Olivia Gude

Angela Gregory Paterakis Professor of Art Education (2015). BA, Webster College, St. Louis. MFA, University of Chicago. Publications: Art Education; Journal of Korean Society for Education through Art; Studies in Art Education; Teaching Tolerance Magazine; chapters in Art, Culture, and Ethnicity; Art and Social Justice Education; Debates in Art and Design Education; From Our Voices: About LGBT Issues, and Transforming City Schools Through Art. Public Art Commissions: CTA Central Park Station, Harold Washington Library, American Creates for the Millennium (Kentucky), S.P.A.R.C. Los Angeles, Northern Illinois University Museum. Awards: National Art Education Association Distinguished Fellow, NAEA Manuel Barkan Award, NAEA Viktor Lowenfeld Award, National Endowment for the Arts–Art in Public Places, Arts Midwest/NEA Fellowship, Illinois Arts Council Fellowship, UIC Great Cities Scholar.

Artist and educator Olivia Gude is the Chair of Art Education and the Angela Gregory Paterakis Professor and at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a Professor Emerita of the University of Illinois at Chicago. Professor Gude has created many award-winning collaborative mural and mosaic projects. In recent years, she has united her work as a community artist and as an art educator by creating participatory spaces in which teachers investigate and re-invent the social practices of art education. These include organizing a Manifesta of Art Education at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in 2012 and Skeptical Assessment Society events at Virginia Commonwealth University, the Art Educators of Iowa conference, the Missouri Art Education Conference, and the New York State Art Teachers Association. 

Professor Gude’s writing and research focus on generating new projects and new paradigms for art education in school and community settings. Her articles combine reimagining the underlying structures and assumptions of art education curriculum with examples of art projects generated in the Spiral Workshop and other innovative art and culture programs. Her articles include Postmodern Principles: In Search of a 21st Century Art Education, Principles of Possibility: Considerations for a 21st Century Art and Culture Curriculum, Art Education for Democratic Life, and New School Art Styles: the Project of Art Education.

Professor Gude is a member of the Council for Policy Studies in Art Education. She received the 2009 National Art Education Association Viktor Lowenfeld Award for significant contributions to the field of art education and was awarded the 2014 NAEA’s Manuel Barkan “article of the year” award for New School Art Styles. In 2019, she was named 

Professor Gude served as a member of the Visual Arts writing team for the Next Generation National Visual Arts Standards. For eighteen years, Professor Gude directed the Spiral Workshop, a teen art program and curriculum research project. Curriculum and resources developed at Spiral can be found at the National Art Education Association e-Portfolios and http://naea.digication.com/omg/ and http://naea.digication.com/spiral/ 

Professor Gude has created more than 50 mural and mosaic projects, often working in collaboration with community members. She has received many grants, commissions, and awards, including two National Endowment for the Arts grants for public artworks, an Arts Midwest Regional Fellowship in Painting, and an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship for Outstanding Achievement in the Visual Arts. She is a member of the Chicago Public Art Group and edited the CPAG’s on-line Community Public Art Guide: Making Murals, Mosaics, Sculptures, and Spaces. www.cpag.net Her writing on community-based public art includes Innovators and Elders, Painting in the Streets in Cultural Activisms: Poetic Voices, Political Voices and the book Urban Art Chicago: a Guide to Community Murals, Mosaics, and Sculptures. In 2018 Americans for the Arts published her white paper, Public Art and Art Education. 

Professor Gude works with art teachers to foster the collaborative creation of new curriculum and assessment models in urban and suburban school districts, including the Chicago Public Schools, Atlanta Public Schools, Cobb County School District in Georgia, Fort Worth Independent School District, Naperville School District, New Trier High School, Tampa public schools, the Los Angeles United School District, and the Singapore Ministry of Education. 

Professor Gude frequently presents lectures and workshops on transforming art education curriculum, the role of museums in arts education, community art practices, and on her work as a collaborative public artist. She has presented in many universities and museums, including the University of Texas Austin, the University of British Columbia, New York University, Pratt Institute, The Ohio State University, Pennsylvania State University, the University of Toronto, the Rhode Island School of Design, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, MASS Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, the Walker Art Center, the Dallas Art Museum, and the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art. In 2010, Gude presented on the use of workshop methods to introduce the public to contemporary art at the Den Frie Contemporary Art Center in Copenhagen.

Professor Gude has served as the keynote speaker for arts education conferences in Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Washington, Wisconsin, Wyoming, and Utah as well as for the Manitoba Association for Art Education, the Ontario Art Education Association and Canadian Society for Education through Art conferences in British Columbia and Ontario. Gude has presented keynote addresses for the Korean Society for Education through Art (2011) and for the Singapore Arts Education conference (2013). 

Professor Gude has organized and presented a number of Supersessions at the National Art Education Association conferences, including Evocative & Provocative Pedagogy: Towards a Culture Changing Curriculum (2012) and Meaningful Choices: Changing Processes, Purposes, and Products in Art Education (2017). Working with her colleagues at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Professor Gude has produced several NAEA Curriculum Slams, curated presentations of exceptional curriculum ideas from teachers throughout North America.

My mission in the field of art education is to influence the curriculum content of public school art education. I urge teachers to analyze the hidden curriculum of old stand-by projects and to invent new school art styles that create opportunities for meaningful making using contemporary art practices. My art education writing is based on the curriculum experiments of the youth art program Spiral Workshop, on engagements as a visiting artist in schools and communities, and on my work with teachers in school district, museum and university settings. 

I classify my curriculum research in four categories: inventing new projects, critiquing traditional projects and curriculum, articulating new structures for organizing school curriculum, and developing models for conceptually-oriented theme-based curriculum units.

Art projects encode complex technical, aesthetic, and conceptual methods of investigating the world. When students are not introduced to a range of new meaning making strategies, they tend to fall back on familiar, hackneyed image-making techniques. In this age of "post-studio" practice, it is challenging to invent projects that engage students while introducing them to authentic open-ended techniques through which they can explore significant content.

In my article, Principles of Possibility: a 21st Century Art and Culture Curriculum, I propose new organizing principles for art education curriculum. Noting that all state and national standards include goals related to understanding the uses of the arts in a culture, I articulated a list of major functions and potentials of cultural experience—Playing, Forming Self, Investigating Community Themes, Encountering Others, Attentive Living, Empowered Experiencing, Empowered Making, Deconstructing Culture, Reconstructing Social Spaces, and Not Knowing—and suggested that within each year of an art education curriculum students be introduced to this range of possibilities.