Storytelling, Art History Facts, and Student Engagement (Ep. 410)

Welcome to Art Ed Radio, the podcast for art teachers. This show is produced by the Art of Education University, and I’m your host, Tim Bogatz.

We are welcoming Kyle Wood back to the show today. Kyle always has his Arts Madness Tournament running in March, and it’s become an annual tradition to have him on to talk about that. And it’s an online tournament. He invites teachers everywhere to be a part of it. He posts the brackets, the match-ups, and has just thousands of students across the country voting. And the vote is determined by the simple question, “Which is better?” And it’s up to the voter to decide the criteria for determining which artist or which work is better. It’s a great opportunity to bring in some art history, some discussion, debate, some critical thinking, get all of that into your classroom and do it in a really, really fun way. Also gives the opportunity for Kyle and me to get together on the podcast and nerd out about art history, which I always appreciate.

And the other cool thing is that Kyle has recently been hired as a writer for the AOEU magazine, which I’m very excited about. Nothing published yet, but some really, really good stuff coming in the next few weeks. So please keep an eye out for that. We have a lot of good stuff to discuss here though between art history stories, some arts madness, some upcoming articles, and so many other things. We’re going to have a good time with this. But Kyle’s here. He’s ready to jump on so let me bring him on now.

Kyle Wood is back on the show. Kyle, welcome back. How are you?

Aside from the voice and a little bit of a cold, I’m doing pretty well and trying to look on the bright side. Actually, I see the voice as a bit of a positive because all of my students can hear that I’m unwell. And so when I’m just like, “You know what? Don’t make me strain my voice,” it all gets a little bit quieter.

I remember the first time that happened to me where I just lost my voice and I went into class and I’m just like, “Hey, this is really hurting me to talk so please be quiet.” And kids were so empathetic. They felt so bad for me and they were so quiet. It only lasted a day, but it was really, really nice of them. So it’s a good feeling when they care enough about you to quiet down and let your terrible voice come through.

Yes. And to be clear, it is just my voice. I am not a walking super-spreader. I did the responsible thing, tested negative for COVID and all that. It’s just I sound bad, but I feel okay.

Okay. Good, good. So good to hear. I guess hopefully we can make it through the next what, 20 minutes here. We’ll see how it goes without your voice giving out. But I think the big news, the big update is that you are now a writer for AOEU. Congrats on that first of all. And I guess the question that goes with it is what made you want to become a writer for AOEU?

Well, thank you. First off, it’s exciting for me. I’ve been a big fan of the Art of Ed since before it was a university. When I was starting off teaching, I was going to the blog like, “Okay, I forgot to write lesson plans. What can I steal from AOE now?” And it’s one of those things that’s just been a constant presence in my career. I just always thought of it as a one-way thing. And then when I saw an opportunity and finally got up the courage to actually think that maybe I had something that I could maybe turn in to share with people, it was just like it’s been a wonderful surreal experience. It’s in a lot of ways a dream gig. I think because I have an Irish background so we’re all storytellers and frustrated writers, and so the opportunity to now say that I am a writer is a delight.

Yeah, that’s awesome. Well, it’s very good to have you here, and I’m really looking forward to everybody seeing your articles. Obviously you’re on the show here a lot. You tell a lot of great stories here, and I’m super excited to see them in the magazine. I think we should probably chat a little bit about what’s coming next month, and so we can give people an introduction as to what you’re going to be writing about. And I guess we’ve talked before. I don’t remember whether it was on your podcast or whether we talked about it here, but we were discussing the Mondrian painting that hung in the museum upside down for, what was it, 75 years. But can you tell that story quickly and maybe just talk a little bit about the article that you’re writing about that story?

Well, as I think you know, I’m not entirely sure I can tell any story quickly yet. I will give it a try. Actually, this is the piece that I had up in my classroom just last week. I feel like I’ve told this story 75 million times already. But Mondrian, with the squares and rectangles, the primary colors, you can obviously see where you could get disoriented. It’s almost non-objective like which way is it going to go?

