Art teachers highlight the value of art interpretation and art criticism in their curriculum. High-school students use birdhouses as any entry point for narrating their personal journeys; elementary students incorporate famous artists into their selfies; middle-school students use water-soluble oils for the first time; and more.
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Do you find that your students are open to interpretation? Are they open to being art critics about their own and other works of art? When initially introduced to art criticism, some may associate negative connotations with the word “criticism.” Art criticism, in practice, though, is generally positive and focuses on interpretation.
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The Appalachian Alphabet project grew out of my desire to address the literacy issues I saw in many of the children. Often younger children in our program were disinterested in books, and it was not unusual for the eight- to seventeen-year-olds to tell me they couldn’t read. The children seemed inspired to address this problem.
A couple of years ago, while taking my third-grade students on a field trip to the Art Institute of Chicago, a student asked me, "How come we don’t study any artists who are still alive?" He was right. At the time, my curriculum for third grade lacked any living artists, and although I incorporated more contemporary examples in my other grade levels, I knew I needed to make some changes.
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We often think of teenagers, as well as adults, standing awkwardly in front of their phone trying to get the perfect shot. A selfie is defined as a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically with a smartphone, and shared on social media. Thinking about our student population and their obsession with technology (as well as themselves), I thought, why not make a lesson out of this?
Christina Van Hamersveld and I teach at an arts and technology magnet school in a suburb of Dallas, Texas. Our middle-school program aims to attract students with exceptional creative thinking and raw artistic ability to experience our program and to make our mission of inspiring innovation a reality.
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In my Studio Art class, we always take on a painting unit immediately after our drawing unit. By this time, students have an understanding of value shading and rendering and look forward to working with color. A few years, back, I decided to have my students use water-soluble oils instead of acrylic paint.
Here We Make Our Home encouraged and challenged young adults to learn about who they are, research their cultural heritage, and share their views and beliefs in what it means to be of African American, Hispanic, Asian, or European descent living in the United States of America.
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I think all teachers would agree the ultimate goal of any art project, aside from refining technique, is to encourage students to cultivate a unique voice that challenges the viewer. How do you help foster this mind-set? What tools do they need to become master art idea builders? If you want students to see the importance in their ideas and the interpretive value it add to the viewers’ experience, you must help them prepare and value the process.
Amy Sherald is a Baltimore based artist acclaimed for her striking portraits of contemporary African Americans. She is known for painting skin tones in gray scale as a way of countering the association of color with race. Writing in the New York Times, Holland Carter explained that Sherald “gives all her figures gray-toned skin—a color with ambiguous racial associations—and reduces bodies to geometric forms silhouetted against single-color fields.”
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Jennifer “Vinegar” Avery constructs elaborate installations that combine sculpture, textile art, performance art, relational (or interactive) art, and audience participation. This approach reflects the blurring or outright removal of boundaries between media and art forms that exemplifies cutting-edge contemporary art. However, unlike some contemporary artists, Avery rejects pretention while embracing humor, playfulness, and a chance to create a joyful chaos.
