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January Issue 2005
University of South Carolina in Columbia, SC, Features Works by Phillip Dunn
The McMaster Gallery in the Department of Art of the University of South Carolina in Columbia, SC, is presenting the exhibit, MONTAGE, featuring works by Phillip C. Dunn, from Jan. 11 through Feb. 8, 2005. The word Montage is described as a single pictorial composition made by juxtaposing or superimposing many pictures or designs.
Chicago born and raised, Dunn received his bachelor of fine arts degree in art education from the University of Illinois in Urbana, studied photography and design at the Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology, and received his doctorate in art education from Ball State University. During his career, Dr. Dunn has taught art at all grade levels from kindergarten through graduate school, and has been a professor of art at the University of South Carolina since 1978.
Some of Dunn's accomplishments and awards include being named: Louise Fry Scudder Professor (2003), Mac Arthur Goodwin Award winner for excellence in Art Education (2001), National Art Educator of the Year (1999), National Program Coordinator for the National Art Education Association, faculty member of the Getty Institute for Educators on the Visual Arts in Los Angeles, senior faculty member of the Florida Institute for Art Education; both South Carolina and Southeastern Regional Art Educator of the Year (1987), and Mary J. Rouse Award winner as the nation's outstanding young art educator (1981).
The author
of numerous books and articles, Dunn's publications include the
Pulitzer-nominated, Lillian Smith Book Award winner, A True
Likeness: The Black South of Richard Samuel Roberts, 1920-1936,
and Promoting School Art: A Practical Approach, and Creating
Curriculum in Art. Professor Dunn took a two-year leave of
absence to serve as a visiting program officer at the Getty Center
for Education in the Arts. His duties there included managing
several of the Center's advocacy, multicultural, curriculum, and
theory development initiatives in disciplinebased art education.
Upon his return to USC, he served for five years as the chair
of a Getty sponsored doctoral fellowship program in art education,
and was elected executive secretary of the Council for Policy
Studies in Art Education.
Dunn's research and production interests in art education
revolve around using "low end-high tech" strategies
to integrate the arts into the general school curriculum through
the creation of conceptually and thematically oriented art curricula
that are tailored to fit the needs of individuals. In that vein,
he authored a trio of interactive curriculum planning software
programs for art and classroom teachers entitled: The Curriculum
Navigator for Art (elementary, middle, and high school versions).
He followed that series with InFolio, an electronic portfolio
software program which makes it possible for art teachers to journal
with students and evaluate their art works, and The Interactive
Gallery, a series of interactive programs based on the collections
a variety of museums.
Dr. Dunn is often invited to speak on building support systems for public school art programs. As an artist, he remains active by producing photographs, digital images and montages for exhibition.
At USC, Dunn currently chairs the Department of Art. The Department, comprised of four areas: Art Education, Art History, Media Arts and Studio Art boasts nearly 800 undergraduate and graduate majors. As a member of the Art Education faculty he teaches a variety of offerings including courses that deal with multidisciplinary approaches to curriculum construction, the educational uses of interactive hypermedia, program administration and management, and teaching methodologies for art educators. Over the past eight years his summer technology workshops for art teachers have garnered over $600,000 in outside funding and trained over 400 of South Carolina's art teachers in how to incorporate technology into public school art programs.
Dr. Dunn offered the following statement about his work. "The most frequent question I ask myself as an artist is, "What if?" As a landscape photographer my interests usually lie in depicting our natural environment. The seasons, time of day, the elements, and locale form the basis for attempting to compose an image that connects the viewer with a specific geographical locality at one particular moment in time. Often, instead of controlling the situation, the photographic artist is at the mercy of the very components he or she is trying to portray. But what if the landscape became the beginning of a work of art, instead of the outcome? What if the landscape served as a motif in a larger abstraction that made the real become unreal? Each of the images presented here began as a landscape or detail of a landscape. The landscape image has been used as a motif (a repeated pattern) to construct a montage that obscures the original slice of reality that was used to create it. The resulting images become reminiscent of the kaleidoscope designs we marveled at as children, or patterns that might be more familiar when seen in quilts or Persian rugs."
Dunn continues, "On one level these artworks challenge the viewer to decode or deconstruct them as they present a reality that only exists in the work itself. On another level the motifs can be combined in such a way that they provide a means for examining a locale from a fresh point of view. In some cases the reality of the motif is so strong that it creates entirely recognizable images of something that does not actually exist. Finally, the montages encourage the viewer to create totally new meanings by seeking shapes and textures that can be equated with the real world in the same way that we often recognize shapes in clouds. Abstraction involves manipulating reality without entirely turning away from it. These images are intended to do just thatand more."
For more
information check our SC Institutional Gallery listings, contact
Mana Hewitt, Gallery Director at 803/777-7480 or e-mail at (mana@sc.edu).
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