Classes

Pizza Margherita, the Rolling Stones, a Scavenger Hunt, and a Few Unknowns: Introducing the High Italian Renaissance

Wednesday, April, 6th, 2016

This is one of the three winning entries to the Arts Future Classroom Competition 2015. Share your class with the Arts Future Classroom educators community here. 

The objective of this class is to develop and apply students’ critical analysis of similarities and differences between the styles of Michelangelo, Raphael, and Leonardo da Vinci; explore and analyze the significance of iconographic choices in Michelangelo’s and Raphael’s works at the Vatican.

This is a set of activities that can serve to “flip” one short unit in an introductory art history survey course. In the survey courses I teach (Renaissance to Modern Art), I need to introduce the students to the breadth of material that is expected from our overall university curriculum, but I choose to spend only a short amount of time on the Italian Renaissance so that we can focus more intensely on other material. These activities quickly get students thinking critically and creatively about course content which includes images that are some of the most likely candidates for prior familiarity, thus allowing for rapid advancement to in-depth critical analysis.

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#DrawMuseumSelfies

Thursday, February, 18th, 2016

This is an entry to the Arts Future Classroom Competition 2015. Share your class with the Arts Future Classroom educators community here.

The objective of #DrawMuseumSelfies is to use mobile technology to draw Museum Selfies. This class promotes creating art in museums, using mobile technology and social media for interactive learning in art history. This class may be used as a social activity, ice breaker, or a team-building game, for universities, institutions and networking members of all ages.

Students draw Museum Selfies using mobile technology in a social media classroom to communicate, research and share art history, learn basic digital drawing techniques, create inclusive online communities, and activate connectivity.

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Putting Words In Their Mouths: Writing an Artist’s Artist Statement

Sunday, November, 8th, 2015

This is one of the three winning entries to the Arts Future Classroom Competition 2015. Share your class with the Arts Future Classroom educators community here.

This lesson helps students think about what an artist is attempting to accomplish in their work, taking into consideration biography, commission, context, etc. In doing so, the hope is that the student will think about the role these pieces play in telling a story.

Artists of the Renaissance and Baroque periods are some of the most celebrated, and yet many never wrote specifically about their art. The aim of this lesson is to give those figures a voice. Selecting an artist from this period, we will discuss several of their works along with an analysis of a reading of a biography of and selected scholarship on the artist. Following this, we will break into groups, and each group will work as a class to write an “artist statement” for each piece we discussed. Using our discussion and research/reading as a guide, we will work to find the artist’s voice while we better connect to the works we are discussing.

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