By Sian Wilkerson

As an educator at Virginia Commonwealth University, Laura Middlebrooks, Ph.D., is a strong believer in immersion. Each semester, Middlebrooks, a teaching associate professor of Spanish, encourages students to connect with the city around them as part of their education.

Recently, Middlebrooks had the chance to go to Europe for an immersive experience of their own.

In what they called a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, they took educational leave from VCU during the fall semester to conduct research on art and protest in Spain, traveling across four months around Barcelona, Madrid, Sevilla, Cadiz and Rota to document instances of public art.

“Every moment that I was not confined within the walls of a hotel room, my head was on a swivel as I moved along the streets, taking pictures and videos, constantly asking myself, ‘Is that art? How can I use it to teach my students?’” Middlebrooks said in a trip summary.

During their time in Spain, they took more than 2,000 photos and several hundred videos, with the ultimate goal of turning the materials into a new VCU course or a virtual study abroad program. The research builds on a unit Middlebrooks already teaches in their SPAN 202 course in the School of World Studies, part of the College of Humanities and Sciences, requiring students to create an art project and present it to the class.

To prepare for the presentations, which are conducted only in Spanish, Middlebrooks introduces students to Richmond’s deep roots with public art and encourages them to “connect themselves and their artistic expression with the history of public art in the city in which they are getting a college education,” they said. “The more I can incorporate examples of that tradition, but from the Spanish side of things, the more meaningful I hope it is to them.”

During the unit, the class discusses the definition of public art, exploring examples that students see in their everyday lives and examining art’s heritage in relation to Richmond’s famous monuments. Those spaces include the new Emancipation and Freedom Monument on Brown’s Island as well as the transformation of Monument Avenue’s former Robert E. Lee memorial into a site remembering Marcus-David Peters, who was shot to death by police amid a mental health crisis. Peters graduated from VCU in 2016.

In Spain, Middlebrooks followed their own lesson plan. Ahead of the trip, they put together a schedule to visit a number of sites – cathedrals and festivals, for example – but also left room to simply wander and discover.

One such moment was finding a plaza in Sevilla where a prominent cultural center stood amid signs and banners calling for the building’s conservation.

“There’s no way I could have asked someone, ‘Excuse me, but can you point me in the direction of a cultural center that has examples of art that is embroiled in a local controversy,’” Middlebrooks said. “It was absolutely serendipitous. So I had to carve out time and space to stumble across those places and those moments.”

Among the multitude of experiences in Spain, one had especially deep resonance. In Rota, Middlebrooks documented a Nov. 25 march marking the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women.

The local event included three 6-foot wooden statues in the shape of ribbons, symbolizing an acknowledgement of the victims’ pain, a recognition of how the problem is affecting society and hope for a better future. Participants also marched with banners and other signals of strength and resilience, accompanied by live music and interpretive dance.

The march culminated with an opportunity for attendees to put down in words what they could do to help eliminate violence against women – and then display their thoughts as symbolic leaves on two ornamental trees. Middlebrooks hailed the gesture as an elegant pairing of art and protest.

With those lessons and memories in hand upon their return to campus, Middlebrooks hopes to refine and build on her incorporation of public art and history into their classroom.

“Not only does it give students a way to express themselves in which they might not have assumed they would in a Spanish 202 class,” they said, “but it also allows us as a community to really explore definitions of art and identity and expression.”