CAS CONNECT 2019

Linking Art History to Today OSU professors describe how students examined roundabout sculpture Jennifer Borland (left) and Louise Siddons collaborated to provide a unique community engagement opportunity for their art history students. F or art history professors such as Jennifer Borland and Louise Siddons, teaching students the real-world implications of what they are doing is an ongoing challenge. As Siddons put it: “How do the past and the present continually collide in a project? How do we teach our discipline in a more engaging way?” The pair’s friendship goes back 20 years to their graduate-school days at Stanford. So, naturally, they talk often, and their conversations about a then-new piece of public STORY JACOB LONGAN | PHOTOS JASON WALLACE AND CITY OF STILLWATER art in downtown Stillwater led to a collaboration and unique opportunity for their students in the fall of 2016. Borland and Siddons wanted to share their experience and encourage other art historians to try similar projects at their own institutions, so they wrote an academic article that was published in a new journal, Art History Pedagogy & Practice . In “Yay or Neigh? Frederic Remington’s Bronco Buster, Public Art and Socially Engaged Art History Pedagogy,” the professors wrote about what happened when Siddons’ History of American Art and Borland’s Art History Survey II classes examined various issues related to the city’s placement of an enlarged replica of the 1894-95 sculpture in the center of a roundabout at 10th Avenue andMain Street. “This was a chance to do something really cool,” Borland said. “It was the opportunity to start exercising the student role in class in a different way.” Borland and Siddons didn’t knowwhat would happen with this experiment in examining a local art installation that wasn’t created with the intention of academic exploration. The professors empowered their classes to make decisions and find relevant information throughout the semester. “We had the students reach out to various people, but there wasn’t any one person we could go to and say, ‘This is something we want to use in our project,’” Siddons said. “The city of Stillwater was as helpful as possible, but they can only be so helpful when you can’t answer their questions because you don’t even knowwhere this is headed yourself.” 10 CONNECT 201 9