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December 2, 2009Hello! I’m Arielle McMahon, and my blog focuses on my ethnography project for my English 102 Honors course. This semester, I’ve focused on the gallery in the Art Building of TAMU-Commerce, observing the community within it and the visual literacy that is found there. Completing research journals on scholarly articles all along the way, I broadened my definition of literacy as well as visual literacy.
As I continued hanging out in the gallery and observing, I noticed an unfortunate theme to my studies: the gallery is not often visited. This concerned me, both because I didn’t know how to pursue my research without a community to observe and because, as an art major, I felt that the visual literacy presented through the gallery should be acknowledged. Whereas at first my research question asked how visual literacy functions in the gallery, I now pose a new question: Why is the visual literacy in the gallery overlooked by Commerce community members and how can this be changed? In order to address this question, I started to focus on how many people attended the gallery and its events, who signed the registry sheet, how many advertisements there were for the gallery, and all the while I attended different sessions on campus that helped contribute to my knowledge on what visual literacy is defined as.
A huge portion of my answers has come with two interviews, one with Mr. Odom, who is trying to build a gallery off-campus, and the other with Mr. Huber, an art professor. Their insider perspectives on the community within the Art Building really pushed my research in the right direction, and the information they provided compared and contrasted with each other well.
So, to recap, my research question was: Why is the visual literacy in the gallery overlooked by Commerce community members and how can this be changed? My findings were that the gallery is overlooked because hardly anyone who isn’t an art major is even aware of its existence, and even if they are, they don’t know where to find it. There are no advertisements for upcoming shows and events anywhere on campus except for right outside of the gallery in the hallway of the Art Building. Access to the gallery is also limited – one to five every afternoon on weekdays – and for a while it was even under construction. To fix this, Mr. Odom has tried for the past year to make a gallery in the town square of Commerce. This gallery would create new opportunities for the Commerce community to access visual literacy. Also, simple things like putting more posters around the whole campus about new shows would create more of a crowd that’s not just limited to art students.
