Calendar » SUBJECT OF LEARNING | OBJECT OF STUDY

SUBJECT OF LEARNING / OBJECT OF STUDY

Subject of Learning / Object of Study brings a playful engagement with pedagogical language to three rooms of the Blanton Museum of Art. A colorful mural of chalkboards flank the walls of one gallery. A curated library of books fill the shelves of another. Handwritten wall didactics explain the content of the show through slogans and diagrams. The exhibition underscores how the museum itself as a tool for teaching: replete with visual aids, archives and lesson plans.

The largest of the three rooms, the "classroom" contains a wall sculpture that measures eight foot in height and traverses the length of the walls. The piece is comprised of eighteen colorful geometric panels that are designed to slide in front and behind one another. Modeled after the Montessori School grammar symbol chart, the sculpture adapts these abstract forms into a functioning collection of chalkboards. Across from this piece hangs a grid of eighteen felt rugs. These rugs mimic the paper weaving exercises created for kindergarten instruction by nineteenth century pedagogue Friedrich Froebel. Their designs are based on the color theory excersizes of Bauhaus teachers Johannes Itten, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and Joseph Albers. The rugs are intended for use and can be taken down from the wall to serve as individual seating mats. Both the chalkboards and rugs are design for use during the public programs that take place in the exhibition. Classes, lectures and workshops will run in these galleries from March through June.

The circular gallery serves as the reference library for the exhibition, housing a collection of books on education, textbooks dating back to the seventeenth century and toys inventented by Montessori and Froebel. All of these are made available for perusal by the visitor. Circumscribing the walls of the room is a banner of text declaring the educational axiom of tactile learning. The font for this banner is derived from Melvil Dewey’s “library hand”: the formalized script used by librarians to write catalog entries before the ubiquity of typewriters. This same notation is used in a 5-part, serialized data processing and visualization program that appears on the computers in the library. The program, Robot Pedagogue generates new educational theories by analyzing and recombining the contents of the library books on the shelves above the computers. Using statistically probable word sequences, the program rates their pedagogical quality and stores them in a browsable archive. Visitors are invited to watch this changing display and peruse the archived texts while seated on one of the eighteen modular curved benches. Designed to fit the circular architecture of the library, these benches can also be used in the adjacent gallery for seating during public programming.

Spanning the full height of the smallest room is a didactic mural that also uses the library hand font. This piece is a diagrammatic explication of the exhibition serving as both prologue and epilogue to the exhibition. This diagram illustrates the various components of the exhibition: the three rooms are represented by the shapes at the top, beneath them is a series of color charts which refer back to the color theory used for the rugs and the chalkboards. The white grid applies these same colors to map out the calendar of classes and workshops that are scheduled to take place in the exhibition. At the bottom of the diagram the circles, parentheses and rainbow of colors are reconfigured to depict a the quintessential image for an artwork: a landscape at sunset.