Applications to use the Pat Guthrie Special Exhibitions Teaching Gallery during the Spring 2023 semester are due November 1, 2022! Open to all academic disciplines. Click here for full details. E-mail raechel.cook@uwyo.edu with any questions.
The Pat Guthrie Special Exhibitions Teaching Gallery presents three installations of artwork, each specific to a course taught during the Fall 2022 semester at the University of Wyoming. Faculty from a range of academic disciplines select artwork from our permanent collection to support the content and learning goals of their respective classes.
This object-based teaching and learning method invites inquiry, curiosity, and creative thinking into the students’ educational experience. These skills are tools to prepare our future workforce and leaders, no matter their path, and help enliven the cultural experience in Wyoming.
This semester, we welcome students and faculty from the following UW classes and departments into the museum:
Dr. Tracey Owens Patton, Professor, Department of English and School of Culture, Gender, & Social Justice
ENGL/AAST 4600, COJO 4160, GWST 4500: African American Rhetoric
What is the history of Black participation and equality in the United States? What can this history tell us about social justice controversies and narratives generally? What can one group’s struggle for equity and equality tell us about other groups and society generally? This class is about Black American discourse and its relationship to equality and participation. Using the struggle of Black Americans as an instructive exemplar, the class will come to terms with the philosophical concepts, political issues, social justice movements, moral complexities, and discursive characteristics in African American rhetoric. Selected artwork by Benny Andrews and Romare Bearden will support discussion throughout the semester on the presence and interdependence of classism, heterosexism, racism, religiousism, and sexism in our everyday lives and theories explaining their continuance.
Dr. Nancy Small, Associate Professor, Department of English
ENGL 5055: Narrative and Storytelling
Stories we tell ourselves form the foundations of our identities as well as the gravities that pull us together into communities. Yet the process of taking individual stories and turning them into cohesive narratives is fallible and fraught. Imposing any central theme or structure necessarily oversimplifies what Joan Didion calls the “shifting phantasmagoria” of real life. Narratives also create centers and margins, writing into the world those who belong and those who are estranged. Artwork selected for this class invites reflection on the relationship between individual stories within an overarching narrative and how the meaning of an object can change based on cultural context.
Department of Visual & Literary Arts Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Committee
Tessa Dallarosa, Visiting Assistant Professor of Art
Brandon S. Gellis, Associate Professor
Mark Ritchie, Professor
Bailey Russel, Associate Academic Professional
Four faculty from the Department of Visual Arts have selected works of art that inhabit spaces at the intersection of process, material, identity, representation, and art as a vehicle for social change. Throughout the semester, students will create artistic responses to the artwork on view in the Teaching Gallery as part of their course work. They will also develop independent creative work addressing themes of ‘identity’ that will be presented in an exhibition hosted in the Visual Arts building later in the semester.
Images:
Julie Buffalohead, Ponca, b.1972, Straight Legs, 2018, Oil paint, pastel on canvas, 53 x 128 inches
Museum purchase in honor of President Laurie and Professor Tim Nichols, with funds from Anne Alexander, Marial Bulmer, Roy & Caryl Cline, Paul Flesher & Caroline McCracken-Flesher, Pilar Flores, Jean A. Garrison, Kenneth Gerow, Mary Horton, Debra Littlesun, Leonard & Paula Lutz, Tim and Laurie Nichols, Anthony Ogden, Felicia Resor, Sue Sommers, Marianne Eileen Wardle, the Patricia R. Guthrie Special Exhibits Gallery Endowment, and the Ron and Patti Salvagio Endowment for Art Museum Programs, 2019.3.0A and 2019.3.0B
Jaune Quick-To-See Smith, Confederate Salish and Kootenai Tribes, b.1940, Cheyenne Series #98
Acrylic paint, collage on paper, 30 x 22 inches, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. John Gilbert Dean, 1991.1
