"Diversity"

Diversity is the state of being diverse, a range of different things. In reading Judy Chicago’s, Dinner Party I started to gather together how I have taught and brought women and the history of women into my art history lessons throughout the last seven years of my teaching career. The Dinner Party is about a way or knowledge on how to bring women’s history to generations of students. It allows for more of an insight into the world of women and how important they are in the world of art and also in the world of past and present history. Chicago went on a twenty-five year absence from teaching and than came back to interested in seeing if more women and people of color had become more involved and a part of art schools as well as exhibitions. I find this interesting because I feel that with the different structures and the way education is headed, more and more teachers will be doing the same thing as Judy and taking a leave of absence to create art and be a part of the art world instead of teaching art to the world.

I teach in a high school that is very wealthy and mostly Caucasian. However, the diversity of the school has changed a lot since I started teaching there. There definitely seems to be more of just one race in teaching art, I feel that I get a larger mix of diversity not just in race but also in gender. This leads me incorporating a lot of fundamentals that Judy Chicago tries to have her idea into the mix of curriculum in grades K-12. I have always included women into my lessons involving art history, I feel that this is very important whether it be lecturing of the importance of the first female self portrait, by Catharina van Hemessen painted in 1548, to artist Frida Kahlo and finally the feminist photographer Cindy Sherman. I love teaching about female artists because of the history that I get to lecture about involving how they became an artist and the struggles that they had to go through to make it to where they are or were. I feel the biggest way that I could improve as a teacher of incorporating more of this insight of gender and history into my lectures, would be the artist of Mary Cassatt who was the only female artist to be welcomed into the Impressionist movement by her friend Edgar Degas.

Aside from the Dinner Party, I found myself going back to the film written by Susan Macmillian and the study guide written by Jason Young, which is entitled, “Girls, moving beyond the Myth.” The content involves girls, how the media exposes young girls sexually and how young girls should talk openly to women about their bodies. This just kept me thinking about the female artists the Guerilla Girls. These groups of women have art exhibitions based on how women and girls are portrayed and viewed in society. These women push the boundaries of what could be displayed in an exhibition; this is why some galleries don’t allow their showing of art. The article also goes into depth about how young girls that have sex are viewed as, “sluts” however boys of the same age are not viewed as that term and instead viewed as a mucho man and praised for having sex. This makes me relate more about the gender role that men are superior to women in the world of art, whereas women really need to fight to get to the level that men are for equality in art.