Throughout our lives, humans learn and cultivate countless forms of literacy. Literacy helps us process and understand the world around us. Why then do we spend so much time emphasizing textual and/or numerical literacy while neglecting other forms, such as visual literacy?
– To remedy this, I spoke with the talented artist and visual literacy instructor at UAB, Jenny Fine.
To start our conversation off, I asked Jenny to describe what we mean when we say visual literacy:
Visual literacy is the ability to read, write, create, and interpret visual images in order to make meaning from the world around us. Our visual world presents concepts and delivers messages via imagery to humans on a daily basis. To teach visual literacy, is to have students slow down and really consider the meaning behind these visual messages. Visual Literacy is a learned skill that requires the viewer to think critically in order to make sense of the messages being fed to our psyche, offering our minds opportunities for divergent thinking.
With this Jenny began to discuss her experience teaching, and how she became an instructor of visual literacy:
In 2015, the former UAB Chair of the art department, Lauren Lake, shared that one of her master plans for this school during her tenure was to create a series of online courses. One of those courses was entitled Visual Literacy and Application. She asked me to design this course. Typically, a college provides the course designer with the course title, leaving the content to be developed by the professor. And so, this began my focus towards answering the questions: what is visual literacy? and how, as artists, do we apply our visual vocabulary to convey concepts to a viewer or wider audience?
In creating the course, I learned “visual literacy” is a term used by art historians. When I was going through my BFA course of study, visual literacy wasn’t a concept conveyed in the studio classroom. However, it makes perfect sense that the act of learning to become visually literate is an important part of educating students to become more fluent visual communicators.
Naturally, this expanded our conversation on the importance of visual literacy:
It’s important so that you can be fluent in your day-to-day life. Meaning not only understanding oral communication, but also understanding visual directions/cues that can lead to critical thinking, through image association or comparison and contrast that happens in the natural world around us.
This prompted the question of how visual literacy differs from other forms of literacy (such as textual and numerical literacy):
Well, I do think that textual and numerical literacy is something with which we are really familiar. We have devoted a lot of study to words and their meanings. Lawyers spend their careers arguing and debating over the meaning of a single word. Yet, we have no dictionaries that tell us definitively what images mean and have meant in the past. And so visual literacy differs from oral communication in that the interpretation is often left up to the viewer.
A viewer’s personal history and visual vocabulary always come into play when interpreting images. Viewers tend to make associations and interpretations based on what they know –often informed by their native culture, religion, gender, among other factors. In that way, images can become very slippery. And what’s actually really great about this is that there allows for a little bit of space between the artist’s intent and the viewer’s interpretation. It is in that space between where the viewer is allowed to connect the meaning themselves. The meaning of images is much more tied to personal experience – in a way that isn’t as definitive or final as with words. The risk of making images is that the final interpretation is always up to the viewer – and this can sometimes take the artist by surprise. This is why in-progress critiques and conversations with others surrounding imagery and its meaning during the creation of the work are imperative to an effective understanding of the conceived and executed work – before it is released to the public.
After describing its differences, Jenny went on to describe how visual literacy impacts and aids other forms of literacy:
I think, if anything, that using visual language has the opportunity to dismantle the scientific system in some way. It allows the viewer and observer to move beyond their previously learned notions of literacy.
Next Jenny Described her approach to teaching a subject some would deem abstract and/or conceptual
In visual literacy, I decided that it’s not just looking, it’s about seeing the world around you, understanding the visual world, and making meaning out of what you see. What I’ve done in the course, is break it down into different sections. Different acts of looking: looking out, looking in, looking back, and looking forward; and, through all of these acts of looking we engage different acts of making that become themes of study: Walking, Collecting, Accumulation, Memory, etc. – offering the student concrete examples of how other artists have tackled subject matter – laying the groundwork for the student’s creation of new ideas/ways of thinking and creating.
After discussing her work as an instructor, I asked how the knowledge and perception of visual literacy impacted Jenny’s studio work and everyday life?
