Using Experience to Cross Professional and Geographical Boundaries:
East Meets West, Art Meets Commerce

Susan McGury, Ph.D. and Betta LoSardo, A.M.
School for New Learning, DePaul University
E-mail: smcgury@depaul.edu (Susan) or blosardo@depaul.edu (Betta)

Introduction

Teaching art history to working adults is a dilemma in and of itself. Adults returning to school often perceive work in the humanities as inconsequential to their more relevant goals in business and other work-related topics. Working on a model that underscores experience and its relationship to theoretical learning, we endeavored to develop a course that would unite the students' interests, experiences, and knowledge of business topics with ability to analyze, assess, and categorize works of art. Though a cultural hybrid, Hong Kong's unique culture is focused on productivity and financial gain. While the arts have played an important part in the history and development of Hong Kong as a political and cultural entity, the works themselves have often been kept exclusively for the appreciation of the highest classes of Hong Kong society.

Furthermore, the School for New Learning's own outcomes-based orientation demanded that students take away from the classroom more than factual knowledge of art. Thus, we were faced with a peculiar dilemma: how to make a link between art appreciation and business productivity, and how to encourage students to use their own experiences and insights to augment classroom learning.

Situation Description

DePaul University's competence-based Bachelor of Arts college for adult learners, the School for New Learning (SNL), has a cooperative arrangement with a bank in Hong Kong, the International Bank of Asia (IBA), to provide a BA program to qualified employees seeking to improve their contributions to the workplace and perhaps to expand their academic interests to DePaul's MBA program. Students' academic backgrounds are varied but include some previous experiences in higher education and extensive training in bank operations and specialty areas. Potential students are screened for English language skills, goal orientation, and willingness to engage in the competence-based academic program provided by the School. Furthermore, they are employees who have demonstrated interest and ability in career progress and have a certain dedication to their employer.

IBA and its commitment to higher education for its employees is a unique business situation in Hong Kong. The Bank's interest in providing students with financial and workplace support for higher education is virtually unknown in that production and profit-oriented society. Thus, the students feel a particular attachment to both the educational process and the maintenance of their employment situations. SNL enjoys an international reputation in competence-based experiential programs of higher education for adults. SNL boasts some thirty years' experience in this field and has demonstrated advanced skill in understanding working adults' learning styles, needs, in development of academic skills, and in developing teaching techniques geared toward these goals.

All courses at the School are taught to competence. That is, the faculty refer to and assess student learning based on the standards and guidelines presented in the School's competence framework. The framework represents the knowledge, skills, and attitudes represented in the liberal arts. Thus, the faculty strives to ensure that student outcomes are concerned with ability to apply theories, insights, and experiences to problem solving. All SNL faculty members are schooled in development of student competence and assessment and have geared their content knowledge to the competence system. The course we designed, Integrative Seminar: Banks as Patrons of the Arts, is one of the required courses in the SNL program. It is designed to help students consider the variety of ways in which liberal arts topics might inform their critical ability on a particular topic.

Academic Issues Influencing Learners

While application of theoretical information on business related topics has a ready audience in working adult students, the possibilities for understanding historical and conceptual information related to the arts are not so obvious. Furthermore, the configuration of the Integrative Seminar required that students view material from a variety of perspectives and assess the origins of knowledge and standards in a given field. Students in the IBA/SNL Bachelor of Arts program had little experience with Western-hemisphere art and were not necessarily convinced of the value of learning information perceived to be so far afield from their work at the Bank.

In our experience, the teaching of art history to working adult students requires a great deal of creative presentation and energetic delivery. Art is perceived by many to be the purview of the rich, the hyper-educated, or otherwise select groups. Museums themselves have become warehouses for unexplainable, and hence, inconsequential objects which are largely divorced from the daily life of the average citizen; worse, the objects often smack of cultural elitism. For these Asian students whose experiences and interests lay in banking, and whose culture did not allow for extensive knowledge of Western art, the problem was significantly magnified.

Adult and experiential learning theory holds that students who can connect material with life are more likely to retain, enjoy, and apply that education than those who deem material unrelated to their experience.[1]. Thus, zeal and content knowledge on the part of the faculty would not yield results in and of themselves. Furthermore, some management development models hold that theory, however well formulated, must be accompanied by application and training for making decisions on the job [2]. In order to meet these requirements, to develop a sense of participation in the arts on the part of the students, and to connect the material with the work at hand, namely banking, the following steps were taken by the faculty.

