Field trip: Minneapolis Institute of Arts

The Minneapolis Institute of Arts (MIA) is my favorite art museum to visit. I've grown up going there (it is only 15 minutes away from my house). I enjoy wandering the galleries, taking in the centuries of art history. I love visiting my favorite pieces every time I go--they're like old friends now, offering inspiration whenever I have artist's block.

For many people though, the MIA is not a familiar place, and is in fact a confusing one to visit. It can be overwhelming taking your kids there. What to see? How long should we stay? What's there to do? How do I keep the little ones engaged and not ready to leave within 15 minutes? I have a few suggestions for you, to make your visit to the MIA fun and informative.

The museum is always free, except for a couple galleries that have special exhibits. There's on street parking, and two parking lots that are free for museum visitors. I suggest not going on Fridays, as that is the day that usually has a lot of school groups visiting. It can be very noisy, crowded and distracting with all the kids passing through. Thursdays are a good time to visit--the MIA is open until 9pm, and they usually have some interactive art carts scattered around the museum. The information desk is always a great place to start--they have maps, suggestions of things to see, and free tours to take. The MIA's tours are really fun and interesting. They have different tours aimed at specific ages (they even have a tour for 3-5 year olds now).

I think the best way to experience the museum is to pick a particular floor or style of art to see. Don't try to see everything in one go--it just gets too overwhelming and mind numbing. I don't even try to see it all when I visit. An hour, maybe two, is a long enough time to see what you want to see, wander a little, and not be tired out.

For the young ones, a great way to get them excited to look at all the art is to have a scavenger hunt. My Mom came up with this idea--count all the dogs you can find in the art. You can also pick other animals, like horses (there are quite a few sculptures of those), or flowers, or boats...something that's not too difficult to find and will pop up a lot from gallery to gallery. Your kids will want to check each painting and sculpture to search for their chosen object. If you have multiple children, have each child pick a different thing to look for. The information desk also sometimes offers activity sheets to fill out, which can guide you through your visit.

The museum has a wonderful website: www.artsmia.org and I highly suggest checking it out before you visit. It's easy to browse, and there's just so much useful information. Upcoming events and exhibits, collection highlights, and educational resources. There's a whole section devoted to teachers, with pictures, lesson and field trip ideas. You can browse the MIA's entire collection online; it will tell you what gallery an object is in if it's on display, and you can see pieces that are currently in storage too. The museum only ever has about 10% of their total collection on display at any given time!

If you do just a little bit of research and preparation before you go, your visit to the MIA can be very rewarding and hassle free. Let the museum do the work for you--they want to share their knowledge with and pass a passion for art to the next generation. It doesn't have to be an intimidating place to visit.

Resource: Art for Kindergartners

I've got something special for you today. This is a fantastic article from the July/August 2010 issue of Home School Enrichment Magazine. They've given me special permission to repost the entire article here for all you AH! readers.
If you like what you read, please let them know. It's a great magazine with good articles and lots of resources.

Art for Kindergartners

Taking a look at how children develop artistically

By Ruth Beechick

Children’s art development passes through two stages. The first stage is manipulation of the materials. By manipulating, they gradually move into the stage of representation in which they come to represent various items in their drawings. Many teachers believe in letting children creatively develop through those stages. They are called developmentalists. Opposing them are teachers who feel that they must direct the children’s art to help them progress better. Thus two opposing views are 1) creative art development versus 2) directed art.

Creative Art and Directed Art

Children who are allowed to play with the crayons and paints and other art media will try out what they can do with them. One day a child may see a circle he made, put two “eyes” in it, and say. “Look, it’s me,” or, “It’s a man.” This way he gradually moves into the representation stage. At first the drawings represent something accidentally, and he names them after he makes them. Then he more and more often can plan ahead of time for his drawing to represent a man or other object.

Teachers who are developmentalists allow the children to use their own minds and grow creatively in this art ability. They try to stimulate thinking by perhaps a visit to see farm animals, or watch an airplane, or some other experience. But then the children think up their own ways to draw their experience. They may not always do this well, but it comes from their own thinking. It promotes their growth in art ability and their cognitive development as well.

