Week II

The three ways to approach a problem

Making quicker decisions needs for sure to be a priority for me this second term. I must speed up a little my thought and work process, and when it comes to deciding my idea for the Major Project, I’m trying to focus on that. Next Monday we have our first presentation to pitch our topics, so Fiona had us do an exercise with post-its to let ideas flow. We had to brainstorm and write our ideas to later stick them to the wall, in order to categorize and group them.

I must say that, before this Monday, I already had made up my mind about the topic I wanted to fully invest these months in: the History of Art from a gender perspective. I have really felt a connection with this idea somehow, and I think that is key to staying motivated and consistent in my research. That’s why, for Fiona’s class this Monday, I brainstormed the three approaches I’m seeing for this broad and complex topic. My corner of the wall ended up looking like this:

All my ideas fall under the same umbrella: the gender perspective in the History of Art.

At the beginning of the exercise, I didn’t have any idea at all of what I was going to write, so it was a surprise when topics started to fill the sticky notes. Without me noticing at first, issues started to fall into the same groups, categories forming for me to analyze and narrow down. At the end of the class, I was quite surprised and inspired by my three topics:

• Educational scope: the History of Art with a gender perspective focused on education. Inspired by how much misinformation about women artists could be solved with the proper information for students, this path would explore academic standards and how we could offer female role models in History.

• Art historians: after following for many years art historians and artists, I came to notice how they confronted quite usually the censorship, judgment, and mistrust of the general public when talking about art and gender. My idea would be to give them a platform where they could give information in an accessible and easy way.

• Male wrong-attributed artworks: part of why I think that this conversation is important, is because of how common is for History to wrong-attribute artworks, and how difficult is to update the right information in museums and books. I want to explore why this happens and how there’s a double standard between men and women in Art analysis.

It’s complicated not to think of a creative solution when deciding between ideas. Feels like a faith jump you are taking when you don’t really know what’s going to happen to that idea. But I believe that all my topics have legs, and potential, so the solution will come up eventually.

Hazel’s class in the 19th was also very helpful. I developed in a sentence what the problem I wanted to address was: the ignorance and misinformation about female artists in the History of Art. Then, I wrote down the three different ways to approach the issue. Hazel was very positive about the topic and she had similar thoughts on it to mine. She gave me valuable feedback too, since she felt that my educational and art historians ideas could mix up and I needed to narrow them down more in order to differentiate them.

After talking to her, I felt quite motivated and happy to have chosen this topic, a feeling that still remains today.

Feel free to read my other blog posts! You can find them here.