As an artist, my primary way of communicating ideas, and my interior thoughts to the world is through visual images. Yet, once the artwork is released out into the world, that meaning is up for grabs. The viewer can come in and make different meanings out of it. Something that I have learned in my practice. As an artist’s practice grows, hopefully, so does their audience – taking the work from its local context and placing it in another location with its unique audience with their cultural perspectives. As I have continued in my studio practice, I have developed my visual language. And, of course, that’s about my history and my cultural upbringing: who I am as a person, who I am as a female, etc. But oftentimes when you take that concept, that visual language, that image outside of its cultural context, and you put it into another context, it’s read differently. For example, an easy comparison is that American brides wear white wedding dresses, whereas Chinese brides traditionally wear red. Yet, if you flipped the context and attended an American wedding in which the bride wore red, more than likely, the bride would be considered scandalous. That’s because the cultural relationships with these colors and what they mean are perceived differently because of the viewers own history with place, traditions, and beliefs. As I have continued in my practice of communicating visually, as an artist, I’m realizing that it’s not just about the images that you’re using, but also about who you’re showing them to. The question then becomes which is more important, the artist’s intention or the artwork’s impact.
In releasing visual works out into the world – the artist’s creation of the artwork may be complete, but the artwork, hung in a variety of places – at different moments in cultural discourse – or within cultural contexts outside of the artist’s studio – the work begins to take on other (sometimes unintended) meanings – maybe even one’s the artist, themselves, did not see coming.
This, in turn, offers the artist an opportunity to expand their viewpoints and perspectives around not just their understanding, but beyond the self. Therefore, exhibiting one’s artwork in a variety of different contexts can be a decentering experience for the artist. If the artist’s ego is open to it, the work can continue to teach and expand the artist’s visual literacy and promote a greater global perspective – which can become the root of empathy. This is one reason why we often hear in the art world that representation is important.
We look at images, but images also look back.
Relating to visual interpretations, Jenny discusses the impact that visuals have on culture and society:
I recently exhibited an almost decade-old artwork in a community outside of my local region. As an artist progresses in their studio practice – it is the hope that work begins to be seen or exhibited in more distant places. To Alabama viewers, this image had a very specific meaning. However, when exhibited almost a decade later in a region far outside of Alabama – the conversation surrounding this artwork became something foreign to my initial concept and interpretation of the work. The impact was vastly different from my intention. This shift in perspective was a surprising experience for me.
Through this experience, I realized that visual literacy and visual language is very slippery – once you think you have it grasped, culture changes, and the visual language shifts not only due to the change in location/audience but also the current cultural discourse has its way of shifting the meaning of images. Visual literacy, or art in general, is not only about illustrating the present moment in time, it’s also become the illustrated history of a particular culture – the job of an artist is to push things forward – to help pave the way for culture to change. And it’s through new ways of seeing and understanding society that moves us into the future.
To conclude our conversation, I asked Jenny to give her best advise for readers to become more visually literate:
In my visual literacy course, I ease the students into focusing on prolonged looking with an exercise that was written long ago by William Burroughs called The Color Walk. It’s quite simple.
The goal of the assignment is to spend an hour of your time looking and becoming more aware of the visual world around us. Your walk can begin anywhere. Just walk out your door, pick a color that catches your eye, and watch your surroundings pop as you follow the color from one object to the next. I have my students pause and compose a photograph to help slow them down.
Another exercise that I like to do is, if I have 30 minutes, I like to go to a public space, take a sketchbook with me and watch the world around me. I sketch out or write down and describe what I’m seeing about these interactions and how you might interpret them. I try to guess the nuances of what is going on.A more advanced exercise would involve dissecting constructed images. Take a friend to a museum and mutually decide on artwork to silently study for 20 minutes of uninterrupted looking. Make notes. What do you see? Describe it. Do you have any unanswered questions about the images? After these 20 minutes of critical observation – talk to each other about interpretations of the artwork. Are they similar? How are they different? This is a fun way to prompt an interesting conversation surrounding different perspectives of the same thing.
– If you are interested in following Jenny Fine’s artwork, visit her website at www.jennyfine.com or follow her on Instagram @fannieamericus
– If you’d like to learn more about new ways to see and interpret the world around you, check out these resources available in the JCLC catalog: