What are Fayum mummy portraits? Why don't more people know about them? And why are they important for art educators to know about and to integrate into their curricula? In this article, the author aims to answer each of these questions.

The Fayum mummy portraits from ancient Greco-Roman Egypt are exceptional in that they are the only surviving classical (ancient Greek and Roman) panel paintings from antiquity and are antecedents of Byzantine icons. Moreover, they hold important implications for art educators regarding multicultural education. They spotlight an exemplary pathway…

African American artists have participated in every major art style and movement since before the founding of this nation. However, until recent decades, this "grand epic" had been marginalized within the traditional survey canon of American art. Art historians have undertaken considerable scholarship (Bearden & Henderson, 1993;…

The National Visual Arts Standards (NVAS) present ways for students in the United States to create, present, respond, and connect to the world of art and artmaking. This article focuses on the practices of one visual arts educator, Educator A, who taught in a state-sponsored specialist music high school, guided by the following question: "How…

In this Instructional Resource, Denmead and Brown consider how "Ruffneck Constructivists," an exhibition curated by Kara Walker at the Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA), University of Pennsylvania, can disturb and provoke young creatives and art education more broadly. For this exhibition, Walker draws on the figure that MC Lyte…

In this article, the author examines how art educators can create narrators of art history rather than those who ascribe truth to the opinion of a few. She presents a series of tangible classroom activities that will potentially help art history become meaningful to students' lives. The author states that students have a right to access art…

What does an introduction to and engagement in performance art offer K-12 students? In this article, we respond to this question by proposing a lesson inspired by the artmaking practices of the contemporary artist Erwin Wurm. Performance art can be defined as any form of work that combines the artist's body and a live-action event with or…

Collecting and placing images/objects of inspiration and personal significance is not an uncommon practice for studio artists. Washington based mixed-media/installation artist Renee Stout draws from the collections she displays in her studio and in her home. She is an avid collector of various objects, including vintage perfumes, West African…

A primary goal of substantive art education is to communicate visually--to decipher art for meaning and to construct meaning through images and objects. Strategies available to engage students are the interdisciplinary activities found in performance, visual and written forms of creative expression, and related disciplines such as ethnography,…

This first written assignment of the semester for the author's undergraduate introductory art history class--an essay where students describe and reflect upon the significance of a family heirloom--is instrumental in meeting class objectives. The author's objectives in this class are for students: (1) to broaden their conception of what art is…

Advocacy is not new to art education. Over the years, Goldfarb (1979), Hodsoll (1985), and Erickson and Young (1996) have written about the importance of arts advocacy, but the concept of advocacy has evolved with the times. For example, in the 1970s, arts advocacy was described as a "movement" and brought together art educators,…

The consequence of narratives becoming stagnant or controlled is that they become a Master Narrative. The Master Narrative is an "ideological script that is being imposed by the people in authority on everybody else: The Master Fiction... history" (Moyers, 1990, para. 4). Master Narratives use myths and ideologies to sustain a sanitized version of…

Studying images of families in works of art and in snapshots is compelling, and the author wondered if looking at both types of images side by side might help students understand both kinds of images more fully. Snapshots often prompt detailed and vivid stories among family members and friends. Therefore, she wondered if dialogue about snapshots…

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…

A result of the industrial age was a short-lived but powerful new American art movement called Precisionism, most evident in painting, but visible also in drawing, photography, and print-making, focusing on industrial and mechanical subjects. Precisionism originated in the 1920s, allied with European Cubism's fascination with shape and geometric…