Blog Category: Primary and secondary schools

Wine Making (Vine Shoots, Putti Gathering Grapes and Male Bust; Grape-gathering Cupids); detail | c. 350 CE | Chiesa di S. Costanza (Rome, Italy) | Image and original data provided by SCALA, Florence/ART RESOURCE, N.Y. ; artres.com ; scalarchives.com | (c) 2006, SCALA, Florence / ART RESOURCE, N.Y.

Gregory K. Martin, Ph.D.
Upper School Director, La Jolla Country Day School

In a compelling study of Western United States history, Patricia Nelson Limerick quotes Nannie Alderson, a former Virginian who moved to Montana in 1883. Alderson, looking back on a unique feature of her experience, recollected that there was on the frontier an abundance of cans: “Everyone in the country lived out of cans […] and you would see a great heap of them outside every little shack” (“Closing the Frontier and Opening Western History”).

Jacob A. Riis | East Side Public Schools 1; ca. 1890 | Museum of the City of New York

When I first joined Artstor, it was from the perspective of an art history and humanities teacher. In my own little niche, the Artstor Digital Library was what one friend called “the candy store for art historians.” As I familiarized myself with the wide array of candy available, I was also building my understanding of the way the Common Core State Curriculum Standards include visual resources in research, analytical, and presentation skills across the K-12 curriculum. It was then that I began to see the Digital Library as the candy store for all of us, including K-12.

Pantheon; Interior view #1 | 118-126 CE | QTVR Panoramas of World Architecture (Columbia University) | Visual Media Center; learn.columbia.edu

By Dana Howard

True confession: I was a sporadic—and inattentive—user of the Artstor Digital Library. My high school was a fairly early adopter of Artstor. I used it a lot on those early years, but as I had more and more of my slides “in the can,” I stopped paying attention to the changes taking place in the Digital Library.

I would periodically run to Artstor when I was asked to do presentations at the last minute, (I found the ability to do a quick download of Image Groups to PowerPoint very helpful), but for the most part I was too busy to explore new tools and new collections as they were announced. I think I was typical for a high school user; I was busy teaching and felt constantly bombarded with new resources elsewhere.

Jacob Lawrence | The migration gained in momentum, 1940-41| Image and original data provided by The Museum of Modern Art | © 2008 Estate of Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Margaret Teillon
Volunteer educator
Wachovia Education Resource Center, Philadelphia Museum of Art

From a very early age children love to read, be read to, and look at pictures in books. Recognizing the joy children bring to picture books, I have developed teaching materials using selected children’s literature combined with Artstor images. My goal is to enhance literacy instruction and provide an interdisciplinary method of teaching social studies, language arts, and art appreciation. For the youngest students, I have enhanced books such as Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown; and for elementary students have developed images for Martin’s Big Words by Doreen Rappaport. Included in each enhanced book is an OIV presentation and image palette with accompanying quotes from the text, and Web links to additional creative lessons. Teachers and homeschool educators have borrowed these materials for their own students.

Jacquelyn DeLombard

Beginnings Pre-School owner/teacher, Philadelphia Museum of Art Teacher Resource Center volunteer

Several weeks ago, the pre-kindergarten and kindergarten children from Beginnings Learning Center were at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) for one of the five lessons they attend during the school year. For the program, “Museum Looks and Picture Books,” PMA had sent the book, A Chair for my Mother, to school for the children to read prior to their visit, and now the class was following the guide to the American Wing to look at and discuss chairs. All of a sudden a child yelled, “Look! There’s Chuck Close! I want to go look at the rectangles and squares!”

Mark Rothko, No. 13 (White, Red on Yellow)1958. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. © 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Jean (Hans) Arp, Objects Arranged According to the Law of Chance, 1930. The MoMA. © 2009 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

ordered by Sultan Mehmed II, Topkapi Palace; Outer Court; Tiled Kiosk interior,Istanbul, Turkey, 1473. Image and original data provided by Walter B. Denny

Various quiltmakers, Surprise Quilt Presented to Mary A. Grow, 1856. American Folk Art Museum

Obviously the children not only knew their shapes, but also were very familiar with Chuck Close, who had previously been the artist of the month in their classroom, and thanks to Artstor’s zoomable images were very aware of the shapes he used in his work.

Children are taught to recognize and classify objects around them according to the attributes of shape, size, and color. These are the basics for nearly all learning that follows: writing, reading, mathematics, and even common household tasks like matching their socks or putting away their toys. For years preschool teachers have collected picture files from magazines, calendars and discarded posters and artwork because, next to a concrete object, an image is the clearest way to teach a young child something new. With the images from Artstor, the teacher is able to use works of art to teach very young children the simplest concepts of shape, size, and color, and continue to the more complex as children are ready for additional attributes or combinations thereof. At the same time, the children are almost incidentally learning the names of the works of art and their creators.

With the images projected in front of them, they can create their own shapes in a variety of media: paint, shaving cream, chocolate pudding, or catsup. They can compare what they see in the images to things found in their own classroom: rectangular windows, circular tables, and the rhythm band triangle. On the way home they will see traffic signs and understand what they mean by the shape long before they can read the words. (Of course everything in the preschool environment is labeled, giving them the opportunity to compare the word to the object.) So when the children recognized the Chuck Close painting AND the shapes in it at the museum, the teacher knew they really understood what they had been taught.

This essay was a 2011 Artstor Travel Awards winner.

Yona Friedman, Spatial City, project Perspective, 1958-59. © 2007 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

Proportion and Perspective
Steven Wills, Coordinator, Wachovia Education Resource Center, Philadelphia Museum of Art 

This image group is meant to supplement a lesson in a middle-school math class that deals with measurement and proportion — usually in the context of geometry. There are several purposes of the image group, specifically:

• to help visual learners see how the concepts discussed in class can be applied;
• to help answer the question: “Why do we have to learn this?” (A frequent question in a math class); and
• to help show the connections between math and science and math and art, thus helping to build an interdisciplinary approach to teaching.

Constantinople, Christ the Saviour in Chora, Vault; Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple; detail of Joachim, Anne, Mary, High Priest Zacharias, and the Holy of Holies, c. 1310-21. Image and original data provided by Erich Lessing Culture and Fine Arts Archives/ART RESOURCE, N.Y. http://www.artres.com/

Catena (Vincenzo di Biagio), The Adoration of the Shepherds, probably after 1520. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Diagram Demonstrating Filippo Brunelleschi’s Perspective Technique from a Lost Painting of the Battistero di San Giovanni. Image and original data provided by SCALA, Florence/ART RESOURCE, N.Y.; artres.com; scalarchives.com; (c) 2006, SCALA, Florence/ART RESOURCE, N.Y.

Albrecht Altdorfer, Saint Sebastian Altar; Christ before Caiphas, c. 1509-1516. Image and original data provided by Erich Lessing Culture and Fine Arts Archives/ART RESOURCE, N.Y. http://www.artres.com/

Albrecht Durer, Madonna with the Monkey, circa 1498. The Illustrated Bartsch