Economics is everywhere, including art.
Alexandra Nica, director of the undergraduate program and professor of instruction in the department of economics at the Tippie College of Business at the University of Iowa, takes a closer look.
Alexandra Nica is director of the undergraduate program and professor of instruction in the Department of Economics at the University of Iowa Tippie College of Business. She earned her MA and PhD from the University of Iowa and her BA from the University of Transylvania in Romania.
Did Jackson Pollock ever think much about economics? Probably not, but economics students think about Jackson Pollock.
I teach the intermediate macroeconomics class at Tippie and not long ago I noticed that my students struggled to give concise analysis of graphs and data because they were unable to visualize what they looked like. I realized they needed to learn to slow down and look closer at details to help them make more sense of the whole.
I also knew that art was one tool I could use to help them. As a concert pianist myself, I know how art helps with visualization because art rewards those who looks closely at the details. So I brought my students to the university’s renowned Stanley Museum of Art, where docents helped them dive deep into some of the works in our extensive collection.
They closely examined paintings by Joan Miro and Katja Farin. They looked at sculpture from Elizabeth Catlett and pieces from the museum’s extensive collection of African art. They began to see things they didn’t expect and realized that close looking is as effective in finding meaning in one of Pollock’s abstract expressionist masterpieces as in a chart tracking US GDP.
The experience showed the value of creativity in moving past a basic reading and providing concise summaries, especially when looking at graphs. Students learned they can tease out meaning from economic data using an artist’s tools to see that things aren’t always as simple as they seem. As a result, they now write clearer paragraphs with better in-depth analysis than before, even when the graphs are more complicated. This will be important for their careers, when their bosses will expect a concise, three-sentence summary of what a visual says and what it actually means.
