This week I am honestly unsure about what to write. I decided that since we have been looking at contemporary African art that I would do a search of my own and find an artist that I am interested in and write about that.

The artist that I found is El Anatsui. He was born in 1944 in Ghana. Below is just a part of an artist statement that he gave.

About six years ago I found a big bag of liquor bottle tops apparently thrown away in the bush. At the time I was searching for a pot monument (pillars of stacked pots, each of which represents a bereavement in the village) that I had seen decades before in that locality. I kept the bottle caps in the studio for several months until the idea eventually came to me that by stitching them together I could get them to articulate some statement. When the process of stitching got underway, I discovered that the result resembled a real fabric cloth. Incidentally too, the colours of the caps seemed to replicate those of traditional kente cloths. In effect the process was subverting the stereotype of metal as a stiff, rigid medium and rather showing it as a soft, pliable, almost sensuous material capable of attaining immense dimensions and being adapted to specific spaces.

http://stevenson.info/exhibitions/materials/anatsui.htm

El Anatsui is an African artists that mentioned stereotypes in his artist statement. Able to see that his work is not as politically or culturally deep as some of the artists we have looked at, it still is visually appealing and has cultural ties.

I found it interesting to read a statement that he talks about a stereotype. While many of the artists we have talked about including Yinka and Fani-Kayode deal with larger issues of gender, culture, and sexual stereotypes and the limits it places on them as artists, El Anatsui seems to

deal with manipulating material more than anything else. Many times these objects have links to history and people.

He is changing the viewers idea about metal in the picture below.

Many of us think of everyday object in only one way. El Anatsui is able to see objects in many different ways and in ways that will make on think differently about an object the next time they see it. For instance he will use metal cans or liquor caps and sew them together and turn them into a cloth like piece of work. He also said that many times these cloth like pieces resemble kente cloth.

Personally I would love to see on of his works up close. I would like to take a look at the individual pieces and how they are put together and then i would like to step back and see the larger picture. I would like to understand why he chose the certain pieces of metal and what connections they have with him and his surroundings or history.

I was unable to view the collection at Waterloo Center for the Arts. When I arrived this morning they said they had taken down their pieces Thursday afternoon in preparation for an Art Festival. I would have liked to see these pieces up close and also see how the center displayed them as well as label them.

For me this week of class was interesting but challenging. We had three articles to read for Thursday. The first article I read was by Olu Oguibe. This article was a very difficult read for me. In all honesty I don't like to have to read slowly. Nonetheless this article was a challenge and one that I can see as an agreeable challenge for this class. A questions that I posed after reading this article was, why did Ouattara not just start talking about what he wanted to and get what he wanted to say out? I can see that he is in a way stuck in a catch 22 but as a person I would feel like getting my opinion out, if it is something very important to me, is something I would do no matter if my name got slandered or what was reported was nothing like what I said. McEvilley sounded like an ignorant man and I gave him the title of “white power” (not a good title in my book). It seems as though he already knew what he wanted out of the interview and didn’t really care what Ouattara said. Even when Ouattara gave a small verbal protest, McEvilley didn’t seem to nudge, ponder as to why he was protesting, or even take a second for a further explanation. Why is it that so many people are still putting stereotypes onto people because of their origin, race, or gender?

One question a member in my discussion group posed that I found to be very interesting was something to the effect of, “what could I do, if anything, as a young white female with this new information to help effect change?” This question got me thinking about many things one being about how we are being taught about other cultures, their art, and livelihood in schools from k-12. I know that when we studied African art we looked at the so called “traditional” art of Africa, and needless to say from only one ethnic group in Africa. So this got me thinking about my future as an art educator and what I can do to help embark on a journey to effect change in my k-12 curriculum of art education.

There are a few things that I would consider doing in my classroom, and I am also open to suggestions from anyone. One thing I would do while teaching about cultural art would be to show past and present works along with visuals of the cultural environment. And if this culture is to lie in a much larger group of people, like Africa, I would try to explain that the works they are seeing are only from a very small part of a country. You could maybe give them some basic facts that would help the students see how diverse the population is. I believe that too many times in classrooms today teachers feel the need to rush through a learning experience because “students can’t concentrate that long”, or “they really are not listening”, or they feel the need to have them produce a piece of work every time they are in the art room. It is true that teachers are only given a short amount of time with their students in the art room and even less time when they are younger. I do believe that many teacher need to change their teaching not just k-12 art educators.

Overall the question that was posed raised more concern than just about my future teaching, including the power of the female voice in today’s society, and age and how that could effect who listens to you but I feel that in my future school and classroom is where I can make a difference as a young white female.