Art Appreciation: Multicultural Perspectives (ARTH100)

Purpose: to help other instructors teaching the same course

Common Course ID:  Art Appreciation: Multicultural Perspectives (ARTH100)
CSU Instructor Open Textbook Adoption Portrait

Abstract: This open textbook is being utilized in a Art Appreciation course for undergraduate students by Asa Simon Mittman at California State Uiversity, Chico. Look At This!: An Introduction to Art Appreciation is a freely available, accessible, antiracist Open Educational Resources (OER) textbook for Art Appreciation courses. Art Appreciation is taught at most two- and four-year US colleges and universities, generally as lower-division introductory General Education courses that are often the only art courses that students outside of the arts and humanities take in their time in college. The book provides the tools and vocabulary of close visual analysis, and the contains a series of thematic chapters. My main motivations were: to increase financial equity by giving every student equal access to course materials; to facilitate inclusion by ensuring that all materials meet W3C Accessibility Guidelines; to encourage students to rethink assumptions about cultural categories, e.g. race, gender, sexuality, religion, nationality, class, ability, and age; and to actively foster an antiracist mindset.

Course Title and Number
Brief Description of course highlights:  ARTH 100: Art Appreciation, Multicultural Perspectives is a basic introduction to the world of art, and the art of the world. We will roam at will over all of the inhabited continents. We will wander through time from the present, back to the earliest moments of human creativity, 40,000 years ago. We will cover many major works, but also lesser-known works that reveal facets of the cultures by which they were produced. This is a huge amount of material. We could never hope to cover every period in sequence in one semester, so we will therefore progress through major themes that are common to various periods. We will seek to learn how to approach works of art, how to examine their contexts to gain an understanding of their meanings and the ideas at work within them.

Student population: This is an Area C1 General Ed course (Pathways: Gender & Sexuality Studies, Health & Wellness). It is aimed at students with little/no prior experience in visual arts, and presupposes no incoming knowledge. Most students are freshmen and sophomores, but juniors and seniors frequently take the course, as well.

Learning or student outcomes: 
Analyze works of art using visual analysis vocabulary.
Write clear and cohesive short essays on works of art.
Apply knowledge of major art themes to any work of art

Look at This! An Introduction to Art Appreciation 
Brief Description: Look At This! is designed to help you approach and appreciate the visual arts wherever you find them. It explains how artists use the visual elements of their work to create moods and effects, teaches you how to break down complex images into their parts, and gives an overview of major themes in art. The book is global, and covers art from prehistory to the present.
Authors: Asa Simon Mittman
Student access: https://pressbooks.calstate.edu/lookatthis
Provide the cost savings from that of a traditional textbook.  Margaret Lazzari and Dona Schlesier, Exploring Art: A Global Thematic Approach, now in its fifth edition (first published in 2002, Wadsworth Publishing). New paperbacks cost $165; most students rent hard copies or pay for temporary eBook access, both of which cost ~$40 for a semester and leave students with nothing afterward. The course has 120 students each fall and 50 each spring, which amounts to between $6,800 and $28,050 per year.
License: Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial  

Instructor Name - Asa Simon Mittman
California State University, Chico
Professor of Art and History

Please provide a link to your university page.
https://www.csuchico.edu/art/people/faculty/mittman-asa.shtml

Please describe the courses you teach.  I teach courses on ancient and medieval art, monsters, and film. I have published Maps and Monsters in Medieval England, Inconceivable Beasts: The Wonders of the East in the Beowulf Manuscript,  Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous, and many other books and articles on monsters and marginality in the Middle Ages. I co-curated Terrors, Aliens, and Wonders: Medieval Monsters at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York.

Describe your teaching philosophy and any research interests related to your discipline or teaching.  The goal of Art Appreciation it to help students appreciate art. This is fundamentally difference from an introductory Art History course, which is designed to teach students major artistic periods, their cultural context, and so on. In order to help students appreciate – which is to say enjoy art – the first challenge to overcome is the discomfort many people feel standing in front of works of art. They often ask themselves, "What am I supposed to be doing?" Therefore Art Appreciation should being with an introduction to visual analysis. This is the main skill that helps us work through the properties of any work of art. It helps us break them down into their components, identify their key features, and understand how they general attention, emotion, and ideas in viewers. The second step is to introduce students to major themes that can be found in art all oveI pr the world, from prehistory to the present. There are many possible themes! The initial set in the first edition of Look At This! Is: Nature, Communities, Power, Religion, Sex, Selves, Pleasure, and Copies. I plan to add a few additional chapters over time.

