User:Tgokey

My name is Thomas Gokey and I am a visual artist. You can see the kind of artwork I do on my portfolio website.

One of my artworks is to help organize the creation of A Supplement to the Texas US History Textbook. The goal is to create a better educational resource than the standard textbook. Our supplement will engage students in the actual research and writing of their own history. It will create a more interesting read, and it will be more faithful to the actual facts of our history. America could have turned out much differently than it did. Our democracy can be thought of as a giant artwork that, if it is a true democracy, we are all able to create together. This is also how I think of our Supplement. In this sense, the Supplement is a form of direct democracy and social sculpture.

I am not a professional historian but I do have some training in historical research. As a student at Bethel University in Saint Paul Minnesota I majored in Art history (in addition to my primary major which I designed myself, it combined studio art and Christian theology). I also spent one academic year as a research assistant to the art historian Wayne Roosa who was conducting research into contemporary artists who engage biblical themes. Beyond this experience I have an amateur interest in history, especially art history and the history of non-violent social movements like the civil rights movement.

I currently teach studio art at Syracuse University.

thomasgokey [at] gmail [dot] com