Description
Please complete both parts. For part 1 I am on track with the project.
Project Topic: Edmonia Lewis who predates the Harlem Renaissance.
Part I: Project Update
The purpose of this part of the assignment is to convince me that you’re on track in completing your project or else that you are struggling and in need of assistance. If all is well, simply summarize your work so far and what remains in a few sentences. I shouldn’t expect this would take more than 100 words.
If you’re in trouble, you might have to spend a little more time describing your difficulties or the impediments you’re facing. You will need to alert me if your project is changing, as a consequence of unforeseen obstacles. We will need to work together as soon as possible to ensure that you can still submit a project of some sort.
Part II: Paper Outline
One way to consider the final paper is to think of it as a glorified art analysis. By the time the paper is due, you will have completed several analyses with feedback from your professor, so you should be growing well-practiced in the form and content.
Two elements take the Paper beyond the usual art analysis assignments, however. First, the Paper looks at more than one artwork, so the Paper will necessarily be longer than the art analysis assignments you’ve written so far. Second, the Paper also contains an element of reportage and analysis from your project’s framework.
As a result, part of what you discuss are ideas about your interpretations of specific artworks, but also your ideas and analysis about how those meanings are shaped by the public venues you’ve imposed on the works.
Consider the following as examples – any of which could be a promising thesis for the Paper:
In my Change the Course project, I submitted a PowerPoint presentation collecting representative works of the Harlem sculptor John Doe.
Thesis: John Doe’s sculpture would enrich future iterations of this course due to his rough formal techniques and gritty subject matter which could form a contrasting perspective to the high-gloss and lofty tendencies of currently covered sculptors such as Savage, Barthe, and Johnson.
The point of this paper, then, will be to help me understand what’s so great about John Doe, his style and works, and his content – and how the course currently is a bit limited in terms of broad perspectives on sculpture.
In my Media Campaign, I took five of Jacob Lawrence’s Tubman paintings to faceBook and engaged in conversations about the works.
Thesis: While my campaign revealed widespread unfamiliarity with Lawrence’s paintings, I noticed that posts where I described and analyzed specific formal elements of the paintings tended to reap more “likes,” suggesting that an educational component must be an essential part of publicly displaying Jacob Lawrence’s work.
In my Change My Work Place project, I redesigned some public space and documented this process. I put all the information into a Prezzi. Because my work place is a reception area in a tax service provider’s office, I chose five works from Harlem artists on the theme of work.
Thesis: Among artists as varied as Lawrence and Jones, or Douglas and Motley, Harlem artists reveal a surprisingly unified attitude to the nobility and elevation of labor – even the most menial work — lending public endorsement to the tenets of the American Dream (as opposed to Harlem’s more critical writers, for example, where the theme of the White Witch emerges as a critique of the elusiveness and racial privilege of the American Dream).
Required Elements of the Paper Outline:
Thesis Statement: must be an arguable claim about artworks’ meaning or significance.
Minimum of four reasons which argue why the thesis is valid.
Conclusion: a statement which answers the question: “My thesis matters to our understanding of My Artist’s work because ______.”
