Art is the past, present and future of human thought expressed creatively. History is the study of the past through documents and artifacts used for informing our present and changing the future. When you mix these two disciplines, the result is a contextualization of humanity’s ideas, emotions, struggles and passions that everyone could learn from. It’s important for everyone to engage with either of these subjects to understand how they relate, so as to inform and supplement our experiences with both. Art, history and education are all fundamentally connected and are at their best when brought together to teach people about the world.
Art and history go hand in hand. They could even be interchangeable in some scenarios depending on your lens. History, in any capacity, informs art whether we’re talking about a genre directly inspired by the past like steampunk or a genre speculating the future like cyberpunk. Likewise, art has the potential to help shape politics, culture and history in overt or covert ways. You can’t have art or history without human experiences.
The connection between art and history becomes most apparent in education, where historical research and syntheses are digested through the usage of art as teaching tools. From the literature we read, the videos we watch, the music we listen to, the visual art we see, the assignments we write, the speeches we prepare and a plethora of other artistic mediums, all of it is art and students can benefit from learning about, as well as from, art.
Teaching art has many benefits for students beyond just boosting academic grades, such as helping the students express themselves creatively and critically, explore identities and get in touch with the ethos of the past recording for experiencing in the future. These classes are considered fun and a break from the more academic classes.
History classes, on the other hand, are stereotyped as “boring.” This is largely in part due to the state curriculum’s design not meeting students where they’re at or making the subject material engaging, instead opting to make them read a broad textbook.
What can help resolve this social epidemic of boring history classes tainting the good and engaging name of well-researched history? For starters, using art about and from the eras you’re teaching about to help students visualize and gain a deeper, more emotional understanding of the material and ultimately gaining information from them. Creativity and innovation are absolute within history as the world tends to bend towards progression, helping bridge the gap between the past and those who will shape our future.
On the flipside, history ties into teaching the arts since, especially at a young and impressionable age, you’re helping them contextualize not only the art but also the cultural impact it has on people in the past and even present. You cannot truly and fully appreciate a piece of art without understanding what caused its existence and where it fits in history.
For example, the popular play “The Crucible” by Arthur Miller was an allegory for American McCarthyism and the red scare, which was a mass hysteria during the Cold War about various people, including creatives, being communists or left-wing and stifling and persecuting them. Many of them were put on trial for supposedly being Soviet spies or communist sympathizers. This knowledge brings new light on this historical fiction play on the Salem Witch Trials and highlights a pattern shown in history then expressed through artistic means. This is just one of many instances of art and history compounding.
Knowing how art is made not only helps you appreciate the work behind it but also teaches many life lessons about the world and art’s influence on people since artists create art that builds upon past works to make something new. It’s impossible to truly appreciate a piece of art in a vacuum, and learning more about history and its impact on art helps people improve and become more socially conscious.
Art is a human phenomenon existing for a reason that deserves to be preserved for the sake of the future’s ability to learn from it just like history. Art and history could become sincere allies in teaching and even in general when moments feel bleak to remind us that there were people before us who felt and experienced similar things. Everyone can learn, especially from these two mediums, for the purpose of potentially changing the world.