The Dadaists were an unconventional group of artists who used their art to rebel against civilization in the early twentieth century. They experimented with a variety of media and often used machines as themes in their artwork. Dadaist artist Kurt Schwitters incorporated city refuse into his collages, including bus tickets, newspapers, cartons,…

This article describes a miniature painting project that allows students to research a master painter and then replicate the work on a smaller scale. This lesson focuses on the students' ability to learn to identify style, subject matter, themes, and content in painting through the study of historical paintings, and the application of various…

Plasticine clay is a bendable material that is easily manipulated by students of all ages. It is a great material to work with because it does not dry out from day to day, so high-school students can work on an extended project. They do not have to worry about the clay drying and cracking, and the entire work of art does not have to be completed…

The last two sections (EJ1039315 and EJ1039319) presented stories about specific moments or lessons. Also, situations infused with complexity where the writers had to toggle back and forth between providing the larger context and the details that support readers' understanding of that big picture were presented. In this section each story is…

The author could have chosen any ancient symbolic language, such as Egyptian or Pre-Columbian, but being from Denmark, she developed a unit that would introduce American students to artwork familiar to northern Europeans. Looking at examples of ancient art from Denmark and Sweden, students were to think about the use of symbols in ancient time and…

Many of the paintings of 20th-century American artist Philip C. Curtis defy clear classification. Curtis's artworks often show dreamlike and fantastical qualities and are therefore frequently pigeonholed as Surrealistic. While this classification is not completely erroneous, it fails to acknowledge some subtle differences between Curtis's artwork…

Mentoring in classrooms allows teachers the opportunity to be motivational tools in the lives of students while operating as role models. The current research shows that mentoring in the art classroom provides stimulation and the momentum to students who are less motivated with creative assignments. The first part of this study looks at the…

When artists are inspired to travel in Europe to study art and history of the Western world, Italy is a good place to start. With its ancient architecture, rich cultural heritage, and superb works of art, Italy has been the quintessential center of Western art history for centuries. It was the good fortune of Alabama-based artist and teacher…

Art history can be a little dry at times, but the author is always trying to incorporate new ways of teaching it. In this article, she describes a project in which students were to create a place setting out of clay that had to be unified through a famous artist's style. This place setting had to consist of at least five pieces (dinner plate, cup…

An art room should be a garden of visual stimulation, born of creativity, inquiry, critical thinking and intellectual conversation--and a little collaboration is not a bad thing either! When the author unpacked the new stools for her art room at the high school, she envisioned something more beautiful than the brown masonite circles that…

In this article, the author describes the last assignment of her Advanced Studio class, which was about art movement and movement in art. In the assignment, students were to find a master painting they really liked. They would then have to break it up (usually into foreground, middle ground and background) and reassemble it. The difficult part was…

In this article, the authors present a classroom activity called Pop Culture Peep. In this particular activity, students are required to first research famous artists and/or famous artworks to have an image to use as a reference. Students then plan out how they would decorate the Peep, deciding what materials they would use to create the Peep in…

In this article, the author describes a class project based on the work of contemporary American artist Red Grooms. Grooms is best known for his "sculpto-pictoramas," which are a combination of both painting and sculpture that literally pop off the page or out of the background.

In his book "A Whole New Mind," Daniel Pink describes the aptitude of Symphony as the ability to synthesize, or to put pieces together. Symphony is the capacity to see relationships, detect broad patterns, and to create by combining diverse elements together. The artist Wassily Kandinsky exemplifies Symphonic thinking. A pioneer in nonobjective…

Last year these authors addressed an issue in these pages that echoed Linda Nochlin 's (1971) haunting question, "Why have there been no great women artists?" (Clark, Folgo, & Pichette, 2005). That essay examined the question, "Have there now been any great women artists?" through a study of art history textbooks primarily written for college…