So there was this one piece, it’s New York 1 I believe it was titled, that went off to MoMA and then it was displayed in other museums, but it was I guess an unfinished work. At least it was unsigned. And they discovered a few years back it was just hanging upside down for 75 years. And I think the most delightful bit of that to me is that you would think naturally everyone’s like, “Okay, well, we’ll flip it right side up.” But in actuality, the curators just shrugged like, “Well, that’s the story of this piece now. It’s the upside down Mondrian.” Because hey were worried it would damage the piece to flip it up right side up or something like that.

Makes sense.

It makes sense. But it just struck me as so funny. And it’s one of those things that when you look at Mondrian and his paintings, there’s no visible brushstrokes. It feels so sterile in a way that I loved that humanity coming to it.

Yeah. Let me ask you, is it going to bother you that it continues to hang upside down? Now that I’m just thinking about type A personality is knowing that it’s upside down. Not saying that that is your personality, but are you bothered that it’s upside down and stays upside down even though we know better? Do you think other people are bothered by that?

I would bet that some amount of people are. I personally am not bothered by it. I personally love that about it. I love it on multiple levels. Like I said, to me, it gives a human touch to something that feels very otherwise cold. But also, I don’t know about you, but a lot of my abstract works, I would work the canvas and then I would look at it from different angles. And very often I would find like, “This is actually a more interesting composition sideways or upside down.”

So I personally really like that. For me, there’s a personal connection to it that even people who were so meticulous and careful and deliberate in their construction, there’s still some room for surprise and spontaneity and unexpected connections. I love the unexpected. That’s why I talk about this useless information instead of like, “Oh, he distilled art down to his fundamental elements of primary colors and simple shapes.”

We love boring though. It’s way more exciting if you can tell stories like this. And yeah, I think it’s a good lead in. It’s a good way to capture kids’ attention. And I think that can especially work. Let’s say you’re doing non-objective work at any level, I’m thinking about high school because that’s what I teach, but at any level, I think that may be a good way to talk about non-objective work and maybe get kids to create some. Look at it from different angles, look at it upside down and see what they’re seeing, how things change, how meanings can change. And it’s really the impetus for a lot of different discussions. And I think that can be really valuable. And I think you call it worthless information, which I know is tongue in cheek, but I think there’s a lot of value there in getting kids curious, getting kids excited about these stories and just having a little bit of a connection or at least being intrigued by some of those stories behind the work.

So I was also going to say, I know you have another article come in next month on artists and just the everyday materials that they use. What can people look for in that one?

Okay. Before I get to that one, I do have to say part of the reason that I wanted to talk about Mondrian today was to foreshadow the article that I have that is the very first article I wrote that I submitted when I was trying to get the job at AOE. And it is about one of my favorite lessons of all time. It is a new spin on Mondrian that takes those flat squares and rectangles, makes them 3D and wire them up with LED lights and make a light box and just totally transform it. Kids love it. And if you’re on cycle for evaluation, we all know admin loves a good steam lesson.

That’s true. No, I’m intrigued by that. That sounds cool.

But to plug the one that I suppose is probably more interesting to a lot of people, I don’t know about you. I’ve had a lot of students who get frustrated. We run out of… You look at the watercolor pan, there’s no blue or green in 70% of those watercolors. And kids always come to you and they’re like, “Oh, I need this. I can’t do this. I need this. Where do we have this?” And I wanted to write something about artists who also have those hurdles but they see it as a hurdle and not a wall. So I found stories of some artists who started making stuff with paper, crayons, markers. I know obviously Jen Stark is the art teachers’ go-to favorite example. Her art paper stuff is amazing. I know she was at the Now conference, what, like 20…

I want to say 2017 or probably ’18, yeah.

Yeah, something like that. But she is doing amazing stuff. And that started because she’s from Florida. She went to study in the south of France for a semester and just had no money to ship all her materials across the Atlantic because I think we can all imagine how expensive that would be. The exchange rate for the Euro was doing her no favors. And so she gets to the art supply store and she looks around. She’s like, “What can I afford? A whole lot of paper.”