Teachers who think they can direct children’s art growth might after a farm visit hand the children a cow picture to color. Or they might show on the chalkboard how to draw a barn and ask the children to copy that model. These assignments are teacher-directed art.

Research on Creative Art

versus Directed Art

In a research on art development, 5000 children of kindergarten ages 4 to 6 were studied. For a period of two years, half the children copied adult designed models and half followed a program of creative art. Some children who had copied adult models were retarded in their own art progress for the full two years, as compared with the “creative” group. If a child is given only one or two models, he may still make progress in devising his own drawings for other objects. But if he repeatedly works from adult models, there is little opportunity left for his own development in art. In such cases the children tended to become classroom problems because they had difficulty thinking for themselves.

Another experiment with slightly older children was set up to help determine the effects of dictatorial methods of teaching. This research used 250 children of primary ages. All the children had been in a program of creative art, but at the time of the experiment 125 of them were given ten lessons of a restrictive or dictatorial nature, while the remaining 125 continued with their regular creative experiences. The restrictive art lessons consisted of copying drawings from the chalkboard or worksheets, coloring or tracing drawings, following verbal directions to produce drawings, and cutting geometric forms such as a triangle and a square to make a house. In these ways they drew such things as a house, apple, tree, bird, or snowman.

On the eleventh day both groups went to a fire station and on their return to school were asked to make pictures of their experiences. The drawings and paintings of the “creative” group illustrated their observations and personal reactions and were successful in varying degrees, while 44 percent of the “restrictive” group failed to depict the fire station outing at all, but resorted to doing trees and other items in the manner which they had been taught in the previous ten days. Still others in this group regressed to the stage of manipulating the art media, rather than performing at their usual higher stage—that of producing drawings from their own heads.

Hand or Mind

We can’t teach drawing by drilling on the physical skills; it comes from the mind. When Joni Eareckson became a quadriplegic she thought she would not be able to draw anymore. But a therapist told her the drawing skill was not in her hand; it was in her head. With this encouragement, she learned to hold a pen in her mouth and draw the pictures that were in her head. If your children draw ears too large, or if they leave out the trunk of a person and attach legs directly to the head, it is not hand training they need so much as time for the mind to develop more and opportunity to sharpen their powers of observation. One way to sharpen their observation and develop their thinking is through drawing—their way, not ours.

The creative approach to art not only develops the aesthetic nature; it also helps children’s cognitive development. The children who made their own decisions about how to show the fire station trip and who solved the problems in carrying out their plans were more active mentally and were active on a higher mental level than if the teacher had given them a fire truck to color, or had drawn a model station for them to copy.

Here, then, is a dilemma because of our modern habit of using published lessons. A published lesson would end with the fire truck or whatever to color, not a creative activity. A publisher’s staff that understood the creative system once planned lessons to fit the creative approach. All the teacher materials were there as usual, but the lessons did not end with a picture to color. They gave the teacher creative ideas instead, sometimes games or other activities. Or if they suggested art it was the creative kind of assignment.

The staff did not get away with this for long. The publisher wanted to get more money from more student sheets to sell. And the teachers had been brainwashed into thinking the lessons must end with a fire truck to color or other fact from the lesson. They thought that was the “doing” part of the lesson. The children first learned by listening; then they “applied” the lesson with crayon and paper. Moreover, the Sunday school teachers wanted the sheet to say something to parents when it was sent home; it was a message for the parents and not primarily for the students.

So that publisher and his customers went back to the old way. Each week their children bent over a table, crayon in hand, working quietly. Everybody thought that was great education. They loved the “doing” time at the end of the lesson, little knowing that the children’s minds would be growing more if they were planning their own drawing of a fire station or of sheep in a pasture or of whatever was in the lesson.

It might be better if we relied less on art or handwork for academic learning and made more use of games, rhymes, sound stories, conversation, pretending, and other learning activities. In homeschooling, art often is just for art, and not necessarily to help other content learning. Or try it for worship. Children could enjoy the beautiful colors God made. They could express joy in using the hands God gave them. One four-year-old was painting with blue when the teacher said quietly, “God made blue.” “He did?” the child exclaimed with surprise in his voice, and he painted his blue with new vigor. After that, the teacher would not think of pulling the child down to the level needed to complete a directed painting lesson—even with blue.

