Parting Shots

National Parks Class:  Let met echo what Kelly said in her previous post.  It’s been a great course and a good semester, and I’ve enjoyed learning with you and from you all about landscape art, 19th-century American Imperialism, and more.  Further, it’s been a joy to see how each of you have applied these ideas, which in reality are about much more than just the national parks, to your own art and meditations on humans and nature.

I’ll also echo what Kelly said about grades.  We sat down and tabulated these together, and for the most part, those who got below a B in the class did so because they did not write all of the blog posts.  Again, blogging, forming ideas, and having extended meditations on cultural artifacts and actual works of art was a big part of the course.  There were no exams, no researched essays, and no traditional projects like annotated bibliographies.  That’s why blogging comprised so much of the final grade.

I hope you all thought that the skill of blogging was a valuable one to learn. Each of you has developed the ability to participate in public discussions.  One shout out goes to Jack Vest, whose “Where the Wild Things Are” was the most popular post all semester. So far, it’s scored over 900 hits!

We also evaluated your final projects, and many of them were excellent.  Kelly and I have extensive notes on your presentations and projects, and if you are in fact curious about how we evaluated your final project, you are welcome to e mail us and we’ll be happy to share.

Best to everyone this holiday season, and I hope to see you all around the Carmichael Library!

Whew! You’re done! We’re done!

A reindeer in honor of the upcoming holidays. As we have learned, people visit national parks in expectation of seeing grand wildlife, so I thought a reindeer would be appropriate!

Hey National Parks Gang!

I just wanted to post one more time and wrap things up.  I hope that you found this course interesting and that you’ve expanded your thinking about nature, culture, art, and national parks — all things that we tend to take for granted and not give a whole lot of deep, critical thought.  I hope that over the last few months we’ve changed that.

I also wanted to let you know that Andrew and I met this afternoon to evaluate, calculate, and post grades on Banner.  We looked at everyone individually and revisited all posts, discussed participation (which includes attendance, participation in discussion in and outside of class, especially via the blog), and the final projects.  There was a pattern in that those of you who did well posted all or most of the required blogs, had good participation, and had a strong final project.  Completing few blogs or posting blogs that were very short and did not meet the requirements negatively impacted grades.  Although we both don’t enjoy calculating and assigning grades (the classroom part of class is the best part of teaching) we did enjoy revisiting the class and we really did find your final projects interesting.  If you have any questions about your final grade please feel free to contact either of us.

I hope your Finals Week goes well and that you have a great break and holidays ahead!

– Kelly

A last minute thought..

I liked the discussions we had in class about the sublime. The sublime was kind of something I took for granted before I ever really thought about it. I feel like I look at things, especially in nature, differently now. Since the sublime was so intriguing to me, I really enjoyed the presentation about the sublime and most wanted landscapes. I though it was interesting how everybody seemed to want something different, because what is beautiful and sublime to one person may not be for another. It just reminds us how diverse our society really is, especially in college where you have all kinds of people coming together from all different backgrounds. There is no way to please everyone, and no one size fits all ideal landscape. I know it is cliché but, I guess beauty is truly in the eye of the beholder. 

Central Park: Ever changing

This is a video that kind of maps out Central Park and shows how it’s always changing. It relates to Chace and my final project on how it’s designed and how it looks a lot like the Olmsted designed campuses.

The Pastoral Trope and Its Influence on Man-Made Spaces

For my final project I wrote an essay about the pastoral trope. I’ve always been interested in how common themes are spread and I liked how pretty much everything we discussed in class could be brought back to the pastoral. I researched the beginnings of the trope and how literary pastoral inspired landscape architects like Olmsted. Parts of my essay focuses on Glen A. Love’s writings in Practical Ecocriticism: Literature, Biology, and the Environment, as well as the pastoral trope and Yosemite. I’ve made a slideshow to go along with it and I’ll be showing a video of people in a time lapse in Yosemite.

Slideshow

Video

 

Final Project: Nature and Technology

I’ve always been a technology person. Whenever I visit my parents it’s a miracle if I don’t have to fix the computer, tv, camera, or somebody’s cell phone. But there’s also a part of me that is drawn to nature as well, so the main things that stuck with me from discussions in this class have to do with the relationships between nature and technology. As I was preparing for my painting and doing some research about it, I started to see two different sides of the issue emerge.