The Role of Experiential Collaboration

Studying art is a domain all its own. It requires knowledge of history, form, personalities, social movements, and an array of technical assessment skills. While the study of business can also be both theoretical and technical, the intersection between these two fields is often perceived as small. Not so. Throughout history, the accumulation of wealth was seen as a means to collect objects of beauty. Nero's Golden Palace, Lorenzo de'Medici's collections of cameos and precious gems, the vase collections of various Chinese emperors, and the kunstkammer of late Renaissance northern Europe all attest to this. However obvious that connection might be historically, we had to create an opportunity for students to see concrete examples of art in corporate life. Many large American corporations boast collections large and small, and some make them readily available to employees. This trend has been documented most recently by the donation of the Sara Lee Corporate Collection to the Art Institute of Chicago [3]. Several large Chicago corporations offer tours of their collections. This is not true in Hong Kong, where space is at a premium and collections are essentially private. Why buy art? Why collect? What is the impact of the collector on the art world? What, indeed, is the impact of the collection on the corporation? On the employees? Should corporations be charged with the responsibility of protecting our artistic heritage--or encouraging and developing it? Who wants all this art, anyway?

These questions cannot be answered exclusively by the study of art history. Students must look across fields and must examine art, work, and society to come up with answers of their own. Collaboration in this learning experience included not only the two faculty members involved, but also the experience and attitudes of the students themselves. The course we designed to meet these challenges. Integrative Seminar: Banks as Patrons of the Arts, attempted to address students' learning and growth through three significant elements: a film on art collecting and identity; an examination of local artistic resources; and a research game which helped students define and combine profit and aesthetics.

The Film

Our course was designed to address the intersection of academic fields using the students' own experiences as a crucial starting point. Faculty background in art history, particularly concerning the periods of the Renaissance and the Impressionists, provided some ready connections between corporations and art. The infamous nature of these two periods in the history of art and wealth offered up some easily recognizable images. However, most of the students would have limited experience with the types of art in various collections. This was a problem we identified long before scheduled course delivery. In order to remedy this experiential shortfall, we scripted and conducted interviews with various representatives of different aspects of the art world and videotaped the consultations. Our presumption was that although our Asian students might not be familiar with the Impressionist holdings at the Art Institute of Chicago, they would most certainly understand the financial implications of art collecting, the very human motivation to collect and master a topic in its finest detail, and the equally intrinsic value of assessing visually stimulating works. We focused the film around four interviewees: a curator of a prominent corporate collection; an educational specialist from the Art Institute of Chicago; a local artist; and a lifelong collector of works of contemporary art. These individuals were asked to respond to the following questions:

1. Describe the collection. Who was the original collector? When did he or she begin the process? What kinds of works are included? How long has the collection been in existence?
2. Why was the collection amassed? What were the original motivations?
3. Do those reasons still hold true? How have they evolved?
4. What is the history of the collection?
5. What problems have been engendered by the collection?
6. What special knowledge have the collectors gained with respect to these works of art? With respect to collecting?
7. What is the impact of the collection?
   1. on the collector.
   2. on the field.
   3. on the institution.
8. Please describe any additional collection information.

These questions were specifically designed to elicit information that would help students see works of art in the context of social value and corporate identity. Our ultimate goal of helping students understand the reasons why corporations and individuals collect art was more than met through this exercise. For example, students learned about the extensive art collection of one of Chicago's premier banking institutions: Bank One. This collection includes a large oil painting of Chicago after the fire of 1871, with the Bank's facade still standing [4]. The connection between the reliability of the Bank in the face of great destruction was not lost on our banker students. Thus, we established the notion that corporate identity might be borne out through collections of works of art.

In another example, a local Chicago art collector discussed the twin goals of aesthetics and financial return, which guide her choices for additions to her compilation of art and artifacts. This connection was intended to help students consider the balance between financial gain and personal artistic choice.

Furthermore, students could begin to see the civic issues at hand. If banks and other large corporations can be said to make money from the community, can it not also be said that their contributions to the arts give something back to those same groups and individuals? The Sara Lee Corporation donated a large part of its substantial collection to the premier art museum of its home city, the Art Institute of Chicago, thus fixing its name and benevolence in the minds of the Art Institute's patrons. Corporations can show themselves to be responsible citizens and participants in the community as well. Chicago is identified by and with the cultural symbols of the Art Institute lions, in this instance, covered with snow and wearing their trademark Christmas wreaths. Our Hong Kong students, while they did not identify with the vicissitudes of winter weather in Chicago, got the message that museums perform a community function. They represent the city, its cultural output, its ideal self, and its individuality.