God created wondrous beauties for man to enjoy, and He created man with an aesthetic side to his nature so he can enjoy them. One of man’s first jobs was to dress the garden and keep it. God’s plan for the tabernacle included elaborate art, for which He gave men the necessary skills. Much of the greatest art in the history of the world is that which was done to the glory of God.

All children, of course, will not grow up to be artists, but all should experience art creatively, especially during the kindergarten and primary years when they are developing through the manipulative and representative stages of art thinking. We give opportunities for children to grow in their language, their muscular coordination, their singing, and numerous other ways. We can let them grow in art as well. 

Dr. Ruth Beechick has taught all elementary grades and has watched many children develop in their art ability.

© 2010 by Ruth Beechick

This article was originally published in the Jul/Aug 2010 issue of Home School Enrichment Magazine. 

Learn more at www.HomeSchoolEnrichment.com

Resources: Incredible Art Department

An artist I know from MNartists suggested I pass this website onto you. The Incredible Art Department http://www.incredibleart.org is a sprawling site chock full of art lesson and project ideas for preschoolers all the way to college level, links to other art related sites, newsletters and much, much more. It's a large site with A LOT of content, so there's a bit of informational overload. It can be a bit overwhelming to figure out what to look at first. I suggest setting aside some time to explore it, because there's definitely a lot of good stuff there. For such a large website I found it easy to navigate--the design is simple, there are tabs at the top of the page with drop down menus to choose from, and if you want to go back to the main page you just click on the picture of mona lisa at the top of the screen. It's aimed at school teachers, so the lessons would need to be modified to your smaller groups/individual students. 

Projects: Illustrate your own story

Materials:
-Paper
-something to draw and write with

Here's an activity to get the creative juices flowing--have your kids write a story and illustrate it. And it's a two-for-one project: you're combining writing skills and art.

Some kids have a hard time coming up with anything to draw when faced with a blank sheet of paper. They're usually so full of ideas, but once they have that pencil in hand and a clean piece of paper in front of them, their mind just goes blank. Other kids "don't like art" and don't think they're creative, so they just won't try when given an art assignment. And there's the kid who always insists on drawing a dog or a tree, no matter what the assigned project happens to be, because they're afraid of going beyond what they know. (these are all examples from classes that I've taught)

This activity helps all of these kids stretch their creative muscles without realizing it. First, have your child write a story. It doesn't matter what it's about as long as it's at least a few paragraphs long. Storytelling seems to come naturally to pretty much all the kids I know. Once they have the story finished, ask them to pick a few scenes to illustrate.  It's not so scary when there's already some ideas there for them to draw. It can be as simple as showing what the characters look like to an epic, highly detailed action scene. The point is that they're creating pictures to go with their story.

An alternative activity could be to have one child come up with the story and another to illustrate it. I used to do this with my younger sister, Leah. Ever since we were little, she has has always been a wonderful storyteller, whereas I was always more interested in coloring in all the pictures in my chapter books. She would fill her notebooks up with a fantastic tales, and I would draw the characters for her. It was a fun thing for us to do together.

The point of the project is just to get your kids drawing, giving them a jumping off point for their art. Sometimes a few constraints can open up a world of possibility. Rather than starting with a blank page, this can jump start their imagination and creativity.

Resources: miniature art article

Here's some out of the box creativity for you: art carved from the tips of pencils.

Resources: women in art video

This is a fun little video that got a lot of press a couple years ago. It's a beautiful sequence of women's faces over hundreds of years of art.

An Introduction to Art History

For many people their knowledge of art history goes something like this: Egyptian, Greek and Roman, Middle Ages, the Renaissance, some other stuff, Rembrandt, Impressionism. And after Impressionism it all got a little weird, and it looks funny, and that's not art, so let's just stop with Monet because I don't understand it after that point anyways.

