Art Is Messy

Living and teaching in Asia painfully reminds me of how inadequate my knowledge of non-western art is. I can rattle off movements and artists from Europe and the Americas without blinking an eye, but given the same challenge with non-Western art, nothing but the sound of silence would fill the air.

While it is impossible for art teachers to cover art created by all the peoples of the world over thousands of years in their classrooms, I do think it is our responsibility to make more of an effort. Often times, art from places such as Africa, Asia, and the Middle East are included in the curriculum as “special multicultural units.” While this is a noble attempt to expand our students’ knowledge of art, it simply doesn’t cut it. Art from areas such as the ones mentioned above should be incorporated into all lessons done throughout the year. Wouldn’t a lesson on landscape painting be more effective if students compared and contrasted  European and Asia images of nature? How might a student’s understanding of pattern might change after looking at textiles from America and Africa?

In order to start filling in the holes of my own art knowledge, I am starting to compile a list of online resources. Seeing I live in China, my stop is Asian art. I came across a link to San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum on the Asian Region Art Educators website and thought this was a great site to share. The museum’s education section has a series of very informative and very free PDFs on art from all over Asia. They are worth checking out.

If anyone has other good Asian art resources, please send me the link and I will post it to this site for others to see.

Although, I love teaching in China and wouldn’t want to be doing anything else at this point, at times I really miss teaching in New York. One of the things that I loved about being in New York was the tremendous amount of cultural resources that my students and I had at our finger tips. NYCkidsARTS summarizes all the great instutions that NYC has to offer. I wish there was a resource like this for Shanghai.

After reexamining my curriculum from last year, I noticed that I focused too much on thematic artwork. While my students were exposed to a great number of different artists who worked with similar themes, I felt that my students didn’t have a strong grasp of the lives of individual artists. So in order to address this issue right off the bat, I decided to begin the year with a lesson about Leonardo da Vinci. For this unit, students will learn about da Vinci’s charcoal portraits, his life, as well as some fun interesting facts. For example, did you know da Vinci was a vegetarian? Nope, I didn’t know either.

While searching internet for online resources that my students can use, I came upon these resources that I thought were well worth sharing. So here we go….

The first site that I really liked was Brain Pop. I knew that my school had a Brain Pop account, but I always kind of figured it was a site that focused on the Science and Math. Boy, I couldn’t have been more wrong!! To my pleasant surprise Brain Pop has a whole section on Art and Music! I clicked the Famous Artist and Musician link and found a little icon of da Vinci staring right back at me. His tiny expression seemed to say to me “Dummy, why didn’t you check me out before?” In the section about da Vinci, Brain Pop has a great little animation that answers the question “Why do so many people talk about da Vinci?” In addition, the da Vinci section has quizzes, activities, and a small time line.

Brain Pop also has animations about art movements, techniques, and other artists. I think this has now become my new favorite online resource for kids. I can just kick myself for not looking into Brain Pop sooner!

The second online resource on Leonardo da Vinci is the Universal Leonardo Museum, sponsored by the University of the Arts, London. While some of the text may be advanced for 5th graders, the galleries are great for exploring the vast variety of work that da Vinci is famous for. The images may be accessed through clicking the Explore and Browse tabs in the main navigation bar. What’s most exciting is their Play section. Here visitors to the site can make hybrid monsters, take a quiz that makes the Mona Lisa smile with each correct answer, practice Mirror Writing, and much, much more!