Two students sit back-to-back on folding stools in a museum gallery of African art. One faces a wooden staff topped with a stylized carving of a human head. The other has a pencil and sketchpad.
The student facing the staff describes it to her counterpart, who attempts to draw the object based on her descriptions. They have five minutes to complete a likeness.
“Are there any designs on it?” asks the drawer, a young man.
“It has a head,” says the describer. “It has chubby cheeks. There are ears and eyes. It has a hat.”
“What kind of hat?”
“It looks like triangle without the point. It has a flat top,” she says.
Llyanna Griffith-Waite describes a wooden staff topped with a carving of a human head to her classmate, Angel Magana, who attempts to draw the object based on her descriptions.
Time expires. Given the circumstances, they produced a reasonably accurate representation of the staff, which was made by an unidentified Zande artist in what is now known as the Democratic Republic of Congo during the late 19th or early 20th century.
The person describing the piece, Llyanna Griffith-Waite, and the one trying to draw it, Angel Magana, are first-year students at Albertus Magnus College, a private liberal arts college in New Haven. They were visiting the Yale University Art Gallery along with their classmates for a session focused on careful and critical “looking,” the detailed observation required to gain a deeper understanding of an object.
Over two days last month, about 300 Albertus Magnus students attended 14 sessions split between the Art Gallery and the Yale Center for British Art (YCBA) as part of “The Examined Life,” a core set of introductory humanities courses at the college that are intended to develop critical-thinking skills and encourage students to engage with the world in ethical ways.
The Yale Art Gallery and the YCBA are world-class museums and great places for our students to engage in experiential learning.
Two years ago, as part of a redesign of the first-year student experience, Albertus Magnus revamped its first-year humanities program to focus more on student-centered and experiential learning, said Ross Edwards, dean of academic affairs.
And at Yale, school leaders found a valuable partner to help deliver this kind of learning.
“We want students to take charge of their learning early on. We feel that makes for a strong and rigorous introduction to the college experience,” Edwards said. “As part of that, we developed a series of experiences that are academic in nature and take place outside of the classroom. The Yale Art Gallery and the YCBA are world-class museums and great places for our students to engage in experiential learning.”
As Edwards and his colleagues began developing the new program, they contacted Sydney Simon, the Bradley Associate Curator of Academic Affairs at the Yale Art Gallery, about the possibility of incorporating a visit to the museum as part of the humanities program. Together, they designed a cultural experience for students that would support the learning aims of the seminars.
“One goal here is to welcome the students to the Gallery and the YCBA,” said Simon, who oversees college- and university-level curricular engagement at the museum. “We want them to know that these are their museums, too. Another goal is to teach them the value of being a little patient and sustaining attention on a work of art. Even the simplest objects reward a close look. There’s always something to unpack and think about. We want them to experience the challenge of looking at something for a while and communicating what they see.”
The students participated in a back-to-back drawing exercise to encourage them to look closely at works of art and carefully communicate what they see.
The first iteration of this collaboration occurred on a pilot-basis last fall at the Art Gallery and was successful. (At the time, the YCBA was closed for a building renovation.) This year, both museums welcomed the students for 75-minute sessions — half were held at the Art Gallery, the other at the YCBA.
“I was delighted that the YCBA could support this formative first-year experience for Albertus Magnus students and strengthen our partnerships with local institutions of higher learning,” said Hannah Kinney, head of education for the YCBA. “By encouraging students to slow down, look closely, and listen carefully to other points of view, we wanted to demonstrate that museums are places to practice skills that are essential to both academic success and everyday life — a valuable lesson for the start of college!”
The students are taking “The Examined Life,” a core set of introductory humanities courses intended to develop critical thinking skills and encourage students to engage ethically with the world.
Capturing the details
In preparation for the visit, the students were assigned to read “The Power of Patience,” an essay by art historian Jennifer Roberts on the value of slowing down and sustaining attention when viewing works of art.
