The United States has a visually stunning history of documenting its natural lands. In the late 1800s, Hudson River School painters captured national parks in the west (National Park Service, 2017). Ansel Adams is famously known for his rich black-and-white photographs of Yosemite and other national parks from the 1920s. In the 1930s, the Works…

This instructional resource presents contemporary works of art that illuminate and revel in the decadence, decay, and potential for regeneration imminent in organic matter decomposition. In so doing, these artists employ a range of strategies that might be drawn on in the art classroom: observing, illustrating, and reinterpreting decay;…

Art education has celebrated pluralism and cultural diversity to bring a more profound understanding between people from different backgrounds. However, since the spread of COVID-19, horrendous discriminatory crimes have increased, such as the 2021 Atlanta massacre, a shooting that targeted Asian American-owned massage parlors. These alarming…

An art curriculum is a composite of cultural expressions, the values and experiences that students and teachers bring with them into the classroom, and the social contexts of the learning environment (Kraehe, 2010). In developing art curricular materials, educators are encouraged to integrate a diversity of cultural perspectives. The contemporary…

Today several contemporary artists are using their artistic talents to help bring attention to the immigration debate. Westover School, the independent school where author Sara Poskas teaches, decided to address these issues by inviting one such artist--award-winning artist and architect Mohamad Hafez, a native-born Syrian, raised in the Kingdom…

The author introduces Hong Kong-based paper-tearing artist Sing Man Lee. Lee's paper-tearing art offers a lens for learning about traditional Chinese cultures as well as contemporary life in China. This instructional resource can serve as part of a multicultural art education curriculum, enriching students' art experiences by connecting their…

During the summer of 2016, through a teen arts internship, the author conducted research on some of the contexts, narratives, and activities that shape artist identity formation. The teen arts interns spent mornings engaged in activities such as discussion, writing, and making art, with a focus on art as activism, and spent afternoons as teaching…

The practices of artists and the field of artistic production is an iterative space--a rapidly evolving network of ideas and dialogic strategies, as well as collaborative and interdisciplinary practices. Artists function at the intersection of many disciplines as researchers, activists, and problem solvers. These practices provide an imperative to…

Author Jennifer Bergmark describes an art project with the purpose of providing a collaborative creative experience to break down school-community barriers and provide a space for conversation and community building. A goal for the school where this project took place, Stratton Academy of the Arts, located in Champaign, Illinois, is to create a…

The term "knolling" was first used in 1987 by Andrew Kromelow, then a janitor at Frank Gehry's Santa Monica studio (Heathcote, n.d.). At the time, Gehry, an architect, was designing furniture for Knoll. While cleaning the studio, Kromelow would arrange displaced tools at 90° angles to create an organized surface. Perhaps done out of…

Many students are actively involved with social networking sites; they follow friends in virtual worlds and post personal information and photographs online daily. Although they may not realize it, students are publicly "documenting" their private lives on social media to allow others to learn about them. Understanding documentation as a…

This article explores how new materialism can help conceive of art education practice as research. The discussion is organized in three parts. First, the authors examine how a practicing artist talks about materials as an aspect of creative artmaking experiences. The second section introducees new materialist concepts for thinking about the power…

This resource describes how one art classroom used "everyday labor" as a topic to connect artmaking to community workplaces. The work of Theaster Gates, Faith Ringgold, Jacob Lawrence, Jeremy Deller, and Adrian Piper are suggested to stimulate class dialogue about work, labor, and jobs. The author invited members of their farming…

During the author's visit to a state institution in Peterhof, Russia, in May 2016, it became clear that a human rights perspective, the disability rights movement, and the principles of disability studies had not yet entered the center. The center serves approximately 1,000 adult residents. While the staff of the art studio are dedicated to…

In contemporary art, many artists have incorporated playful and functional elements into their artistic expression beyond the conventional perception of art merely as an appreciated object. In this article, the authors touch on the movement of art in daily living and explore the playful, functional, and interactive nature of art by Tin Yan Wong, a…