Final Project

This is our Powerpoint for our presentation on Cookie Cutter Campuses. Art History Final1

To break the law or go extinct??

I some how just stumbled onto this website when I was looking up information on The Great Smokey Mountains, This article is about how this species of snake is eating animals to survive of course but its eating endangered species of birds and this one species of snake and has caused within a few decades to completely devastate the island’s bird life—causing the extinction of nine out of the 11 native species. The American Bird Conservancy (ABC), one of the country’s top conservation organizations, is fighting to ban the importation of such snakes. If ABC is successful, these snakes will be considered “injurious wildlife” and regulated by the Lacey Act. The Lacey Act made it illegal to transport across state lines any animals or birds killed in violation of state laws.

“Everywhere you look non-native invasive species are undermining the very ecosystems our national parks are intended to protect. Eradication of these pests in parks consume a growing amount of money. With there being no way to guarantee that “pets” will not be released into the wild, the American Bird Conservancy urges that appropriate measures be taken to prevent ecosystems in the United States from going the way of Guam.”(Hepburn)

http://www.nationalparkstraveler.com/2012/12/going-going-guam-non-native-snakes-threaten-national-park-ecosystems13924

I just thought it was really intense how that this county is having a debate on what to do with these snakes and how to handle their decreasing population in wildlife birds.

Cookie Cutter Campus

For my final project Kendra and I will be comparing and contrasting Olmstead design campuses across the U.S. and Montevallo.

When we went to the library to learn about the history and design of this campus, we felt strongly about this topic for our project. It was really interesting to learn about what is here and what has been replaced over the years. Montevallo is a true Olmstead design campus with its winding walkways and the scenery to be enjoys from all around. Olmstead was about keeping nature as is and just placing building with in, he didnt want to destroy the natural beauty of the surroundings.’ Olmsted believed the goal wasn’t to make viewers see his work. It was to make them unaware of it. To him, the art was to conceal art. And the way to do this was to remove distractions and demands on the conscious mind. Viewers weren’t supposed to examine or analyze parts of the scene. They were supposed to be unaware of everything that was working. His designs subtly direct movement through the landscape. Pedestrians are led without realizing they’re being led. It’s a strange sensation of feeling lost yet completely confident that you can easily return to your starting point.”(Linderman)

We went back to the library and talked to Carey Heatherely and he helped out a lot with information on Olmstead and where to start looking. He gave us a handful of websites that came in handy when looking up information.

http://www.olmsted.org/the-olmsted-legacy/olmsted-theory-and-design-principles/olmsted-his-essential-theory (his ideas and a great website about the firm and its architects)

http://www.brynmawr.edu/library/exhibits/thomas/plan3.html

http://hcap.artstor.org/cgi-bin/library?a=d&d=p838

https://www.mtholyoke.edu/courses/rschwart/hatlas/campus_environment/olmstead_plan/index.html

https://digital.lib.washington.edu/architect/architects/2494/ (all of the buildings that J. C. Olmsted worked on in the Seattle area, including the University of Washington.

We will be presenting our project in powerpoint form. Starting off with a brief history of Olmstead and his design ethic, plan and theory. We will be comparing three different places to an Olmstead design including Montevallo, Stanford, and Mount Holyoke with Central Park. Comparing the winding paths and getting lost on campus with its beauty and the colors in the trees on your way to class. Contrasting campuses with a different design will be easy to find but the differences in the layout could be a little difficult. You could always find a little Olmstead in any campus I feel like except UAB. Contrasting UAB to Olmstead will be the easiest. The buildings all around and the few patches of landscape are just grass with no trees, Its a depressing campus. With our last slide on our presentation we will discuss the many benefits of having and Olmstead design campus, which include style, scenery, and environmental conservation.

The Epitome of the Sublime Preview

So my final for this course is my search for the ultimate scenery that can be described as sublime. As I have stated in other post before, the idea of the sublime is something that I can not help but find interesting. It makes me wonder how we come to decide what is and is not sublime and for what reasons. This of course is something we talked about in class, but I really wanted to explore the concept further.