Art is integrated with subject areas such as math, science, writing, social studies, and music to create rich and holistic learning experiences. Young students explore cubism and develop collagraph prints inspired by a guitar study, elementary students use a Visual Thinking Strategy to evaluate art and literature, middle-school students sculpt clay bones and participate in an outdoor archaeological dig, high-school students collaborate with a professional artist to paint a mural that celebrates diversity, equity, and inclusion, and more.
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As an art teacher, I’ve always considered art to be central to the curriculum—a bridge that unites content areas in logical and meaningful ways. With art as a central focus, the interconnected concepts of the curriculum promote deeper understanding in students. The engaging nature of art can capture student interest, and learning becomes cumulative and holistic when art is taught as a subject within the general curriculum.
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Guitars abound in our home city of Nashville, Tennessee, but you don’t have to be from Music City to enjoy this multilayered lesson. My district’s scope and sequence specifies that second-grade students should create collagraph prints. With an eight-day schedule and therefore only about twenty classes in a school year, I wanted to make the experience as meaningful as possible. In this lesson, collagraph prints are connected with Picasso’s cubist collages and Blue Period artworks.
Recently, I was amazed by photographs of floating umbrellas positioned over a walkway on a street in Portugal. It was wonderful seeing the freckles of color reflected in the path below. Inspiration struck, and I thought how I would love for my students to work with umbrellas and create a similar floating display. What a unique canvas for them to discover on their artistic journey!
“Have you found the book of gold?” This was the question posed in a book that our reading specialist used to promote literacy at our school. The Book of Gold by Bob Staake (Random House Children’s Books, 2017) is about a little boy who wasn’t interested in anything, especially books. After a shopkeeper sends him on a journey to find a book that turns into gold, the boy discovers a world filled with wonderings and questions that lead to a life centered around curiosity.
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Sometimes you happen upon a great idea for a motivating lesson from watching your students try out new things. Such is the case with our archaeological dig project that was born from a student observing my life-size human skeleton located in our art room. The student asked if he could re-create the skull using clay. Being the teacher who wants to encourage experimentation, I naturally agreed. This student really didn’t enjoy observational drawing, but he had a natural affinity for working with his hands.
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This lesson demonstrated to students how a mathematical principle can be used pragmatically in a work of art, as well as how art can be used to enhance applied geometry. Students also learned how valuable a simple mathematical tool like a compass can be when creating shapes, and how those shapes can be transformed into meaningful art.
In 2020, I received a Missouri Arts Council grant to bring St. Louis artist Cbabi Bayoc to our small-town community. Cbabi’s first and last names are acronyms: Creative Black Artist Battling Ignorance and Blessed African Youth of Creativity. The grant resulted in a mural that was painted at the start of the school year, fueling excitement for our Globally Strong Culture Fair. The goals of our mural were to help students see themselves in the work and to spark curiosity about the wider world outside of our rural Ozark Community.
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One of the highlights of the Forbidden City in Beijing was the twelve imperial symbols of authority, embroidered upon the woven silk of China’s dynastic dragon robes. After viewing small embroidered huoji (Mandarin for colleague, partner) pouches/purses that were displayed in a Shanghai fiber arts exhibition, I discovered a practical way to apply these twelve historical Asian images to a contemporary project: cell phone pouches.
For the past twenty-five years, The St. Louis Symphony has sponsored an art contest called Picture the Music. The contest invites students to listen to a piece of music composed by classical composers. Students’ interpretation is on a piece of 12 x 18" (30 x 46 cm) paper using the art materials of their choice. Playing the music on repeat generates thoughts in students’ minds, enabling them to paint, draw, or collage a truly unique visual music experience.
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Dennis Osadebe (b. 1991) is a Nigerian mixed-media artist living and working in Lagos. His style, which he readily admits is post-Pop, is a unique expression of the current Afrofuturism aesthetic, blending traditional African subject matter and culture with contemporary life and futuristic vision. It is a style he refers to as “Neo Africa,” centered around the reimagining of African art with the use of positive, progressive, and evocative imagery.
