I participated in a joint exhibit at the Wayne Theater Gallery, Waynesboro, Virginia, “Art in the Twenty First Century, March 1-May 27, 2018. Three assemblages/sculptures based on work by Pablo Picasso, as well an installation titled “Cultural Literacy/Critical Literacy.”
“Cultural Literacy/Critical Literacy” is based around the conflicting views of two books, one written by E. D. Hirsch, Jr. titled Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (1987) and my own book Critical Literacy: What Every American Ought to Know (2005). Hirsch’s book is famous for its list of 5,000 cultural items he felt every educated individual needed to know. Although I felt that many of the items Hirsch included in his list were useful, I was concerned that they did not represent the diversity found within American culture. In my book, I undertook a detailed critique of his his understanding of current school reform and educational research, and created a list of 5,000 items he left out of his list.
Using the list from Hirsch’s book and my work for a total of approximately 10,000 items, I created a Power Point presentation that would contrast an item from my list (black background) and Hirsch’s (white background). This list was run a continuous computer loop and projected on the Wayne Theater Gallery’s large format television screen.As illustrated below, a Hirch term is listed along with one of mine. I change the order (Hirsch/Provenzo or Provenzo/Hirsch with each slide. Running at a rate of three seconds per slide, it takes approximately eight hours (5,000) slides for the presentation to repeat itself.
I believe that this installation forces the viewer to engage in a dialectical process, one in which the words value by Hirsch are placed in contradistinction to words and meaning represented by my list. In my opinion, this type of a dialogic process is inherently democratic.
The Power Point list for this installation is included below together with a PDF version of the list. People are welcome to install the materials as they wish with credit to the author/creator.
Crit Lit A through Z Final PDF