(Radio Iowa) – University of Iowa students in an advanced macroeconomics class were sent on a field trip across campus to the U-I’s Stanley Museum of Art this past semester to learn how focusing on tiny details can help illuminate the bigger picture. Alexandra Nica, a professor in the U-I’s Tippie College of Business, says she first had students look very closely at complicated graphs depicting economic concepts, then they headed for the art museum. “They went through a series of exercises. One of them was also this ‘close looking’ exercise and at the museum I also had them link at least three economics concepts with the artwork that they were looking at,” Nica says. “That was really rewarding because out of my 55 students, I did not receive the same answer twice.”

Calling it an “art intervention,” Nica says the business students took in Jackson Pollock’s famed “Mural,” as well as other works by Joan Miro and Katja Farin, as well as the museum’s extensive collection of African art. She says she was pleasantly surprised at how engaged the students became in linking economic concepts with artwork. “The vast majority of them have been extremely enthusiastic, not just about the fact that they went to the art museum,” Nica says. “Some of them told me that they’re graduating in two days and they never went to the Stanley Museum and they were really excited that this project offered them the opportunity to just even visit the museum.”

The field trip was part of a special program the Stanley Museum offered to U-I faculty and Nico says she was the only non-art-related professor to seize the chance.  “I applied for it because I always wanted to do something economics and art related, because I’m also a concert pianist,” Nica says, “so for me, art and economics go really well together, even though maybe at first glance, they might not.” She says learning to visualize and interpret artistic images shows the value of “close looking,” or slowing down to notice details which helps to make more sense of the whole, whether it’s an economic chart or an abstract expressionist work of art.