Notebook is a Columbia News series that highlights just some of the many fascinating students who study at our University.
Minne Atairu, an interdisciplinary artist and doctoral candidate in the Art and Art Education Program at Teachers College, has created new artwork for an exhibition now on view at the Shed.
When are you graduating from Teachers College?
I graduate in 2024.
What was your path to pursuing a doctorate in art and art education?
My path was significantly shaped by my time serving as a teaching artist at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C. There, I was privileged to design artistic experiences centered around West African cultural artifacts. Notably among them were the Benin Bronzes—a collection of looted artifacts from my ancestral homeland in Benin, Nigeria.
Ironically, it was within the confines of this museum, thousands of miles away from Nigeria, that I first came face-to-face with these invaluable, centuries-old objects. My engagement with the artifacts, in glass display cases, was a stark departure from the sanitized, untroubled representations I had seen only in my undergraduate art history textbooks back in Nigeria. I left the National Museum of African Art wrestling with questions about colonial dispossession, epistemic justice, culturally relevant pedagogy, and much more.
Additionally, my experience working on digital engagement projects at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, although unrelated to art, further reinforced my interest in an interdisciplinary approach to art education—one that embraces technological innovation. This interdisciplinary perspective has not only enriched my artistic practice, but also laid the foundation for my academic research into generative AI in K-12 art education.
