The Daily Princetonian
Thursday October 22, 2015
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TEACHING CRAFT This week, Street spoke to three Lewis Center of the Arts professors in different disciplines. Professors Nell Painter, A.M. Homes and Martha Friedman discuss their experiences as artists and teachers at Princeton.
A.M. HOMES ANDIE AYALA Contributor
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he creative writing courses taught by A.M. Homes, under the umbrella of the Lewis Center for the Arts, are essentially a formal space for sharing and refining the art of storytelling. Every week, students are required to send in manuscripts of their own works of fiction and bring in other
stories they would like to share with the class. Ultimately, Homes hopes that the class will “help people reconnect to their imagination” and learn that it’s “okay to take intellectual and creative risks.” Homes finds that Princeton students tend to be really good at following rules — after all, that’s how they were admitted here. However, as a result, these students are often risk-averse and fearful of the prospect of failure — which is a necessary component of creative writing.
Homes said she loves teaching this course because she gets students who have a variety of different interests, many of whom have been trained to think and to write based on empirical claims. She said that her philosophy as a professor is to help students understand that their future is not based on what they know, but on what they can imagine. In Homes’ words, her advanced fiction class isn’t about “becoming the next great novelist, although that’s great too.” Rather, she says, “it’s about becoming a person.” While some students who take the course end up coming back to Homes hoping to write a creative writing thesis, students often don’t take this class intending to pursue a writing career. In discussing one of the most memorable examples of this, Homes described a young woman who was a talented writer but was aiming for a profession in medicine rather than writing. “When I end up in an emergency room I want her there, because she had that unique combination of intellectual skill but also human compassion,” Homes said. “So I said to
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MARTHA FRIEDMAN ANGELA WANG Contributor
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a rtha Friedman, lecturer in visual arts in the Lewis Center for the Arts, grew up in a family of scientists. “Literally, the way I thought about things seemed different from my nuclear family,” Friedman said, describing her upbringing. As paradoxical as it sounds, Friedman decided to become an artist in response to her family’s interests. Her father, a molecular geneticist, brought her to the lab and asked her to sort out fruit f lies. Her mother, a doctor, provided her access to images of anatomical slices. Because her mother and father taught her about what was going on inside bodies and about organic processes, her fundamental idea of the physical world was abstracted, and she developed a keen sense of a body’s movement from the inside and out. Her ability to abstract materials from their daily physical appearance proves beneficial to her as a sculptor. Friedman always wanted to be an artist. When she was 10, she went to an arts camp in Chicago intending
to focus on her oboe-playing. Instead of enjoying playing in the orchestra, she “loved making the double-reeds for the oboe.” One day, she saw a group of art kids in the camp hanging out outside. She smelled the paint coming out of the studios and realized that was where she needed to be. The next year, she went to the camp to take the sculpture class. “I make weird stuff, and people actually kind of took it seriously,” Friedman said. “And then you find people that think like you, too, and that felt really good.” She continued attending that camp until she was 18 and taught there for two summers. Now, she is a lecturer at
the University, co-teaching a class called “Body and Object, Making Art that is Both Sculpture and Dance”
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COURTESY OF PROJECTARTIST
NELL PAINTER
COURTESY OF WIKIPEDIA
JOY DARTEY Staff Writer
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fter history professor emerita Nell Painter saw a New York Times cover depicting the Russian bombing of Grozny, the North Caucasus-located capital of Chechnya, she wondered why white Americans were called Caucasians. After spending a semester in Germany finding out, Painter wrote “The History of White People” in 2010, discussing how formerly nonwhite people were classified as white through their assimilation into American society. Painter is often referred to as a historian first and a painter second. Noting the sharp divide between art and history, she explained her interest in the two subject areas. “It’s scholarship versus art,” Painter said. “[In history], my aim is for the reader to understand what I’m thinking. I was making the meaning, not the reader. But in art, the viewer makes the meaning. The aim is not so much clarity, but interest.” Despite the differences between the two subject areas, Painter combined art and history in her two art history books. She continues to make art and believes that an artist does not need to wait for inspiration to strike in order to create, as long as there is interest and inclination. “I feel that as a professional, I need to make art whether I feel like it or not,” she explained. Painter first started teaching at the University in 1988 as a professor of history. She eventually took a 10-year break from teaching but was invited back to the University by Eddie Glaude GS ’97, head of the African American Studies department, to teach a course this fall. The interdisciplinary course is called AAS 347: Art School at Af-
rican American Studies: Process, Discourse, Infrastructure, in which Painter combines art making with art criticism and an examination of contemporary art, particularly the works of black artists. The course is fundamentally based on art concepts, but the art that students create is intertwined with African American history. “We are doing it from the point of view of black artists,” Painter explained. “What are the issues of interest to black artists?” Painter defines black artists as artists of African descent working in the United States. She believes that, in general, black artists tend to have a stronger interest in making social commentary through their art than non-black artists. “People of color generally have the same interest in commenting on society, as a critique. And in the art world that is a problem, because generally the art world just wants – you can call it art for art’s sake. So art that is problematic or that has a point of view is very often just brushed aside as illustration,” Painter said, explaining that “illustration” is considered lowbrow compared to “fine art,” which is highbrow. Painter currently has two students in her seminar and makes art with them on their studio days. Dallas Nan ’16 and Lorenzo Laing ’16 are both invested in creating political art. At the beginning of the semester, Painter asked Nan and Laing to bring in images that were of interest to them. The images then acted as the “program” for their artwork. Nan’s image concerns the gentrification of a slum in the Philippines and Laing’s is of a demonstration from Ferguson.
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