Blog Search results: "AP® art history"

Reliquary of Sainte-Foy, from Conques, ca. 1000, with gothic additions. Image and original data provided by Erich Lessing Culture and Fine Arts Archives/ART RESOURCE, N.Y., artres.com

Tlatilco, Female figure, 1200-900 B.C. Image and data from: Princeton University Art Museum, Image © Princeton University Art Museum, photo: Bruce M. White.

Jean Antoine Houdon, George Washington Statue; overview, 1785-1788, Richmond, VA. Image and original data provided by Art on File; artonfile.com.

Made for Prince al-Mughira, Pyxis of al-Mughira; the prince seated with his lutist and fan-bearer, 968. Image and original data provided by Walter B. Denny.

Each May, around the world, almost twenty five thousand students sit for the AP® Art History exam. This year’s test falls on the third of May (a date not lost on many seasoned Art History teachers). It is also quite different from the AP® exam you or your children may have taken. This time, students will be taking a test that covers a newly designed AP® Art History curriculum. This is the first year that the exam is truly global in nature.

This curriculum includes works from the European tradition that we all learned in our survey course, such as the Acropolis, but also goes beyond that to include artists from Native American tribal traditions, the rest of the Americas, and works from the Pacific, Africa, and Asia. There are now 250 key works of art or architecture that a student must know quite well in addition to those the teachers and students explore to round out the experience. For the first time, the AP® Art History exam covers something of the cultural heritage of each student in the room while providing them the chance to learn about our global artistic production.

Wangechi Mutu, A Little Thought for All Ya’ll Who’re Thinking of Beating Around the Bush, 2004. Contact: Alexandra Giniger, Studio Manager, Wangechi Mutu Studio ali@wangechimutu.com

Next week we will offer Teaching Global Contemporary Art in AP® Art History, the second in our series of occasional webinars on works of art and architecture in the AP® Art History curriculum. To help us navigate this topic, we have enlisted art historian Dr. Virginia Spivey as our guest presenter. Dr. Spivey specializes in the art of the late-20th and 21st centuries and the scholarship of teaching and learning in art history (you can read about her many achievements below).

Global Contemporary Art is represented in the curriculum framework by 27 works of art; after polling a group of AP® Art History teachers, Dr. Spivey has settled on the work of five artists: Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Mariko Mori, Wangechi Mutu, Xu Bing, and Bill Viola.

Please join us Monday, April 4th at 7PM EST for a lively discussion on these contemporary artists and the art and ideas that influence them. Register here.

— Dana Howard, Senior K-12 Relationship Manager

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For more than 19 years, Dr. Virginia Spivey has taught in museum and academic settings, where she has received two university teaching awards and multiple nominations. Since 2009, she has worked independently, providing expert content and developing curricular resources for clients including Pearson-Prentice Hall and Smarthistory at the Khan Academy while teaching part time at Georgetown, the George Washington University, and the Maryland Institute College of Art. Dr. Spivey recently revised the chapter on “Art since 1950” as a contributing author to Stokstad’s Art History (forthcoming 2016) and is currently working with the National Gallery of Art to redesign their docent training curriculum in art history. Since 2014, she has been a contributing editor at AHTR, a peer-populated open educational resource and online community for art history instructors, where she served as project leader to create Art History Pedagogy and Practice, an academic e-journal slated to launch in fall 2016.

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Kwakiutl, Transformation mask, 1917 or earlier. Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology

I continue to be amazed by the possibilities for teaching the new Advanced Placement® Art History Curriculum with Artstor. As we gather images to place in our growing AP® Art History Teaching Resources and draft the accompanying essays and links, I sometimes pause to marvel at how the curriculum interconnects. Those key works of art and architecture required for AP® Art History tell a powerful story. Along with the Digital Library’s 1.8 million images, I am seeing how having a deep reservoir of images really helps makes the large task of preparing to teach this new curriculum manageable and fun.

Jacques-Louis David | The Oath of the Horatii | 1784 | Musée du Louvre | Image and original data provided by Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, N.Y.; artres.com

Artstor’s AP® Art History Teaching Resources support the revised Curriculum Framework for the Advanced Placement® Art History course. The image groups and accompanying essays will eventually cover all 250 key works of art and architecture required for AP® Art History courses. Along with the Digital Library’s 1.8 million images, the project enhances classroom teaching in preparation for the AP® exam and provides support for anyone teaching these works of art.

Senior K-12 Relationship Manager Dana Howard, an experienced Art History teacher, has been leading the team creating the project.

The ‘Codex Mendoza’, pt. I.; fol. 002r, early 1540s. Image and original data provided by the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. Copyright Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.

As we built our AP® Art History Teaching Resources over the last three years, we found ourselves fascinated by some of the newly required content. The art of the Colonial Americas is represented in the curriculum framework by six distinct objects. One of these is the “Codex Mendoza,” named for the first viceroy of Mexico (1535-1550), who commissioned it c. 1542 (contributed to the Artstor Digital Library by the Bodleian Library). Intended as a gift to Charles V, the manuscript never reached the monarch.

Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper during restoration, 1982-1999. Image and original data provided by Erich Lessing Culture and Fine Arts Archives/ART RESOURCE, N.Y. http://www.artres.com/

I continually come across astounding images when crafting our resources for use in the AP® classroom; they serve as a reminder that a work of art is often subjected to dramatic events. Moreover, that these images stem from so many different places underlines the special value of the Artstor Digital Library.

Recently, in gathering the 24 images to support the teaching of Leonardo’s Last Supper, I found that we had seamlessly accessed eleven different repositories, from the Royal Library in Windsor Castle to the Musée national de la Renaissance–Château d’Écouen.

Egypt, Mummy of Ukhhotep, Middle Kingdom, ca. 1981-1802 B.C. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Come tomorrow evening, droves of miniature monsters will haunt our neighborhoods, jack-o-lantern-shaped candy bowls in tow. Amongst the groups of trick-or-treaters, though, one spooky creature will likely be absent: the mummy, which, despite being the star of many a horror film, never seems to be a Halloween costume favorite.

My guess as to why the mummy costume has never attained the cult status of, for example, the ghost is a purely pragmatic one. Dressing up as a mummy is a difficult task; cutting eyeholes into a white sheet is pretty straightforward. This is a fact that my own failed childhood attempt at dressing up as a mummy—which ended in my mother watching the rolls of gauze bandages she had dutifully wrapped around me immediately unravel—confirms.

An Egyptologist, however, might answer this question differently. For though the mummy of horror cinema is unrestful and vengeful, rising from the tomb to wreak havoc upon the living, in reality mummification was nothing more than a sophisticated burial ritual, meant to help lead the deceased to a peaceful afterlife.