Now this was my view before I went to college (though I didn't realize it at the time). It's very easy to be in a box and not know it. Thankfully, I had some wonderful art professors who really opened my mind, expanded my knowledge and taught me some good art history. Now you don't need a four year degree or to memorize all the -isms and definitions of the art world to enjoy a work of art. You can simply enjoy an object for its beauty. But knowing a little background information can greatly increase your understanding and help you see how this painting relates to that sculpture and how this sculptor might have been influenced by that painter. You can look at a painting, sculpture, installation, drawing, etc, in its historical context and see what might have influenced its creation and also what artists were inspired by it later.

Art History is not separate from World History; I think sometimes we forget that. Art is not created in a vacuum. Artists have always reacted to world events in their art making. Pablo Picasso made his famous Guernica painting in response to an event that actually happened. There's a reason that Michelangelo choose David instead of another Biblical figure for his statue for the city of Florence. There's always a reason and purpose behind every work of art. You just have to find out what it is,and suddenly you see a row of boxes in a completely different light.

I think in general, we have a good understanding of classical art--Egyptian, Greek and Roman, Medieval and Renaissance art history. It's not difficult to find books, videos, curriculum, on these time periods. It's easy for us to understand, there are only a few major artists and art movements to know. It doesn't seem like things changed very quickly. This art style led to that one, that artist built on his master's work and his apprentice continued with the ideas passed onto him. But right around the Renaissance things started to change and much quicker, we have a lot more information to sift through, art styles started to overlap, and one artist might be part of several different art movements during his lifetime.

Once we pass Impressionism, modern art as we know it starts to rear its head. And that's where a lot of people get turned off. It's weird, it makes me uncomfortable, it doesn't look like anything...I don't understand it. And if you don't understand the "why" of something, it's hard to teach the "what." You don't have to like it but modern art is an important part of the historical timeline. My personal aesthetic leans more towards the graceful, flowing lines of Art Nouveau and I used to find most modern art ugly and disconcerting. But since I started studying art history, I've come to the point where I can appreciate the ideas and meanings behind a work of art even if I don't necessarily find it "beautiful" in my eyes.
 
If I want to be a well rounded artist, I need to understand my work in context of art history, and I don't live in the 1800s. I need to understand my work in the context of today and the art of the last century. I can choose to reject the ideas of those who have come before or find ideas that speak to me and expand on those. I know art history overall and in general. But I also have specific, detailed knowledge of important movements and artists and art that speak to me specifically.

 In the same way, as you are teaching you don't have to know,  in every little detail, every single artist and art style. You can have a general grasp of the important ones, and you don't have to overly focus on art styles you don't like. But just because you don't like it doesn't mean you shouldn't teach it at all. It is important whether you like it or not. Each artist has their place on the art timeline and we can't just pick and choose who we want in the history books. They are there for a reason.  Each art movement flows out of ideas and work from the ones that have come before, whether through embracing and expanding on those ideas, or completely rejecting them and going in a new direction.

So you're probably wondering at this point, "Well, how do I find all this information, in an easy to understand format, and turn it into something my kids will enjoy?" Well, that's what I'm here for! My goal for this site is to collect all the helpful stuff into one place for your perusal. I sift through all the junk floating out there to find the gems--things that are fun, interesting, and informational. And I'm here to share my own experience and knowledge of making and teaching art.
I'm also a huge fan of my local library. You can search through their system for books on a particular subject and just put as many as you want on hold. If a book isn't what you want or is too dull, you can just bring it back. That's how my siblings and I learned so much about topics that interested us--we'd get all the books we could on it from the library. For our library, you can have up to 100 books checked out at once, and believe me, we've done that more than once. I work at a bookstore and can tell you that that's a great resource as well. Booksellers have a lot of knowledge and are usually just waiting for someone to come along and ask for book suggestions.
If reading isn't your thing, you want someone to show you how it's done, youtube is a great resource. There's obviously a lot of junk on the site, but there's also a lot of great educational videos. I'll post good videos on here as I find them. Also, there are a lot of tv shows and documentaries, some of them you can watch online for free.
And I'm a big fan of Google, especially their image search. You'll notice me linking to that a lot. If you want to find information, that's a great place to start.

Art doesn't have to be boring, friends.