Images and Culture: Of, On, and Off the Wall

Two years ago, art historians at Otis College of Art and Design developed an active learning project for our “Introduction to Visual Culture” course. Titled Images and Culture: Of, On, and Off the Wall, this activity engages the charged symbolism surrounding walls in contemporary discourse, to question how can walls be activated to bring diverse interests and populations together? Simulating a museum installation, and enacting the work of museum curators, each week a different section of Visual Culture curates a rotating exhibition of 55 global images spanning the pre-modern through postmodern worlds, to explore how the visual collides with historical, political, social, economic, and geographical considerations. The topics move from the straightforward like formalism and genre, branching out to gender, perspective, ideology, the canon, semiotics, technology and media, and diversity and intersectionality. Rearranging the same examples each week, students are introduced to narratives that challenge white, western, patriarchal, universal assertions concerning the canon. Our wall aims to develop analytical tools, help students synthesize complex ideas from different vantage points, and to encourage new connections, unpredictable discoveries, and productive disruptions to enhance students’ awareness of visual imagery in shaping attitudes, behaviors, and ideology. Student curators must think, collaborate, take responsibility for their choices, and mediate issues that rub against citizenship—negotiating difference, assuming responsibility, and making informed choices. It is our hope that, despite recent rhetoric, walls can be instructive and, in the spirit of Maya Lin’s Vietnam War Memorial or the 2019 Whitney Biennial, provide space for reflection, contemplation, and understanding.