And she made these works that are absolutely brilliant, not because paper’s the most exciting material, but because she found a way to work with it. It’s not about having the best, it’s about making the best of what you have. And Jen Stark is a great example of that. And I found two other contemporary artists, Tom DesLongchamp and Herb Williams who do stuff with markers and crayons respectively. And they’re using the materials in ways that I honestly never would’ve thought of, and maybe that’s why I talk about art more than I make it. But they make it and they make it really well with really bare bones stuff in some ways.

And I think that that’s really valuable. And I don’t remember where I first heard this, but I’ve used it forever. Just the idea that creativity comes from constraints. When you put limits on there, if you put up those challenges or those hurdles or those walls, however you’re going to describe them, it forces you to come up with creative ways to problem solve and to figure out exactly what you’re going to do. And I think again, that’s another great discussion that you can have with your students. And like you said, if you use any of those artists that you just mentioned, there’s a lot that can come from that. And again, it can be the impetus for some really good discussions and some really good creation.

All right. Now, Kyle, can I put you on the spot for a lightning round of art history facts?

Okay. So my absolute favorite, and this is because I grew up on detective shows. I love a Good Caper and a con. My mom and I would watch Columbo and-

I was just going to say.

… that’s my childhood.

My wife has been diving into Columbo. It’s on all the time in my house. And my God, if I don’t get sucked in every time.

Oh, it is so satisfying. It is comfort TV. But recently, the AOEU, there was an article that I saw immediately, like Six Seedy Parts of the Art World, and I’m like, “Yes, I’m all about this.”

I could not click on that one fast enough.

I start looking through it and there’s Han Van Meegeren who I absolutely love, a forger who went on trial and had to prove that he was in fact a forger in order to save his own life. Bonkers story. I did an episode on it called The Unbelievable Story of Han Van Meegeren. Love it. But then a little while later, I found this other story of Wolfgang Beltracchi. I don’t know if you’re familiar with this dude.

No.

But it’s next level bananas. I did another episode on this and I felt a little bit guilty. I put my friend on the spot. I was like, “Okay, I’ve got two pictures here. One’s the forgery, one’s the real thing. See if you can tell which one it is.” But he made these forgeries claiming that they were lost in World War II. As we all know, a lot of stuff was lost in World War II. So he had his wife dress up in period clothing and he went to flea markets and bought old cameras and enlargers and photo paper from the era and then took pictures of his forgeries in the background in order to create this seeming provenance where he is like, “See, you can see her grandmother at home with this painting in the background.”

Oh my God.

And who’s going to deny it, the picture from the ’40s?

I hate to admit that, but that is brilliant.

It is. This dude was… Tip of the hat. I’m not a fan of forgery, but I am a fan of someone who is a master of their craft. And the greatest irony of that, in his interviews, he basically got caught because he bought paint that was labeled as zinc white but it had titanium in it. And so the forger is upset that the label was not true to what the contents had.

Oh, my.

You cannot make this up. I absolutely love it. Faith Ringgold is another favorite of mine. I know we all know Tar Beach. It’s sold, I don’t know, 15 million copies. Huge award winner. Well, she actually started making story quilts. I saw an interview where she talked about one of the reasons she did story quilts, aside from the historical legacy of quilts and all of that, she said she had stories to tell but no publishers were interested in her. And so she said when she puts a story quilt up, it’s hung in the gallery and she knew it would be photographed and published in exhibition catalogs. So she found that work around to, again, find a way. Great artists find a way. I’m absolutely inspired by that.

I also love Easter eggs, when artists put a little bit of themselves in there. We’ve got Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party. He put his friends in there. Gustav Caillebotte is the dude sitting slater style, backwards chair, hat on-

Oh, cool. Okay.

… right in the front corner. Because Caillebotte was a boat enthusiast. Man lived a life of leisure, all that, big supporter of the Impressionists. And the woman playing with the dog at the table also in the foreground later married Renoir. So we could see-

Oh, interesting.

Just like Monet painted his wife or Michelangelo painted various critics, and them just savage, savage justice.

Full of hate, yeah.

