Investigating Contemporary Art

Investigating Contemporary Art is designed to help middle school students and their teachers explore contemporary artworks in Experience Art and investigate their meanings. When students explore contemporary art they engage with ideas, identities, values, and perspectives of their own time. This card set focuses on contemporary art so students become familiar with artists, artworks, and artmaking possibilities of their own time, but more importantly, so they have access to perspectives on the world that they inhabit.

Seeking and finding meaning through encounters with art is an ability students can develop and carry with them into adulthood. Because students can be hesitant to engage in group discussions, this card set is designed so they don’t always have to come up with their own ways to describe art. Using the components provided, students will decide if a word given to them might somehow “fit” the work in question. By engaging in open-ended discussions about artworks, young people can develop new understandings and important insights about the world, each other, and our relationships.

Components

• 48 Art Image cards include six copies of each image from the eight unit openers to facilitate small group discussions through prompts on the back of each card.
• 32 Descriptive Words cards feature terms students can use to answer the question “What do you see?”
• 32 Expressive Word cards feature terms to assist students in answering the question “What moods or feeling are suggested?”
• 32 Themes and Ideas cards provide possible answers to the question “What is the artwork about?”
• 48 Evolving Ideas cards include eight identical sets of cards with terms describing contemporary artmaking approaches.
• Teacher’s Guide provides instruction, additional information, and teaching support for meaningful interactions.

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