For Brianne Cohen, assistant professor of contemporary art history at the University of Colorado Boulder, art is much more than an aesthetic: It can offer powerful commentary on the issues of the day and galvanize public opinion. "There is a question of compassion fatigue. If we’re barraged with all these images of atrocity and war and so forth, can we actually move as a public to effect change? So, that’s the big question for me. Can they do that? I think that (the images) can.”
In her upcoming book, "Don't Look Away: Art, Nonviolence, and Preventive Publics in Contemporary Europe" (Duke University Press, May 2023) University of Colorado Boulder Assistant Professor of Art and Art History Brianne Cohen delves deeply into the role that art can play in creating public commitment to curbing structural violence in Europe.
Roth at CU Boulder says that graduate programs are evolving to reflect students’ changing goals. In the past, most aspired to academic positions or commercial sales through gallery representation. “Now many students are exploring socially engaged, field-based practice, starting their own small businesses instead of going into the academic or gallery world,” Roth explains. “Students are looking for a third way.”
Ecological disasters often harm the most vulnerable people, animals and ecosystems, and yet this unequally distributed damage remains insufficiently seen, realized and discussed, a group of scholars at the University of Colorado Boulder contends.
Four acclaimed video artists from Vietnam and Cambodia are traveling to the University of Colorado Boulder to take part in an immersive art program—in the hopes of taking a cross-disciplinary look at environmental issues.
“The new program will challenge traditional and mainstream understandings of art by unpacking, contextualizing and decolonizing the term (art),” Cordova says. “We’re not just here to appreciate art,” he says. “We’re here to analyze and to be critical of the forces that surround its production, consumption and interpretation.”
“We are trying to make things more flexible for students who don’t want to put themselves in some sort of disciplinary box,” Mark Amerika, professor of distinction, art and art history
Art has always taken our imaginations to unexplored places, and now two University of Colorado Boulder art professors are finding it can also encourage freshmen, through a first-year seminar, to actively explore the campus, community and, hopefully, the wide world of academia.