But I love stuff like that. And speaking of Michelangelo, the pettiness of that little drama between him and Raphael both working for the same pope and Raphael paints Michelangelo into the School of Athens as the weeping philosopher. But a fun, I guess not really so fun fact, but an interesting fact about Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel, we all picture him on his back because there was a movie where he was on his back. He was standing up craning his neck. He wrote about how miserable he was doing that and left little doodles in the margins. So we know he was standing up craning his neck. But an interesting fact, he messed up with the mixture of the plaster and the lime and there’s too much moisture. So there was this just massive bloom of mold growing early on, left the figures unrecognizable so he actually had to scrape a big section and redo it all partway through.

Interesting. I’ve never heard of that before.

Which I like to tell my students. The great ones really did work hard at this stuff and they would revive. Even they would make mistakes and face those setbacks and they pushed through and they persisted. If you haven’t noticed, I’m a big fan of that theme of persistence. I talk to my students about that all the time. Are we at five? Where are we on?

I think we’ve got plenty. I lost track. I was enthralled and so I was not counting. But no, I think that’s great. I feel like we could probably do an entire episode on Michelangelo or just the Sistine Chapel. I love discussing with my students just the idea of when it was cleaned and it completely changed what it looked like. And then do we want to be true to the artist’s original vision? Did they clean too much? Is the soot and everything that’s built up on top of there, is that now part of the work? Do we damage the work when we remove that? There’s just so many different things that you can discuss with that that I think, yeah, just a lot of avenues to go down there.

Yeah, it really is. It is a story that it’s just so winding and so many connections you can bring into it. And that’s what I love, is when you can bring these things in. And I didn’t use to talk a ton about art history. If I’m going to be honest, in undergrad, art history was not my forte. But the more I’ve been teaching, the more I have found it helpful to have these little tidbits in your back pocket to be able to make a connection. Because when you’re standing in front of that group of students, there are certain times where it’s like, “Okay, this kid really needs to hear this message. This kid really needs to hear this message.” I also think representing personalities, representing the struggles, the emotion, those bits of connection I think are really important too.

Yeah, for sure. Well, and I think that at our base level, everyone enjoys a good story. And so if you’re able to weave a good story into whatever you’re presenting, that’s a great way to hook kids to, like we said earlier, get them intrigued, get them interested in what you’re going to be doing. And so if you do have some of those stories connected to what you’re showing and leading into what you’re going to be teaching, then kids connect with that at a deeper level. And I guess just speaking of all those ideas, I would love just your perspective on whether it is just sharing these fun facts, telling these stories. Why do you think they are so effective when you’re introducing lessons?

Well, I think you’ve already hit on it, that story is it’s a powerful tool for how we make sense of the world. We don’t memorize a ton of data and do a statistical analysis of stuff. It just gets us at that gut level. The story is where things click. And I have found that what I’m presenting a work of art and talking about it and trying to get kids to buy into why this artist is relevant. We talk about the Mona Lisa. Mona Lisa is a controversial one because I always start off like, “Awesome or awful? What do we think of this work? Let’s do a cold read.” Mona Lisa is always very divisive.

But then when I start talking about the story behind the theft of it and these panels and the frame and the glass, it all weighed 200 pounds and imagine lifting 200 pounds off the wall and then hiding out in the closet. And talking about the physicality of it, when we start to make that connection to the person who created this as a human who had friends, who had thoughts and feelings, and we start to think about the artwork as not just something that’s behind bulletproof glass that someone threw soup at recently, but it’s actually, it’s an object. It is three pieces of wood that were glued together or whatever it was. It’s a wooden panel that somebody painted that hung in the king’s bathroom for a while, that was stolen in 1911, that some people think is still missing.

There are all these things that we start to think about in a different way and we evaluate it differently when we start to see it’s not just a famous smile. It’s portraying this woman, Lisa Gherardini. What was her story? And we don’t know that much about her because she wasn’t famous. She wasn’t the nobility. She was in some ways just really unremarkable. She was a woman in her early 20s I think maybe when she sat. She probably never even saw the finished painting. But it just raises these questions. And I find that once you start to talk about these as real people and real objects, the kids start to ask other questions. And I find when they’re curious, that’s where things really get interesting.

