My latest article in Studies in Art Education is a conceptual analysis of youth in visual art education. This paper will be particularly useful for scholars who are doing research with youth. I show how youth can be deployed discursively to frame, produce, and buttress arguments about the role of art education in society and the need for particular approaches to curriculum and instruction. My literature review is organized around four themes: Youth as (1) transition, (2) culture, (3) difference, and (4) image. In presenting these four themes, my aim is to support art education researchers as they extend, refine, clarify, and deepen their analysis in ways that have positive concrete effects on young people through art education. The article can be read here. The accepted pre-publication version can be read for free on the Cambridge repository.
Author: Tyler Denmead
Urban Frontier Bench
This artwork masqueraded as an auction on eBay as a part of an exhibition titled #exstrange. Through this piece, I was bringing into question the labor of young people of color in youth arts and humanities programs. Youth programs are often asked to teach their students to be entrepreneurial and generate revenue for themselves and their programmes through selling artwork. This shift reflects the marketisation of the youth arts sector that positions young people as entrepreneurs. By commodifying their learning, these programmes can become entangled in complex racial and market-based logics, including gentrification. I set out to illuminate these logics through this conceptual art project. See the artwork in the archive of the exhibition “#exstrange” at http://exstrange.com/auctions/urban-frontier-bench-the-limited-youth-edition/.