The museum visits put Roberts’ ideas into practice. At each museum, groups of 10 to 15 students each rotated between two experiences: The groups met with a collection curator to do a deep dive into a single object relating to ideas of narrative, identity, and agency. They also participated in an activity, led by a museum educator, in a different collection area designed to help them to practice describing what they saw and to recognize that people bring different perspectives to works of art.
Even the simplest objects reward a close look. There’s always something to unpack and think about.
At the Art Gallery, the students participated the back-to-back drawing exercise; the exercise at the YCBA asked students to write poetry in response to a work of art. About half of the groups started with a curator and half with an educator, and then swapped locations.
Griffith-Waite and Magana’s group visited “Nusantara: Six Centuries of Indonesian Textiles,” an exhibition of textiles that spans the geographical and cultural breadth of the 17,000 islands that compose the Indonesian archipelago.
Arielle Winnik, the Donna Torrance Assistant Curator of Indo-Pacific Art at Yale, presented two textiles from Java, the archipelago’s fifth-largest island. First, they closely studied a “dodot,” a large ceremonial waist wrapper from central Java that would be worn at the royal court.
Winnik noted that the indigo garment shows signs of use. She urged the students to consider its intricate gold-leaf pattern, which features depictions of snails, snakes, bats, and birds.
This large, ceremonial waist wrapper was once worn by members of a royal court in central Java. It is on display in “Nusantara: Six Centuries of Indonesian Textiles,” an exhibition at the Yale Art Gallery.
“This pattern is known as ‘alas-alasan,’” Winnik said. “It shows creatures from the land, the sea, and the sky. It has a lot of cosmological significance. The idea is that it’s showing the entire cosmology, the earth, the sea, the sky, and beyond.”
She explained that sumptuary laws dictated that only members of the royal court could wear the garment.
“It’s likely a member of the royal family wore this,” she said.
The students also examined a smaller skirt from Java’s northern coast that was made for ordinary people to wear. Winnik asked the students to consider the similarities and differences between the two textiles. They noted that they had alas-alasan patterns. The dodot was colored in indigo, gold leaf, and the natural white of the cloth, whereas the smaller skirt was colored in various shades of red, orange, and blue.
Each color present in the smaller textile, Winnik explained, required a separate dying process.
Next, the group walked to the Laura and James J. Ross Gallery of African Art where Simon introduced them to the back-to-back drawing exercise.
“This might push you out of your comfort zone a little bit,” she said, “but I’m going to ask you all to just go for it.”
The students who were describing the pieces of art sought precise language to convey in detail what they saw; those drawing were encouraged to ask clarifying questions.
After sketching the carved wooden staff, Magana, the first-year student, switched roles with his partner, Griffith-Waite. At Simon’s prompting, they chose a more complicated object for their second attempt: a mask from Sierra Leone set on a sculpture of a woman. The figure’s black hair is tied into two horns arcing downward from its head. Flowers decorate its torso. The mask, nestled at the woman’s waist, smiles serenely, eyes closed.
In their second attempt at the back-to-back drawing exercise, Magana described a complex and colorful mask from Sierra Leone to Griffith-Waite, who dutifully attempted to draw the elaborate object.
“Her clothes just hang off her,” Magana says. “Does that make sense?”
“No.”
“Okay. She’s wearing a skirt, but she has no legs. There is a second face on her stomach.”
“What’s the face look like?”
“It has big ears. Closed eyes. Eyebrows. A small grin.”
“What else?”
It was a tough task, and they gave it their best.
“Hey, that’s not bad,” Magana said, viewing his partner’s sketch after time expired.
Following the exercise, the group huddled with Simon to discuss the experience.
“It is hard to put what you see in words,” Simon said. “It’s a skill that takes a lot of practice. It was an incredible act of translation that you were all doing.”
The session was time well spent, Griffith-Waite said.
“I had fun sketching with my friend, trying to clarify what we were seeing and be precise,” she said. “And I enjoyed learning how wealthy people in Indonesia dressed compared to people of lower income. It showed the disparity in how people live.”
