Published to accompany exhibition held at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute, Utica, NY, 14/3 - 27/9 1998 and travelling.

In South Africa, with its highly contested and changing understandings of national identity, its National Gallery is no less a contested space. A History of the Iziko South African National Gallery considers questions of artistic and cultural identity, from the late 19th century to the present day. It explores how the gallery has understood its function and its public, as a ‘national’ gallery from 1930 and, before that, the chief gallery of the Cape Colony. This question is investigated through a study of the gallery’s administration, collection and exhibition practices over the last 150 years. What is understood by and expected of a national gallery varies considerably worldwide. Should it regard itself as part of a broad international cultural discourse, or should it be representative of a specifically national – or even regional – identity? The gallery is a microcosm of the greater debate: how the South African nation relates to the larger world and how, if at all, it understands the concept of a shared culture. In the last 20 years, Museum Studies have become a major part of the field of Cultural Studies. There is a vast literature on what might be called the ‘history’ museum, but far less on the art museum or gallery. To date, there has been no large-scale historical inquiry into the Iziko SANG, the country’s national gallery. The absence of such a history marks a serious gap in the literature, which this study aims to fill.

This second edition of Reaching and Teaching Students with Special Needs Through Art is written for art educators, special educators, and those who value the arts for students with special needs. It builds on teachers’ positive responses to the first edition, and now combines over 700 years of the educational experience of arts and special educators who share their art lessons, behavior management strategies, and classroom stories. The revised second edition provides updated chapters addressing students with emotional/behavioral disabilities, learning disabilities, intellectual disabilities, physical disabilities, and visual and hearing impairments. The newly revised second edition includes chapters on students with autism spectrum disorder, preschool students, and students experiencing trauma. All chapters have been updated to include current definitions and language, recommended teaching strategies, art lesson adaptations, behavior management strategies, and references to related chapters. Follow-up activities are provided for further insights into each group of students. A new summary chapter connects how the authors’ collaborations resulted in changes to two professional organizations. Since the first edition, many of the featured authors established the new Division of Visual and Performing Arts Education (DARTS) at the Council for Exceptional Children (CEC) and earlier, formed a new National Art Education Association (NAEA) Interest group—Special Needs in Art Education (SNAE), now Arts in Special Education (ASE). This edition is ideal for preservice arts methods courses and education courses on accessibility and inclusion at the undergraduate and graduate levels. It continues to offer current yet proven best practices for reaching and teaching this ever-important population of students through the arts.

What do people learn from visiting museums and how do they learn it? The editors approach this question by focusing on conversations as both the process and the outcome of museum learning. People do not come to museums to talk, but they often do talk. This talk can drift from discussions of managing the visit, to remembrances of family members and friends not present, to close analyses of particular objects or displays. This volume explores how these conversations reflect and change a visitor's identity, discipline-specific knowledge, and engagement with an informal learning environment that has been purposefully constructed by an almost invisible community of designers, planners, and educators. Fitting nicely into a small but rapidly expanding market, this book presents: *one of the first theoretically grounded set of studies on museum learning; *an explicit presentation of innovative and rich methodologies on learning in museums; *information on a variety of museums and subject matter; *a study on exhibitions, ranging from art to science content; *authors from the museum and the academic world; *a range of methods--from the analysis of diaries written to record museum visits, to studies of preservice teachers using pre- and post-museum visit tests; *an examination of visitors ranging from age 4-75 years of age, and from known and unknown sample populations; and *a lens that examines museum visits in a fine grained (1 second) or big picture (week, year long) way.

The goal of this book is to cull from the last NSF conference, the "best ideas about how children interact with objects & through that interaction acquire new understandings, attitudes, and feelings."