Art, incorporated
You may be a chemistry or business major, but don't be surprised if your course includes a stop at the campus museum
Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pa., has a fine collection of Rembrandt prints. But Lori Verderame, director of the Martin Art Gallery on campus, wants students to do more than just pass through the gallery and say "wow." She sees the prints as a chance for economics majors to learn about Rembrandt as a businessman and entrepreneur, or for cultural-history students to find out more about what Baroque society was like in the Netherlands in the 1650s.
Universities and colleges, even small ones, often have significant art collections on campus, whether built up by a curator or donated by alumni. The challenge has been to bring the paintings and prints out of storerooms and make sure they are seen by more than just the art majors. In recent years, Dr. Verderame says, colleges like hers have turned up their creativity a notch to incorporate art resources into virtually every discipline.
Since the 1960s, scholars have been looking at art from psychological, historical, economic, literary, and other points of view, but just in the past five years, "more and more university galleries are focused on reaching out to the campus," says Roger Dell, a lecturer on arts in education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in Cambridge, Mass., and a former curator in Honolulu and Chicago. Part of the reason is the postmodern view that "art is infinitely complex, and there are many lenses it can be looked at through," he says.
Among the many colleges that are making art resources a part of everyday life on campus:
• Duke University in Durham, N.C. The Institute of the Arts provides a "cultural ticket subsidy." Faculty in any discipline may ask for free tickets to take students to relevant performances. A class in Asian languages and literatures, for example, might attend a performance of a Dhrupad singer of Hindustani classical music from northern India.
• Aurora University in Aurora, Ill. The Schingoethe Center, a museum of native American artifacts and artworks, caters to many classes. A course on Musics of the World, for example, includes research on native American instruments, dance, and song. Students in Social Work With Diverse Populations come to learn about native American family and social structures.
• Smith College in Northampton, Mass. The Museum of Art has designed courses that are tied to the collection, including Chemistry of Artists' Materials and Techniques and Jerusalem in History, Literature, and Art, a first-year seminar.
• Emory University in Atlanta. At the Michael C. Carlos Museum, which houses the largest collection of ancient art in the Southeastern United States, students handle objects that would normally be behind glass.
Today, even business and technical schools with no liberal-arts degree programs are seeing the value of bringing the arts into areas such as mathematics and chemistry.
"There is mounting evidence that science students benefit from studying literature and the arts, adding to their creativity as scientists and helping them to become more aware of moral and ethical issues," says John Strassburger, president of Ursinus College in Collegeville, Pa.
