What were some of the challenges in teaching “Art, Color and Chemistry”?
“There are so many! I had taken both art history and studio in college and my mom always took us to art museums, but there was quite a bit I had to learn last summer. I spent the summer immersed in books about technique and chemical processes (for example, how ceramic glazes are formulated). I found I knew much of the information in a somewhat different context. It was quite nice to have a reason to run out to the Museum of Fine Arts, however. “Because of the knowledge deficit I felt, I purposefully decided to have only art students in the course for this first run. This way, I was able to rely on them to teach me about their art and I could fill in the blanks about the science. I scheduled presentations to be done by teams of students at appropriate times in the class to make sure that I challenged them to teach me (as well as the rest of the class) what we needed to know in art. For example, Christina Miles ’04 and Zachary Blumstein ’03 did a presentation on preparing a canvas for pa
