Traversing Genres
The Extensive Connections between Isadora Duncan and Artists in Other Disciplines
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Emi Yagishita
In this paper, I focus on one of the most famous dancers of the early twentieth century, Isadora Duncan (1877-1927), a modern dance pioneer, and her extensive connections to artists working in other disciplines: including renowned sculptor Auguste Rodin (1840-1917), painter Eugène Carrière (1849-1906), sculptor Antoine Bourdelle (1861-1929), painter Jules Grandjouan (1875-1968), and poet-artist Jean Cocteau (1889-1963) etc. I will explain how and when these artists became acquainted with Isadora Duncan. I will show the impact of the cross-fertilization of ideas in several of their artworks. I will then discuss how the artists perceived Isadora’s dancing and what motivated them to create their artworks. I will conclude with an overview of the complex relationship between the world of dance and the fine arts.
Monet and Magritte Chat with Kekulé and Einstein: Science Meet the Visual Arts
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jailson Lima
In response to the observed decrease in interest in STEM careers, scholars have pointed out the necessity of crafting lesson plans that actively engage students in the transfer of key scientific concepts to their everyday-life experiences. Linguistically abstract concepts such as energy, atom, chemical bond, and intermolecular force are used in chemistry and have been shown to be a challenge for learners from K-12 to undergraduate studies to grasp. Unlike experts, novices fail to understand the difference between scientific knowledge and the symbolism used to encode it. Being able to read the symbols has no direct correlation with reaching the concepts they represent. For example, H2O is a mere chemical representation of water, not the substance itself. The Art & Science Project uses a cross-disciplinary integration between visual arts and the natural sciences to promote a deeper understanding of the role of models in chemistry. Over a period of five weeks, college students taking General-, Solution-, and Organic-Chemistry courses create a draft of an artwork that portrays some of the central concepts and ideas in the discipline. The draft is the result of multiple interactions with both science and art teachers through asynchronous dialogues outside the classroom. In this project, both the product and the process are equally important. Introducing art history and artmaking in the science curriculum is a pedagogical novelty that engages students in a high-level cognitive activity that promotes the necessary reflection to understand threshold concepts in chemistry such as the relationship between molecular structure and reactivity.