In short, as the book description reads: Look At This! is designed to help you approach and appreciate the visual arts wherever you find them. It explains how artists use the visual elements of their work to create moods and effects, teaches you how to break down complex images into their parts, and gives an overview of major themes in art. The book is global, and covers art from prehistory to the present.

My research areas are medieval manuscripts, maps, and monsters. At Chico State, I teach courses on ancient and medieval art, monsters, and film. I published Maps and Monsters in Medieval England, Inconceivable Beasts: The Wonders of the East in the Beowulf Manuscript, The Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous, and many other books and articles on monsters and marginality in the Middle Ages. My most recent book looks at the medieval history of antisemitism. I also co-curated Terrors, Aliens, and Wonders: Medieval Monsters at theMorgan Library & Museum in New York.

OER/Low Cost Adoption Process

Provide an explanation or what motivated you to use this textbook or OER/Low Cost option.  I came to the project with two goals:

1. Save the students money!  - My only goal in this project is to aid our students, and students in Art Appreciation courses elsewhere. For fifteen years, I have used This course previously used Margaret Lazzari and Dona Schlesier, Exploring Art: A Global Thematic Approach, now in its fifth edition (first published in 2002, Wadsworth Publishing). New paperbacks cost $165; most students rent hard copies or pay for temporary eBook access, both of which cost ~$40 for a semester and leave students with nothing afterward. Other textbook options on the market include Prebles’ Artforms (first published in 1978, ebook rental: $75); Gilbert's Living with Art (first published in 1985, ebook rental: $53); Henry Sayre, World of Art (first published in 1997, ebook rental: $75). I believe that Look at This! is an improvement over these options in terms of content and cost.

2. Produce something better than the textbooks currently on the market, which are all mediocre, at best!  Specifically, I wanted to provide a book that was actively antiracist and celebratory of all gender identities and sexualities. Antiracism, in particular, is fundamental to my research. I have written about the history of race through various conceptual paradigms since graduate school, where I wrote Maps and Monsters in Medieval England (2006, under contract with Routledge for revised second edition incorporating recent scholarship on race). I have followed the expansion of Critical Race Studies, and my recent research (culminating in several published articles and a book currently in press) is informed by CRS. Art Appreciation has long been a wasted opportunity to address some of the most pressing concerns of our era. Most of the current texts are embedded in long-outmoded ideological frameworks that privilege Western art, especially European art. This is even true in global thematic texts, where biases are generally less open but still present.

How did you find and select the open textbook for this course?  I searched extensively for viable OER for this course, but could find none that were adequate. There are no comparable OER Art Appreciation resources. The closest competition is Art Appreciation, a Western-only, chronological survey that is a series of static PDFs hosted by East Tennessee State University. 

I therefore concluded that I had to make my own OER, which I am publishing under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0), so all derivatives remain free.

Sharing Best Practices: I spoke to my department at a faculty meeting, and publicized the resource among my art historical colleagues throughout the world. Further, I had an announcement and link posted at SmartHistory.org, which is a widely-used OER art history survey, so this should draw the book to the attention of art history faculty, who frequently teach art appreciation courses.

Describe any challenges you experienced, and lessons learned.  The main challenge was the lack of an acceptable resource. Once I concluded that I would have to make my own OER, the remaining challenges were:

1. Identifying an workable OER platform. With help from Beth Shook, our campus CAL$ mentor, I settled on Pressbooks, which has worked very well.
2. Generate the text for all chapters. I had a base set of texts to work from that I write several years ago, when I planned to publish a book with one of the major textbook publishers. I was unwilling to make some significant changes they required, summed up by their senior editor’s dictate that the book had to be “radically similar to current books on the market.” I saw no point in this, so we parted ways. The main work in updating the text was to bring in more actively antiracist content and analysis, as well as more direct addressing of varied human genders and sexualities. 
3. Obtaining images that could be included without paying permissions fees. Here, I worked with an excellent student assistant, Evelyn Norris. I provided her a list of all the images I needed, and showed her how to locate Public Domain and Creative Commons images. She did an excellent job locating most of the 300 images needed and, when necessary, finding alternates that would serve the same purpose. She also composed formal captions for all images.
4. Uploading all texts and images and formatting them in Pressbooks. I figured out how to navigate Pressbooks, and then showed Evelyn Norris how to do so. She then did the initial work of getting the texts and images online chapter by chapter, at which point I would edit and proof the texts and adjust or replace images as needed.