What's the Problem?
Enigmas for the Visual Arts Studio
Linda Robinson Sokolowski
WHAT'S THE PROBLEM? Enigmas for the Visual Arts Studio describes sixty compositional problems which artist Linda Robinson Sokolowski assigned to her college art students. With titles as enticing as the projects themselves ("Pears Passing for People", "The Head as a Map of Humanity", "Dangerous Landscape"), Sokolowski encourages teaching artists to invent challenging problems for their college students and serious AP art students in high school. Thoughts on setups for still life, landscape and the figure accompany the inspiring narratives, along with 170 photos of works by Sokolowski and primarily her students. The contents speak to how instructors might steer aspiring artists on their own paths toward a personal body of prolific work through problematic learning, beginning with an exciting presentation in the classroom studio and leading to each student's personal solution to the assignment in his/her own studio.
About the Author
Linda Robinson Sokolowski graduated from Rhode Island School of Design in painting after having spent her senior year in the school's European Honors Program in Rome. Those eight months initiated an independent vision of landscape sites that are implied records of remarkable human endeavor. Several years later Sokolowski received her MA and MFA in printmaking from the University of Iowa with the addition of her written thesis THE ORIGINAL PRINTS AND RESTRIKES FROM THE PLATES OF KATHE KOLLWITZ.
Sokolowski's paintings and works on paper were represented primarily in New York City through Kraushaar Galleries at 724 Fifth Ave for over thirty years. During that time she became the head of printmaking at Harpur College, SUNY Binghamton (later to become Binghamton University). In her 33 years of college teachings, she was known for the glue that tied monotypes and intaglio printmaking to painting,drawing and sculpture as she enthusiastically designed substantial problems for her students who thrived from those connections.
Professor Sokolowski received the Childe Hassam Purchase Award from the Academy of Arts and Letters, received three research grants from the State University of New York, exhibited at the National Museum of American Art of the Smithsonian Institution, The National Academy of Design, The Butler Institute of American Art among numerous other national collections and American universities.