BELLEFONTE PROFESSIONAL LEARNING DAY
Cross-Curricular Thoughts
ARTS INTEGRATION RESOURCES
Bringing Art Into Your Classroom
Art has the ability to touch upon every subject that we teach, from various forms of math and sciences to history and culture, literature, world languages, cooking, performing and business… and beyond. You can be sure that a visual artist has fussed-over and problem-solved and attempted to make personal sense of practically everything you teach, and to explore it in an artistic way. Further investigation into how artists might work-through a topic you are teaching could assist in teaching to students who are visual learners or who might be interested to see how the topic is explored in a new way. By showing your students how an artist “solved” a problem visually, you might make a connection that wasn’t happening before. Art is just another way to explore our world, and for some of our students, it’s a way that helps their brains make deeper and more layered connections.
To help you generate innovative and arts-based lesson ideas, regardless of the grade you teach, we have compiled a brief list of artists and art periods you can further investigate, as well as other activities. This is not intended as a stagnant list, but a place to begin your search. We hope you find it helpful. If you are working on a specific topic or lesson and would like help in finding artists or movements, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us (and/or the art teachers assigned to your building).
MATH
Fibonacci: spiral/sequence as inspiration and composition/artists inspired by chaos theory
M.C. Escher: tessellations, perspective, fantasy, multiplication, geometry
Leonardo da Vinci: golden ratio, perspective, engineering
Piet Mondrian: architecture, proportion, geometry, shape, measuring, golden ratio
Agnes Martin: geometry, grids, graph, meditation
Hex Signs (PA German art): geometry
Frank Stella: geometry, shape
Pietro Perugino: scientific/math perspective
Renaissance Paintings: golden ratio
Jasper Johns: numbers and letters
Japanese origami: geometry
Frank Stella: shape, geometry
Robert Delaunay: shape, geometry, circles, movement
Alexander Calder: balance
Kandinsky: rhythm, music
Buddhist meditative sand mandalas: geometry
SCIENCES
Leonardo da Vinci: inventor, biologist
Bridget Riley: optical art (op art)
Andy Goldsworthy:earth art, ecology
Walter deMaria: lightning as art
Jackson Pollock: abstract expressionism, gravity
Henri Rousseau: nature/jungle paintings, botany
Georgia O’Keeffe: flowers, botany
Nancy Holt: earth artist, constellations
Impressionist Art: light effects on our eye and in paint, halation
Wheel-thrown pottery: centrifugal force/physics
Pottery glazes, clay and paint properties: chemistry
LANGUAGE ARTS
Illuminated Manuscripts: language, highly decorative texts
Zines: a noncommercial, often homemade or online publication usually devoted to specialized and often unconventional subject matter
Tom Phillips/Altered books or poems: visual found poems or a form of “blackout poetry”
Jasper Johns: words and letters within work
Jenny Holzer: truisms
Art tells a visual story. The following paintings would be good to use for descriptive writing exercises, poetry, bell ringers, close-reading examples etc.
Turner, Rain, Steam, Speed
Friedrich, Polar Sea
Homer, Snap the Whip
Turner, The Banjo Lesson
Works by the following artists would also be good: Bruegel, Hicks, Saar, Ringold, Degas, Wegman, Christo, Miro, Magritte, Dali, Daumier, Rausche
HISTORY
“Art is an ideological representation of the time in which it was created…”
Art speaks the language of history, and makes time and experience “visible”
Jacob Lawrence: painter. The Great Migration, Harriet and the Promised Land illustrated books
Andinkra cloth from Ivory Coast/Ghana also, mud cloth and Kente cloth (different African regions)
Australian Aboriginal dot paintings (perhaps a study into didgeridoo)
European Illuminated Manuscripts
Huichol Mexican yarn "paintings" (which I will be starting soon with my Art II students)
Mexican mural paintings (Diego Rivera/Frida Kahlo)
Ancient Greek Pottery: storytelling
Persian Miniature paintings
South African Ndebele house paintings
French Art Nouveau style
Russian Constructivist paintings vs. propaganda paintings
Russian Matryoshka stacking dolls
Japanese Kokeshi dolls
Banksy street art in the UK and around the world
Japanese printmaking and sumi brushwork
Persian rug making
Islamic mosaic tiles
American Indian totems and beadwork
Mexican Huichol yarn painting and Oaxacan wood carving/painting
SOCIAL JUSTICE
Kara Walker: African-American experience using silhouette
Faith Ringold: author/illustrator
Ai Weiwei: multi discipline artist
Jacob Lawrence: painter
Dorothea Lange: photographer during Great Depression era
Banksy: street artist
Diego Rivera: muralist
Favianna Rodriguez: poster prints
Kathe Kollwitz: printmaker
HEALTH/ PHYSICAL EDUCATION
Heather Hanson: kinesthetic whole-body drawing
Tony Orrico: kinesthetic whole-body drawing
Harold Eugene Edgerton: body movement in sports activity captured in photography
Giuseppe Archimboldo: vegetable/fruit portraits
Futurism: Italian visual art movement interested in speed
MUSIC
Kandinsky: Composition 8, Like MacDonald-Wright, Wassily Kandinsky wanted to archive the visual equivalent of writing a symphony with his paintings. Inspired by a performance of Wagner’s Lohengrin, the artist used colors and shapes to evoke sounds and named his paintings as if they were musical pieces, such as Composition 8, in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s permanent collection (1071 Fifth Ave.).
Romare Bearden: Bearden's style was influenced by numerous sources, including Western European art, African sculpture, the art of his contemporaries in America and Mexico, and music—especially blues and jazz. Bearden is most famous for his work in collage, which he used in unique and innovative ways.
Pablo Picasso: Three Musicians No trio in New York is as famous at Picasso’s Three Musicians, hanging in the Museum of Modern Art (11 W 53rd St.). The 1921 masterpiece sets three comedia dell’arte figures (including Pierrot on clarinet – a stand-in for the poet Guillaume Apollinaire and Harlequin – with whom Picasso identified, on guitar) in a late cubist-style scene. The composition, as well as a similar one at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, was influenced by Picasso’s original costume and set designs on the Ballets Russes production of Stravinsky’s Pulcinella.
Marc Chagall: The Triumph of Music and The Source of Music Perhaps no artist spent as much time working with musicians and performers than Marc Chagall. His whimsical style came partially from years of creating sets and costumes for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes.
Georgia O'Keeffe: Best known for her cattle skulls and flower buds, but earlier in her career, she painted a series of abstract paintings using “the idea that music could be translated into something for the eye,” she once said. The title alone of her 1918 painting, Music, Pink and Blue No. 2, at the Whitney Museum of Art (945 Madison Ave.), references her belief