in person, and the new online courses will greatly change how teachers and other students interact with and critique others’ work.
“Before, teachers would go up and talk to students or draw on their drawings, but won’t be able to now to maintain health and safety procedures,” said Klages. “Critiques would usually be done in large groups to offer constructive criticism, but now we aren’t able to do that. Most of us will be creating an online gallery, through Zoom or other platforms, and on there students will show their work and get feedback from their peers and teachers based on how they present their work.”
Funding that was previously used to bring in other artists will now be used to bring even more artists for virtual lectures.
“We can record these and save them to use for future teaching,” Klages said excitedly. “Recording and archiving lectures and demos done by professors will also allow students to access the information as many times as they need to.”
Among the new opportunities include the print-making professor to get in contact with other teachers, both in the US and in several other countries, to create a print-making conference.
“This has given us several opportunities with how we are teaching visual arts and adding to the student experience in ways we wouldn’t have been able to in-person, though of course, we are heartbroken to not be able to work face-to-face with our students.”
