Studio Art Professor Caleb Cole's Collaboration with Burns Library

“Draft two symbolic tarot cards, one a recognizable self-portrait, and the other a design of your choosing.” Like many assignments this past spring, this assignment from the Introduction to Digital Art course had to be translated from an in-person to an online teaching format. Even though the format changed, the class goal – using a computer to develop technical, conceptual, and aesthetic images – remained the same. Studio Art Professor, Caleb Cole, as well as the Burns Teaching Librarians, stepped up to the challenge by collaborating together to enable students to meet this goal.

In addition to Cole, Nina Bogdanovsky, Senior Research Librarian / Art & Architecture Bibliographer, and Burns Teaching Librarians Kathleen Monahan and Katherine Fox worked together to create a plan for the newly formatted class so that students could “come through with creative and carefully thought-out artwork,” said Cole, and their work showed that “they definitely got it, for this assignment and for the rest of the course.”

The Burns Library Instruction Program, through collaboration with faculty and other community members, supports intellectual inquiry and scholarship through an active engagement with primary and historical resources, in both original format and digital. Please read more about the library’s materials for teaching and research here.

NOTE: The image was created by Sean Ahearn, class of ‘23