Mindi Rhoades

Complicating Visual Culture

Arguing for complicating the study of visual culture, as advocated by James Elkins, this article explicates and explores Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and pedagogy in view of its implications for art education practice. Subjectivity, a concept of import for addressing student identity and the visual, steers the discussion informed by pedagogical perspectives of Lacan from theorists Mark Bracher, Shoshana Felman, and jan jagodzinski. A reading of contemporary artist Glenn Ligons work, Annotations (2003) demonstrates how unconscious desires, affective responses, and multiple, shifting, and contradictory beliefs are central to Lacanian psychoanalytic pedagogy and subjectivity in classroom practice.

LGBTQ Youth + Video Artivism: Arts-Based Critical Civic Praxis.

In 2005, digital media artist/activist Liv Gjestvang founded a nonprofit organization, Youth Video OUTreach (YVO), to teach lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning (LGBTQ) youth skills to create a documentary about their lives that could serve as a centerpiece for outreach and advocacy efforts by/for LGBTQ youth. While adult-initiated, the youths primarily drove the organization’s direction, goals, and outcomes. Youth Video OUTreach has combined key dimensions of critical civic praxis with artivism, primarily in out-of-school contexts, as strategies to create and capitalize on community resources and effect positive community change. Combining two concepts—Ginwright and Cammarota’s (2007) critical civic praxis and Sandoval and Latorre’s (2008) artivism—this article provides a framework for constructing collective, creative projects that challenge sociocultural inequities. In particular, marginalized youth have found artivism a powerful tactic for reaching broader audiences with narratives, experiences, and perspectives that contradict and complicate dominant ones.

Big Gay Church: Sermons to and for an Underserved Population in Art Education Settings

While the past decade shows dramatic progress in tolerance, acceptance, and support for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer/questioning (LGBTQ) people/rights in the United States, this population remains underserved. Statistics on LGBTQ youth suicide remain troublingly high; yet, when LGBTQ youth attend schools with Gay-Straight Alliances (GSAs), open faculty support, anti-bullying programs and policies, and LGBTQ-inclusive curricula, they fully integrate and avoid many of the stresses and negative safety/health consequences of homophobia (Kosciw, Greytak, Diaz, Bartkiewicz, Boesen, & Palmer, 2012, p. 6). An annual National Art Education Association Convention ensemble performance—Big Gay Church— examines the material, physical, psychological, and spiritual impact of Conservative, fundamentalist, anti-LGBTQ religious doctrine in creating and maintaining the underserved, marginalized status of the LGBTQ community in the US. Big Gay Church advocates and demonstrates the power of creative, collaborative, arts- and inquiry-based scholarship for interrogating discrimination and injustice, accepting agency, and imagining and enacting more equitable possibilities.

Take a Left at the Valley of the Shadow of Death: Exploring the Queer Crossroads of Art, Religion, and Education Through Big Gay Church

Mindi Rhoades, Kimberly Cosier, James H. Sanders III, Courtnie Wolfgang, and Melanie Davenport—a collective of art educators—engage the intersections of art, religion, and education as an occasion for queer thinking and performance. Within academic contexts, these educators use queer theory and critical performance pedagogies (Denzin; Garoian and Gaudelius) to research, critique, and re-present the intersections of conservative protestant religion, education, the arts, and LGBTQ identities in the USA. In addition, for eight years, Big Gay Church (BGC) has presented as a formal session at the National Art Education Association’s annual convention, serving as a playful yet substantive forum for collaboratively pursuing and performing serious academic arts-based educational research around specific issues of identity, equity, power, and social justice in education.

Finding Big Gay Church: An Academic Congregation Exploring LGBTQ Intersections with Religion, Art, and Education

Using the metaphor of mapping as an overarching metaphor, this article presents an amalgamated version of the first five years of Big Gay Church, an annual session at the National Art Education Association’s convention since 2009. Big Gay Church is a collaborative small group of queer art educators and allies coming together to explore the intersections of religion, education, the arts, culture, and LGBTQ identities. By using tools and constructs from dramatic inquiry and other performance pedagogies, as well as inviting attendees to fully participate as members of the congregation, we transform this conference session into an opportunity for scholarship, action, connection, and fellowship. Such arts-based academic interventions can provoke a re-imagining of ways forward, together, in education and research.

The Pen(cil) Is Mightier than the (S)Word? Telling Sophisticated Silent Stories Using Shaun Tan’s Wordless Graphic Novel, the Arrival

This research study focuses on four teacher-researchers’ experiences with Shaun Tan’s (2006) The Arrival, a wordless graphic novel that is in their elementary, middle school, high school, and university classrooms. While in each case, many readers approached The Arrival with resistance, the aesthetic style and lack of recognizable language also invited readers to enter and participate in the story. The teacher-researchers found entry points through dialogic and embodied ways of meaning-making in order to engage students in a deep exploration of issues surrounding diversity and social justice. Drawn together by the common threads of critical multimodal literacies and arts-based pedagogies, the authors found that readers responded powerfully and empathetically to the text as they worked together to construct and expand meaning.

Glenn Ligon: Re-Visioning Change

ABSTRACT Glenn Ligons artworks and career explores his handling of the interrelated issues of race, gender, sexuality, politics, economics, ethnicity, age, and power relation produced through visual culture, and how such artworks could be used to introduce sexual subjects in school.