Object Lessons at the Ackland

As a teaching fellow at the Ackland Art Museum, I worked with university professors from a variety of disciplines to teach object-based lessons in support of their teaching objectives. The idea behind each lesson was to facilitate an organic discussion in relation to a work of art that builds on specific learning outcomes associated with classroom discussions.

Object selection

In a course offered by the Department of Asian Studies at UNC, War and Veterans: Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan, I selected two photographs from the print collection to generate a complementary discussion about how war affects people. The first photograph is from the series “Iraq: Seven Years of War” by Andrea Bruce and depicts an American soldier interrogating an Iraqi prisoner.

I chose this documentary image because it complicates the cultural representation of war. Here, the soldier is clearly the aggressor, not a victim of violence. Although we can’t know what happened on this day or what may have so angered this young man, it is clear that some norm of warfare had been ruptured.

In contrast, the below photograph by Iranian photographer Gohar Dashti operates on a conceptual register. The newly married couple is pictured in a destroyed car on the battlefield, perhaps signaling they are consigned to remain in place; war has arrested their lives. Each of these photographs challenges cultural assumptions about the effect of war.

However, not all of my lesson plans centered on photography. I frequently used paintings from the permanent collection to explore the relationship between audience and subject. For instance, I selected the below painting by Barkley Hendricks for an African American Studies class to illuminate how racialized logics can sometimes complicate practices of looking. Hendricks uses a teal background in the painting to foreground the person. With his environment effectively erased, is it possible to locate his social identity without drawing on racial assumptions?