Yeah, for sure. And I think in whatever way you can pique their interest, whatever way you can get them curious, that’s worth pursuing. That’s worth doing because that’s where the learning is going to take place. So yeah, I think that’s a great way to think about it. And like you said, you give enough, a ton of different ways to access that curiosity, develop that curiosity, and get our kids intrigued by what we’re teaching. And then like you said, that leads to more thinking, more understanding, more questions. And you can always see where it goes from there, which I think is a beautiful thing when you’re in front of the classroom.

So okay, I know we’ve been talking for a long time, but before we go, Kyle, I would love for you to tell us a little bit about Arts Madness. I know you’re doing it again. Best time of the year for me because not only do we have great basketball tournaments, we also have great art tournaments. So if you can tell everybody listening, number one, what Arts Madness is, number two, when it starts, and then number three, where they can find it or how they can participate in it, I would love for you to do that before we sign off here.

Okay. So Arts Madness, every year I’ve been doing this in my classroom for, I don’t know, like 8 or 10 years now. It’s based off of the March Madness. Bracketed tournament obviously, but I have a bracketed tournament of artists and I started in my classroom. Kids would just vote on their favorites in a series of head-to-head match-ups. It’s now 64 different artists. One simple question, “Which is better?” in each of those match-ups and they decide what the criteria are for how they’re evaluating it. Is it better based on naturalism? Is it better based on the expressive qualities? How do we decide these things? And it sparks great conversations just in that because there will be some intense debates, especially as the rounds go on and people are like, “I don’t even know how to compare these things.” It sparks some really intense debates because over the weeks, kids get more and more invested in their favorites.

The most surreal experience I saw, if you Google Arts Madness, my website is the number one result, which I can’t even get the top Google result from my own name. But so if you’re looking like, “Where do I go?” Just Google Arts Madness. My website, whoartedpodcast.com, I have all the information. I have the brackets. Right now, you can go to whoartedpodcast.com/vote and put in your prediction for which of these artists will win.

This year to make it more useful as a classroom tool, 60 out of the 64 artists and artworks are from the AP Art History list. I did 60 from AP Art History, and then four wild cards that are just fan favorite, fun episodes and fun things to talk about. And for every one of those artists and artworks, I have a podcast episode. I’m linking them in the bracket sheet so you can click on an artist and hear and learn more about them. And I’ve got a Spotify playlist, Arts Madness 2024. So everything you need on the website. Just Google Arts Madness or go to whoartedpodcast.com.

Yeah, it’s a great resource. And if you’re looking for an easy way to put together a tournament, just use Kyle’s. It works great for you. So I love that. I will say the last couple of years, I have tried to predict who I thought would win. And both years, I don’t think my guests made it past the second round. I wasn’t even close. So I’ll try again, but my hopes are not high.

It is always surprising. I never really know. I’m curious to see how it plays out this year because there’s an artist who has won the tournament before, but a different work of hers is up there now. And so I want to see with the different color scheme and everything if the kids respond differently.

That will be interesting to see, so cool. All right, well, Kyle, thank you for putting that all together for everybody. Like I said, I know a ton of our teachers use it. They love it. And I know it’s a lot of work to put all that together, but we appreciate you doing it. And as always, thanks for coming on, giving me some time. I always enjoy conversations with you. I always enjoy having you on here.

Thank you. I am always happy to be on, and forever grateful for the opportunity to nerd out about some art history.

Always, always. Thanks, Kyle. We’ll talk to you soon.

Thank you.

Thank you to Kyle for coming on. A lot to look for in March, including his articles that we discussed and seeing how the Arts Madness Tournament will progress. I think the voting might actually be open now. So we’ll link to that in the show notes. And if you want to go check out the Arts Madness tournament, see what it looks like, see if you can bring it into your classroom, we’ll have a link for you in the show notes along with some of the other articles that he and I discussed and some other things that just popped up throughout the conversation.

And then lastly, before we go, I want to tell you that Amanda and I will be back next week with the March Mailbag. So please feel free to send any questions, we love getting all of your questions, to podcasts@theartofeducation.edu, or you can leave us a voice message at 515-209-2595. But for today, I think that is it and we will talk to you next week.

Art Ed Radio is produced by the Art of Education University with audio engineering from Michael Crocker. Thank you as always for tuning in. We always appreciate you listening, and we are excited to be back with you next week.