The Museum Visit

Our next step was to help students see these issues in the light of Hong Kong culture and art. Of particular interest to our students was the idea that collectors, particularly wealthy ones, might indeed significantly shape what was available to view at local museums. If the Art Institute of Chicago portrayed the characteristics of a robust working American city, how might Hong Kong, a strongly individualistic metropolis, be represented in its own art museum? The exercise we designed caused many of our life long Hong Kong denizens to make their first trip to the Art Museum of Hong Kong. Students were asked to consider the collections of the museum with respect to the following questions:

1. What is the reputation of the museum inside Hong Kong?
2. Who is responsible for shaping artistic taste in Hong Kong?
3. Is Hong Kong changing? How might this change be reflected in the museum?
4. How are the disparate natures of Hong Kong and mainland China treated, or not treated, in the museum's collections?

In preparing our class for the museum visit, we discovered that students had a great deal to say on these topics. However, they had not had the opportunity to consider their city from the perspective of its artistic history and contemporary output. Hong Kong is in many ways a separate cultural nation from its Chinese parent. Our students strongly expressed the view that their city deserved its own symbols of identity. This was particularly true in light of the changing realities of Hong Kong's political future.

The uniqueness of Hong Kong was fervently expressed in the reports students produced on their museum visits. Of particular interest was the work of Hong Kong painter Fang Zhaoling, a woman whose long experience as an ambassador of Chinese artistic imagery captured the attention of our students and of their teachers as well. Fang Zhaoling's work, stemming from her birth in China, her difficult life raising eight children on her own, and her extensive international travels, exemplified the indomitable spirit of Hong Kong and its unique view of the world [5]. Mrs. Fang's painting of the Swiss Alps in the Asian style, explained our students, was a picture literally worth a thousand words. (Snowy Landscape in Switzerland, 1987; Winter at the Border of Switzerland and France, 1987.) In their reports, students noted that the museum collections reiterated their own thoughts about life in Hong Kong: the uncertainty of the future, the need to underscore its unique history, and its overarching connection with its Chinese heritage. This was particularly evident in the students' attraction to an exhibit of the works of contemporary Hong Kong artists [6].

Many students reported taking their children for a first-time visit to the museum as well, thus expanding the experiential impact of their own learning and development to include their families. Since the reconfiguration of Hong Kong culture and its impressions on the future are large issues for our students to consider, this was an excellent outcome indeed.

The Research Game

Ultimately, theoretical discussions and high praise don't make for assessable learning. In order to help students make their assessments of corporate needs, cultural identity and aesthetics real, we designed Collectors: The Game of Art and Profit. The goal of the game was to provide a vehicle for students to meet the course goals. In other words, this game helped students pull together their experiences and ideas as well as the thoughts of experts about art and collecting. They could combine these notions with their own professional focus: the art of making money. Briefly, students were separated into small groups and provided with a corporate scenario. These included a large international bank, a large government organization, a community center, a private collector, a multinational corporation, and a small private museum. Each of these hypothetical institutions weighed various collecting considerations differently: return on investment, corporate identity, and preservation of ethnic traditions and aesthetics. Students agreed to create the following, based on the stated needs of their particular scenario:

1. A corporate mission against which they might assess their collections
2. An artistic style or motif around which they might collect
3. A type of artwork (painting, sculpture, craft artifacts, etc.)

There were no limitations on the descriptions or ideas generated by the students in these groups. The only rule that applied was that all decisions must be aligned with the individual group's corporate mission. Thus, students specifying a mission which linked their group to the community must then justify their choices with their impact on or relation to the community in which they were situated.

Once students designed their missions and defined their artistic goals, they were allowed to choose from a wide variety of types and examples of international artwork. Each group was provided with a fixed amount of "dollars" which they could spend in any way the group chose. They could opt for one or two expensive pieces, or they could choose a host of smaller, less famous works. Each piece chosen, however, had to be defended based on the group's mission. Students were also asked to discuss the display potential for their works. Who might see and appreciate the works? Why? This turned out to be a particularly sticky issue in Hong Kong. As we mentioned above, in Chicago exhibition space is a given, and corporate collections are often available for display in employees' workspaces. In Hong Kong, space is a difficult commodity to come by. As a result, students believed that only corporate executives might have access to enough space to maintain an art collection. Display and access were important and highly debated issues which influenced other group choices. Students were also asked to address the corporate responsibility question: were these works intended to be educational? Did they preserve some aspect of Hong Kong's cultural history? Was their collection designed to influence Hong Kong's aesthetic future? Furthermore, students had to consider the profit issues involved. What was the potential of the collection for ultimate sale and corporate profit? Was this strategy appropriate for the mission? This game afforded the students the opportunity to make their own choices, but also to see their preferences in light of the meaning of a work of art outside the personal domain. For example, several students brought up the question of nudity in the arts: its function, its reception among Hong Kong audiences, and its appropriateness in the workplace.

