This collection includes the main assignment (with rationale and rubric) as well as the scaffolding exercise and details. It's described as it would be to the student.

Artists and Archives Engaged through Student-Authored Letters

Oftentimes research paper assignments overlook “creativity” as a component. For this reason, I am asking you to complete a research project in the form of a letter to an artist authored by you.

Objectives:

1. Develop familiarity with African American artists and those of African descent in the United States

2. Understand how African American art is intertwined with American history, culture, and politics, and other areas

3. Engage with archival material (artists' letters)

The End-of Semester Assignment (Main Assignment):

You will receive a list of artists to choose from and will write a 750-word annotated letter to the artist inquiring about the inspiration, context, and implementation of his/her/their most famous work. You might find that a lesser-known work intrigues you and if this is the case you may choose to write about that one instead. Sometimes the most well-known work is not the artist's favorite work. Explore this possibility if you like.

(You can mention other works by the same artist or a different one if it helps your narrative but the focus is on the artist's relationship with one artwork. Your goal is to better understand how the artist sees the particular work and how that view lines up -- or not -- with the way the work was or has come to be understood.)

You are writing the letter to the artist (in your voice from your perspective) to get more insight so you may pose questions but overall, frame the letter as if you've written to the artist in the past.

Completing the End-of-Semester (Main Assignment):

We will visit our campus library and archives and work with primary sources from the Archives of American Art to see examples of historical letters for you to better understand the content and conventions of letters. Many will be hand-written so we will also consider them as visual objects. There will be four total visits to the campus library and archives and one class session examining a letter written by Henry O. Tanner in the Archives of American Art. (Note to educators: This early to mid-semester scaffolding exercise is described below.)

Scaffolding Exercise: Archives of American Art and Henry Ossawa Tanner letters

So far this semester, we have visited the Library and learned how to find sources. We have also had two visits to the Archives. During the first visit, you learned about information literacy, archival literacy, and primary source documents. During the second visit, we examined archival letters and you conducted a document analysis. During this visit, our focus was not necessarily on writing by artists.

For this assignment and this session in the classroom, we will focus on a letter authored by Henry Ossawa Tanner.

In preparation for this assignment, you have already viewed/listened to the letter written by Dr. Richard Powell about Henry Ossawa Tanner’s The Banjo Lesson. We have already had a class lecture and discussion about Tanner and his synthesis of Impressionism, Realism, and Romanticism.

Part of our discussion (as it has been for all of the artists) has been about his identity as an African American Artist….or not. It’s one thing to read about this aspect of his life in the textbook and articles, or to see the perspective of Dr. Powell, but now it’s time to look at it from Tanner’s perspective by examining a letter he wrote to Mrs. Eunice Tietjens on May 25, 1914.

The letter was distributed at the beginning of the semester and for today, you have completed a portion of the document analysis using the same form as we used at the archives to look at letters by historical figures—questions 1, 2, 3, 4. We will complete the remainder in class today and as this letter is your template, so to speak, we will pay close attention to the date, the recipient, the content -- as this is the gist of what you will be doing in this assignment. The one difference is that you are not Henry Ossawa Tanner so you will need to document the sources that you used to construct the letter and in the footnotes, give your rationale for having done so. It’s creative but it’s grounded in research.

In class, we will divide into small groups and each group will be responsible for a set of questions. After you’ve discussed it, we’ll come back together and discuss all of your insights to answer the questions.