Is art a matter of inspiration or of learning? Advice to Young Artists in a Postmodern Era, offers practical advice to the young artist about making the successful Dunning writes that in his years of teaching, he has heard students ask why no classes are ever offered to teach them what ingredients are helpful to the success of an artist: how to approach and deal with galleries and dealers; what to do about setting up their own studio and how to light it; and even how they should support themselves while they are attempting to do all this. Drawing on thirty-five years of experience as an artist and an art teacher, and those of several successful colleagues, the author follows the model of Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet and Hiram William's Notes for a Young Painter to compose this practical guide book. Advice to Young Artists is the only book of its kind geared to aspiring artists.

To expand the possibilities of “doing arts thinking” from a non-Eurocentric view, Artistic Mentoring as a Decolonizing Methodology: An Evolving Collaborative Painting Ethnography with Maya Artists Pedro Rafael González Chavajay and Paula Nicho Cúmez is grounded in Indigenous perspectives on arts practice, arts research, and art education. Mentored in painting for eighteen years by two Guatemalan Maya artists, Kryssi Staikidis, a North American painter and art education professor, uses both Indigenous and decolonizing methodologies, which involve respectful collaboration, and continuously reexamines her positions as student, artist, and ethnographer searching to redefine and transform the roles of the artist as mentor, historian/activist, ethnographer, and teacher. The primary purpose of the book is to illuminate the Maya artists as mentors, the collaborative and holistic processes underlying their painting, and the teaching and insights from their studios. These include Imagined Realism, a process excluding rendering from observation, and the fusion of pedagogy and curriculum into a holistic paradigm of decentralized teaching, negotiated curriculum, personal and cultural narrative as thematic content, and the surrounding visual culture and community as text. The Maya artist as cultural historian creates paintings as platforms of protest and vehicles of cultural transmission, for example, genocide witnessed in paintings as historical evidence. The mentored artist as ethnographer cedes the traditional ethnographic authority of the colonizing stance to the Indigenous expert as partner and mentor, and under this mentorship analyzes its possibilities as decolonizing arts-based qualitative inquiry. For the teacher, Maya world views broaden and integrate arts practice and arts research, inaugurating possibilities to transform arts education.

Dunning draws on art, art criticism, his own insight, and various studies of those characteristics that lead to success in art by providing the student with useful information on pursuing art and art as a career. From exploring the development of self-discipline, examining the learning process, and suggesting courses to take in school to setting up a studio and networking in the art world, he recommends a general strategy that he has seen work well for many young artists. Although aimed primarily toward artists, and often drawing upon a comparison to scientists, this book is designed to explain how to achieve excellence in almost any field to which the reader applies effort, whether art, music, science, or business.

CD-ROM contains: Chapters from text -- Glossary.

Vols. 8-10 of the 1965-1984 master cumulation constitute a title index.