The in-class version of this game allowed students to choose from works that were provided by the faculty. As a final project, students were required to design their own individual art collection for an institution of their choosing. In this cumulative assignment, students demonstrated their mastery of the variety of goals for this course: the use of their own experience, their ability to assess various works of art, the definition and maintenance of corporate identity, and the analysis of many potential points of view engendered by works of art. Students' choices exhibited a rich panoply of works--some local, some famous and international. Their abilities to look beyond the immediate scope of their positions in the bank were successfully documented in these projects. Examples included:

1. A private collection designed to encourage the education of young children in the art of Chinese Calligraphy
2. An international bank, exhibiting representations of engravings of paper money as art
3. A local museum specializing in the preservation of ancient tea services
4. A small for-profit trade organization showing both Chinese and western style art depicting early historical scenes of trading ships and Hong Kong cityscapes

These examples demonstrated not only our students' growth in the assessment of works of art, but also in their understanding of the reasons we choose to display visual graphics and what they might say about us as individuals. Each of our students acknowledged that Hong Kong's evolving political and cultural environment could be, and is, in fact, displayed to the world via a series of visual images. In this course, students began to think about the preservation of visual imagery and how images influence individual lives. They also took on questions such as social hierarchy and relative access to works of fine art. Additionally, they began to define for themselves what art is and how it related to their lives.

Conclusions

This course was designed and implemented with a Hong Kong constituency in mind. It has since been reconfigured for an urban American audience and continues to undergo renovation and amplification. We currently have plans to expand the video into a film series on the nature of collecting. In its current iteration, the course includes a segment on personal collections, and students are encouraged to consider why they or others collect works of art or artifacts and what the act of collecting itself means in the larger world of art.

Adult students not initially interested in courses in the arts can be encouraged by the use of experience and application of artistic ideas to other aspects of their lives. Just as we try to develop links among liberal arts concepts, so to can we extend those links to more practical areas of student interest. The intersection between art and business became clear to our students when they began to look around them and assess how their institutions used art and imagery to depict their corporate missions. They also learned that inclusion of visual imagery in their lives could improve their ability to understand the world around them.

NOTES:

1. Kathleen Taylor, Catherine Marienau, and Morris Fiddler, Developing Adult Learners: Strategies for teachers and Trainers, (San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 2000), 7.
   
   
2. Victoria J. Marsick, "Action Learning and Reflection in the Workplace," in Fostering Critical Reflection in Adulthood: A Guide to Transformative and Emancipatory Learning, Jack Mezirow and Associates. (San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 1990), 35.
   
   
3. Richard R. Brettell, Monet to Moore: The Millennium Gift of Sara Lee Corporation, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), vi, xvii.
   
   
4. Lisa Erf, Curator, Bank One Collections. Interview with the authors, December 2000.
   
   
5. Tsang, Gerard C.C., Chief Curator, Hong Kong Museum of Art. Preface, The Passionate Realm: A Retrospective of Fang Zhaoling, (Hong Kong, Urban Council Hong Kong, 1994), 12-13.
   
   
6. See collected works: Hong Kong Museum of Art, Hong Kong Artists Volume II. (Hong Kong, Leisure and Services Department, 2000).

References

Brettell, Richard.

Monet to Moore: The Millennium Gift of Sara Lee Corporation. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999.

 

Erf, Lisa.

Curator, Bank One. Interview with the authors, December 2000.

 

Hong Kong Museum of Art.

Hong Kong Artists Volume II. Leisure and Cultural Services Department, Hong Kong Museum of Art, Hong Kong, 2000.

 

Mezirow, Jack and Associates.

Fostering Critical Reflection in Adulthood: A Guide to Transformative and Emancipatory Learning. San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 1990.

 

Taylor, Kathleen, Catherine Marienau, and Morris Fiddler.

Developing Adult Learners: Strategies for Teachers and Trainers. San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 2000.

 

Urban Council, Hong Kong and the Hong Kong Museum of Art.

The Passionate Realm: A Retrospective of Fang Zhaoling. Hong Kong: Urban Council of Hong Kong, 1994.

Academic Exchange Extra invites reader responses to any writings in this issue--especially articles advancing the scholarly debate of issues raised.

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