How is art conceived, created, and experienced? How is it taught? How does the act of viewing a work make the viewer part of that work? Learning Mind: Experience Into Art addresses these questions as it documents the changing practices in the making, teaching, and exhibition of art. Timely, multifaceted, and instructive, this groundbreaking volume explores the contemporary art experience and its expanding presence in society through lively essays, revealing interviews, and provocative conversations with some of the most influential artists and educators of our time. Featured artists include Magdalena Abakanowicz, Ann Hamilton, Alfredo Jaar, Kerry James Marshall, and Ernesto Pujol, along with designers Walter Hood and Bruce Mau. Contributing authors include curators Marcia Tucker and Christopher Bedford, art critics Michael Brenson and Jerry Saltz, art historian David Getsy, educators Ronald Jones and Lawrence Rinder, philosopher Arthur Danto, psychiatrist Mark Epstein, theorist W.J.T. Mitchell, and chef-educator Alice Waters. In demonstrating the role that art schools and universities play in the creative process, Learning Mind offers students, teachers, and readers new and vital theoretical texts as well as practical strategies for integrating art into our daily lives.

"Learning Mind: Experience Into Art is astonishing in its range of authors, depths of perception, and subjects, gliding elegantly among three thematic clusters, from 'Being of Being an Artist' to 'Making Art and Pedagogy' and, finally, to 'Experiencing Art.' The editors have brilliantly and imaginatively realized the promise of their anthology's tantalizing, terse title."—Moira Roth, author of Traveling Companions/Fractured Worlds

"Jacob and Baas have gathered together an exceptional group of some of the most articulate writers about art of this generation, as well as some of the most intelligent, thoughtful, esteemed and socially engaged artists. The Learning Mind invites them to speak from their own experiences with art; what emerges are important biographical moments of insight about the way art is a device for transforming consciousness."—Jennifer Gonzalez, University of California, Santa Cruz

Mary Jane Jacob, is Professor and Executive Director of Exhibitions at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Jacquelynn Baas is the author of Smile of the Buddha: Eastern Philosophy and Western Art (UC Press). Together Baas and Jacob conceived and edited Buddha Mind in Contemporary Art (UC Press).