A Statement of my “Teaching Philosophy”

Onoyom Godfrey Ukpong, Ph.D.

At the introductory level, formal knowledge of the history of art is, first of all, learner conversance

with artistic benchmarks from preliterate societies and developing/developed civilizations. (By artistic

benchmarks I am referring to works of art as synonymous with traditions.) Second, this knowledge

results from the teacher narrating, chronicling, and utilizing models of art-historical interpretation to

analyze the benchmarks. At the upper level this entails studying benchmarks as products of artists’

experiences and virtuosity vis-à-vis geography and demographics in the places of their production;

realizing the existence of subjective and objective modes of work interpretation; and connecting work

themes and styles to specific institutions of their affiliation. I believe in historicizing aiming to unravel

the relationships between traditions and human needs, scenes, events, and concepts; thus, study

traditions relative to the following institutions/fields of art-historical inquiry (the utilitarian, the

customary, the political, the mythological, the religious, the social and the fraternal).

Learning the history of art ideally results from the effective teaching of it (as ideally as customer

satisfaction derives from good customer service). I believe in the uniqueness of each major period

style; in the work as art that informs and in the art historian being the translator informant; in the

effectiveness of translation depending largely on my utilization of state-of-the-art instructional

apparatuses for instruction; in walking my students through the often undulating terrain of inquiry

about traditions, their idiosyncrasies and histories; and in explaining to students not only how

informing traditions are but also why these are art for dissimilar reasons. (For instance, a tradition

which may qualify as art in the eyes of a non-Western “ideologue” may not qualify as art in the eyes of

a Western “pragmatist.”) I believe in providing answers to questions of histories of emergence and

proliferation of traditions: the scenes and events that caused our prehistoric ancestors to reject cave

residency and move into a new phase of human development marked by the erection of the first man-

made structure, the early beginnings of their artistic consciousness, the evolution of dynastic traditions

and their adaptation to subsequent more sophisticated ones during and beyond modernism.

It is in the history of art that we learn about many events of the past even more than we do from other

disciplines. As such, the history of art from my perspective is, partly, gaining knowledge of ways in

which artists use their hands to create works of art of abiding fascination. By teaching students to look

deeply, say, at a conceptual work, and see the elements within analytically relative to the place of its

creation, or to its creator’s delight, I challenge them to think through and decode encoded dialectic of

the work; the visual elements and their relationships to one another in three-dimensional space/picture

plane; distinguish the premodern from the modern and from the postmodern traditions on the basis of

the transparency versus the opacity of their contents; examine and gain knowledge of the continuing

adaptation of traditions to new cultural environments (from pre- through modern to post-modern

cultural environments).

The history of art, of African art in particular, does more than historicize traditions. It arouses the

poetic mind in ways that could have prompted Isidore Okpewho (Professor of African Literature) to

describe images in the late Nigerian poet Christopher Okigbo’s poem, “Love Apart,” as strikingly

close to the legendry Nigerian painter Olu Oguibe’s Two Lovers by the Rio Santa Catarina. The

foregoing are the paramount grounds of my art history teaching philosophy. I guide my students

through these associate fields of studying the history of art to ensure their thorough knowledge in the

subject.