In a time of educational budget cuts, the arts seem to take the major brunt of the financial ax. Fine arts programs are often pitted against one another for survival. The music industry and supporting corporations, such as American Express, campaign to have instruments donated or purchased to keep educational programs alive. The visual arts do not…

In the lesson described, the middle school students had been studying the artist Georgia O'Keeffe and the history of her work. Students enhanced their flower portraits by adding a matching border and connecting the lesson to other subject areas. Students dissected a flower and drew a small diagram of the flower and labeled the parts. This is an…

Since opening in 1999, the art studio at the Northeast Center for Special Care (NCSC) serves as a reprieve from the tragedy of loss that pervades every corner of the facility. Working for over two decades with people who have a wide range of disabilities, artist Bill Richards creates a charmed space in the NCSC studio. The neighbors, as they are…

An important revival in art education seeks to provide adolescents with art projects that are culturally and politically relevant to their lives. Stimulated in part by both a postmodernist attitude and the attention to visual culture, such projects address content that is meaningful to students' families, their futures, and their society. These…

In these times when educational standards, assessment, and evaluation of core subjects seem to dominate the public school agenda including early childhood, the challenge for educators to provide essential art experiences for children is daunting. Examinations of the greater educational value of art media can reveal some answers. Knowing how…

Hauntology refers to spectral traces, phantom voices, and palimpsestic discourses that help construct a way of understanding ourselves and acting in the world. This essay explores the hauntological shifts within art education's struggle over popular (visual) culture through a review of positions that view popular culture as an embodiment of…

This article is based on nearly 25 years of working with and studying folk art and folk artists. While certified art educators and their university teachers may think they are inclusive in their understandings about art and learning processes, generally speaking, they are either unaware or tend to ignore folk artists' ways of understanding the…

Miriam Schapiro's moving artworks take on a life of their own, without the use of traditional chiaroscuro or muscular-skeletal correctness. Taking on the medium of mixed-media collage and raising it from banal reality to high art, Schapiro infuses her work with enough art elements and design principles to stimulate rooms full of art students at a…

This paper chronicles the development and updating of a visual arts education policy paper produced by the Southeastern College Art Conference (SECAC). The first statement was drafted and approved by the membership and published in 1995. The revision process for the second statement began in the spring of 2003 and was reviewed by the board of…

The visual art of Marion C. Martinez is examined. Through technology, Martinez reproduces and transforms traditional Indo-Hispanic art forms, at the same time, underscores New Mexico's history as a dumping ground for technological waste.

This brief article describes the historical, cultural, and artistic elements of Vincent van Gogh's oil on canvas "Undergrowth with Two Figures" of 1980. The article concludes with questions for students to consider in relation to these aspects of the painting.

This brief article describes the life of Maria van Oosterwijck. It also discusses her art and its significance and symbolism. A list of suggested activities for elementary, middle, and high school students is included.

Sandpainting is very much a part of the heritage and culture of the Navajo Indians of the American southwest. To separate the Navajo from their art is like trying to separate them from their land. One of the most unique art forms from the American southwest region is sandpainting. This column describes how to introduce sandpainting into the…

A prevailing assumption of Western theorizing about art is that each work of fine art is to be attributed to a single individual, "the artist" who created it. Art education, particularly in art history, reflects this assumption. Despite the "New Art History" of the 1980s that revised and diversified the canon, education in art history remains a…

Paintings emerge from a culture field and must be interpreted in relation to the net of culture. A given culture will be implicated by the sign system used by the painter. Everyone agrees that in Chinese landscape paintings, the most important cultural bond is to ancient Chinese Taoism, and to a lesser degree, to Confucianism. Obviously, then, the…