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Exploring Public Space: Interventionist Artworks And The Creative Disruption Of The Everyday, Jack Watson

High School Resources

1. Attempting to bridge a gap between artist and spectator while also challenging the elitism and preciousness associated with art, artists have long sought ways to blend the art experience into the everyday. From the ephemeral performances and “social sculptures” of 20th century conceptual art to the culture-jamming interventions of contemporary street art, there is a rich historical context for engaging directly with the spectator in public spaces. Taking artwork into public spaces in the form of actions rather than objects – actions which involve the participation of the spectator – bypasses the negotiations and mediations that take place when a …

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Women Of Our Worlds: Women Raising Voices Against Violence, Patty Bode

High School Resources

In a high school painting and drawing course, students investigated what contemporary women artists were making, saying, protesting, and changing in multiple art worlds. Group dialogue centered on generative themes in which students chose interconnected topics of combating domestic violence, affirming diverse body expressions and family relationships to launch a painting on canvas project. Students took leadership in activism to invite community workers into the art room resulting and in-school interventions such as, installing art exhibit in the school office, and projecting text and imagery in school cafeteria walls. Expanding into the community, students produced and installed info-art-posters in sites …

Re-Imaging City Walls: Engaging Children To Replace Hostile Wall-Chalking With Their Drawings, Rabeya Jalil

Teaching Resource Archive

Experience how two art educators lead a community-based initiative by engaging children from suburban districts to revamp public walls; erase hate graffiti and wall- chalking and replace them with interactive drawings.

Power Issues In Everyday Life ÷ Socially Engaged Art = Empowerment, Hoyun Richter

High School Resources

This lesson is facilitated so that students can identify and expand their perspective on a power issue relevant to their lives through dialogue, analysis of relevant artworks, and everyday examples. Artists Suzanne Lacy, Tatyana Fazlalizadeh, Emily are introduced to discuss power and powerlessness.

Let's Collaborate! Process-Based Sculptures, Lena Isenberg

Middle School Resources

To begin this lesson, students will study action painting from the Abstract Expressionist movement. Students will watch videos of Jackson Pollock and Dale Chihuly painting, and compare their processes. Students will also view Pollock and Chihuly’s art-making processes in the context of existentialism. They will understand that an artist’s actions are what give his or her life meaning. Taking inspiration from these artists’ processes, students will create collaborative sculptures in response to their materials. While creating their collaborative sculpture, students will be challenged by the dynamic interplay between individual ideas and group decision-making.

Public Space Interventions: Collaborating With New Craft Artists In Action- Finger Knitted Basketball Nets, Jody Boyer

Middle School Resources

A variety of artists make artwork that intervenes in public spaces. There are many reasons why artists engage communities in their work. This lesson explores a variety of artists who make artwork that intervenes in public spaces and engage communities with their work and teaches students to finger knit a 4 foot piece of yarn with excellent technique and craftsmanship. This lesson explores how the NCAA New Craft Artists in Action Net Works project and their public space interventions with handmade basketball nets. This lesson explores how artists collaborate to make artwork and empowers students to collaborate with their peers …

Representation By Design: Mining The Source, Kris Heintz Nelson

Higher Education Resources

This unit is a hybrid, combining art history, studio instruction, and visual culture and has been interwoven into a freshman foundations drawing course where students are taught observational skills, use of media and process, and introduced to the creative processes of generating ideas and developing personal inquiry. The inquiry is intended to guide students to question dominant assumptions regarding representation and how artists engage in visual research.

Urban Pets As Social Practice: Constructing Pets With A Purpose, Carrie Pope

Middle School Resources

I developed this lesson in my fourteenth year of teaching. I had just transferred to sixth grade general art after primarily teaching pottery classes in a high school for thirteen years. I was at a low income, high poverty school and was having a difficult time engaging my students. I had seen Robert Marbury’s work about ten years earlier and had wanted to do something with it but had never had the opportunity. Recognizing the student's need for play, I first approached this lesson with one class bringing in several garbage bags of stuffed animals my daughter had discarded.

The …

Temporary Sculpture: Activating The Ordinary, Julia Mack

Teaching Resource Archive

Invite students to use everyday objects as art making materials. Through this lesson students will be challenged to consider how everyday objects can be re- imagined as art making materials. In this lesson students will research and discuss every day materials from the art room as materials for sculptures. Students will also consider how the ordinary spaces around them could be activated by the addition of a sculpture.

Install America (Or Wherever You Are), Connie Stewart

Higher Education Resources

The following project was developed as a requirement in an Art Education preparation course at the University of Northern Colorado. The program is strong in traditional academic skill building as are many of the k-12 art programs in the area. Teacher candidates must take courses in drawing, painting, ceramics, sculpture etc.

Art In The Age Of Networks - Networks As A Way Of Thinking, Rabeya Jalil

Higher Education Resources

The theme-based and material-based units (with lessons and lesson sequences) propose a curriculum for one academic semester in an undergraduate visual arts school (for sophomore, 2nd year, or junior, 3rd year students). However the lessons could be modified and tailored to any age group developmentally. This curricular framework aims to foster collaboration (within individuals, materials and disciplines), explore networked pedagogy and networks in pedagogy as a collaborating force through and with the visual arts and explore the materiality of the code and the digital media. The course also engages with new media theory and literature, investigates the materiality of the …

Big Data Visualities, Ron Wigglesworth

High School Resources

Make sense of abstract Big Data numbers by creating concrete, static or kinetic images/visualities which communicate or translate the meaning of the numbers to a human scale of understanding. The subject of the visualities should be created in each student’s artist voice, with the freedom and empowerment to express their own social, economic, political and ecological concerns so his/her work has personal meaning and strength of concern. Employ art hand skills in 21st century postmodern art by using Big Data to illustrate interdisciplinary social justice concerns in visualities, created to move a viewer to action.

Seedfolks: An Integrated Literature And Visual Art Unit, Michi Thacker

Teaching Resource Archive

The book Seedfolks takes place in Cleveland, Ohio, in an inner-city vacant lot. The story develops through a series of 13 vignettes, each culturally isolated character bringing his/her unique perspective and contribution to the story as the trash-ridden lot slowly develops into a community garden.

Through And Beyond The Barbie: 3 Themed Lesson Sequences, Rabeya Jalil

Middle School Resources

This lesson sequence will facilitate students to collaborate, explore and experience themes that they can personally relate to on a deeper and meaningful level. The purpose of this unit is to foster a safe and creative environment for early adolescents of 11 – 14 years (7-8th grades) to explore their personal identities, their gender, their socio-cultural beliefs, their values, through critical thinking, self-reflecting, and art making. Through engaging in a conversation and exploratory dialogue to deconstruct the layers that form identity and culture, using both in the traditional and digital media (collage, printmaking, drawing, digital photography, video, Scratch programming software, …