Art, Anthropology, and Literacy with the Flagstaff Library

Many years ago as I toured the MIT Media Lab building in Cambridge, Massachusetts, an art installment among the robotic teddy bears, LEGO Mindstorms, and glass-walled offices caught my eye. That particular art piece has stayed with me and influenced the way I think about the relationship between science and art ever since. The piece by Jie Qi, pictured below, was dazzling to me, not just because of the sparkling LEDs arranged in a serene natural scene, but also because it prompted me to think about how science and art might influence one another, and how this kind of creativity could help bridge apprehension “artsy” people sometimes feel toward math and science, and that “sciencey” people sometimes feel toward the arts.

At the time, I thought this kind of approach might offer an entry point and a spark of curiosity for adults, teens, and kids who feel proficient in one area but either scared or uninterested in expanding into something else.

In the years since, this inter-disciplinary line of thinking influenced my approach to creating curriculum and inspiring education in a number of settings. In a fourth grade class, for example, I developed a one-time curriculum for engaging students in poetry writing who had appeared uninterested when prompted to learn about and write poetry in other, more traditional contexts. As I compared writing a poem, with various rules and constraints, to writing a line of code in the popular Scratch program that the students had been learning (also a product of the MIT Media Lab), I watched students who had struggled to formulate responses lean into the discussion.

You often hear people of all ages say that the best part of math is that “there is only one right answer,” though this notion is challenged by more advanced mathematics. I wanted to introduce this idea of structure to the students as a tool – one they could use or discard as needed – that might tap into a more logic-based critical thinking approach.

Next, we thought about robots and their components. Thinking about how small things work together to create big things is a key learning hurdle for fourth graders, and this seemed like the perfect way to broach that topic in engineering and in writing. First students used their senses to interact with gears, springs, nuts, bolts, and washers and then recorded their thoughts and observations as lines of poetry. Gradually, we talked about bigger and more complex components until we were watching a FIRST Robotics Competition robot zoom across the projector screen as the class cheered, and then wrote diligently. Like encountering the LED art at the MIT Media Lab, this encounter with a  group of fourth graders felt dazzling – again, I was thinking about art and science as entry points for one another, a way to think creatively and logically, to use order or disorder, ideas and words, as means for developing deeper understanding across disciplines.

While we won’t be writing robot-code-poetry or programming Arduinos or Raspberry Pi’s to create LED masterpieces, science programs at the Flagstaff City-Coconino County Library and East Flagstaff Community Library are combining art, anthropology, literacy, and more to create an exciting lineup of programs for this year’s Festival of Science. This line of creative, cross-disciplinary thinking is also the key mechanism behind one adult program in particular, “Egyptian Cats in Science and Paint,” which will be held at the Downtown Library on Friday, September 30th at 4:30PM.

While brainstorming ideas for the Festival, I focused in on the concept of Egyptian cats as a fun way to broach the topic of Egyptology. I was also thinking about the ways in which ancient Egypt and modern Egypt interact with and reflect one another, and how we could pull these ideas into a contemporary concept of Egypt. Discussing Egyptian art seemed liked a perfect avenue for this. On the other hand, this is a science program after all, and in my research on Egyptian cats I found a close relationship between anthropology, preservation science, biology, and Egyptian art. To bring in a modern context, I thought a paint session to make simplistic recreations of a piece by a contemporary Egyptian artist, Gheorghe Virtosu, would provide an extra draw for attendees, and give people something to do with their hands as we talk through the anthropological, cultural, and biological significance of Egyptian cats from ancient Egypt to today. An optional reading to provide context for the discussion from both an art history and science standpoint is available at the Downtown Library Information Desk.

Join Kinney Anderson, Library Specialist at the Flagstaff City-Coconino County Public Library, for “Egyptian Cats in Science and Paint,” which will be held at the Downtown Library on Friday, September 30th at 4:30PM.

Attendees of this program will be able to paint, chat, and think about Egyptian cats using free art supplies provided by the library during a guided discussion.