Week 2 of MoMA’s Art and Inquiry challenged educators to think about “how teachers can help students use contextual information productively within dialogues about art“. Our required reading prompted us to think about “how educators can ensure facts will act as catalysts for significant meaning making”.
When we discuss art, educators must determine what matters most about the works’ contextual background to help students create coherent and personally meaningful interpretations. There should always be an exchange of contextual background and personal connections. Artists’ biographies, art history or critics’ reviews are never a hindrance when these facts and personal insights are gradually interwoven and “grounded on what students see”. What matters most is providing contextual background that shows students how art is relevant to their lives, improves global awareness and historical perspective and motivates students to explore how art informs other subjects.
A few weeks ago, I visited Woodstock, Vermont to hear the inaugural poet, Richard Blanco recite his poetry at a literary festival called Bookstock. Blanco told the audience he was assembled in Cuba, born in Spain, and imported to and raised in the United States. He recited several of his poems, which reveal his cultural heritage. Since the recitation, I have been thinking about lesson ideas for pairing his poetry with artwork that would prompt students to explore the themes of his poetry: place, home and identity and would motivate them to explore historical, political, social and cultural aspects of his work.
Significant meaning making and relevance is often missing in many classrooms. Inquiry and conversation about art can be the catalyst to help students find meaning and purpose in what they are being asked to learn across the disciplines because the visual literacy students acquire during discussions about art develop 21st century habits of mind, skills such as encoding, decoding, observing, inferencing, analyzing, evaluating, synthesizing, etc.
When we discuss art, educators must determine what matters most about the works’ contextual background to help students create coherent and personally meaningful interpretations. There should always be an exchange of contextual background and personal connections. Artists’ biographies, art history or critics’ reviews are never a hindrance when these facts and personal insights are gradually interwoven and “grounded on what students see”. What matters most is providing contextual background that shows students how art is relevant to their lives, improves global awareness and historical perspective and motivates students to explore how art informs other subjects. When students discover how to interpret and appreciate art, they learn there are individual and shared perspectives and contextual facts to consider involving the artist’s intent, the
artwork’s form, its time and place and more. Discussing all of these aspects of Form, Theme and Context allow students to discern personal and factual meaning to develop a sense of design, story, symphony, empathy, play and meaning needed to develop 21st century habits of mind.
For this week’s assignment, we were asked to browse through MoMA’s online Collection, choose an image, research some information about the work of art using MoMA.organd/or other online sources, and respond to these questions:
- What drew you to this work of art?
A few weeks ago, I visited Woodstock, Vermont to hear the inaugural poet, Richard Blanco recite his poetry at a literary festival called Bookstock. Blanco told the audience he was assembled in Cuba, born in Spain, and imported to and raised in the United States. He recited several of his poems, which reveal his cultural heritage. Since the recitation, I have been thinking about lesson ideas for pairing his poetry with artwork that would prompt students to explore the themes of his poetry: place, home and identity and would motivate them to explore historical, political, social and cultural aspects of his work.This past June, I visited the Art Institute of Chicago and had a chance to see Cuban born American photographer Abelardo Morell’s exhibit The Universe Next Door where I saw Empire State Building in Bedroom, 1994. This piece is also included in MoMA’s online collection. I chose it because I believe this particular photograph when paired with Blanco’s poem America can be used as catalyst for significant meaning making in many disciplines. Juxtaposing Morell’s Empire State Building in Bedroom, and Blanco’s poem America will help students reflect on how a photograph can evoke a different layer of meaning for a poem, and how a poem can influence one’s interpretation of a piece of art. The photograph and the poem together are powerful tools to teach students how art informs other subjects, and how similar ideas and themes can be expressed differently through images and in writing. The subject of both of these pieces also allow students to explore various events in world and American history, such as Cuban Missile Crisis, the Freedom Flights of 1960s, and the Bay of Pigs invasion. Both pieces can also spark social and cultural discussions about acculturation and the effect of re-contextualizing the familiar. In essence, the possibilities for historical, political, social and cultural discussions by juxtaposing the photograph and the poem are endless.
- What information were you able to find about the artist’s work?
Both artists are Cuban-American, and immigrated to the United States as children. Both Blanco and Morell’s families were Cuban exiles in New York, who escaped Fidel Castro’s communist government. What I discovered about Morell is how he uses the camera obscura technique to reconstruct and present an altered reality of the everyday. In Morell’s Empire State Building in a Bedroom, he superimposes a famous landmark onto the image of a bed covered by a plain white sheet. Using Camera Obscura he uses the commanding image to invade the living space of a modest bedroom because he wants us to pay close attention to this new context. He wants us to think about this unseemly arrangement of the everyday with the remarkable, so we consider “there’s more to seeing than what we think we perceive”.
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| Abelardo Morell’s Empire State Building in Bedroom, 1994 |
- If you were to teach with this work, what aspects would you like to introduce to your students?
Teaching with both Morell’s photography and Blanco’s poem Americawould explore this theme of how “there’s more to seeing than what we think we perceive”. The artwork and the poem explore the subject of re-contextualizing, taking things, people, places, situations out of one context and introducing them into another, how that changes the individual, his/her perspective of the everyday, and how changing someone’s context affects an individual’s identity and sense of what feels and looks like home.
I would also want to introduce students to the idea that art interpretation and appreciation is filled with multilayered and ever changing perspectives shaped by our experiences and fact; that one’s perspective about a piece can change after learning more about it through discussion, or reading, watching, hearing a related text, and that facts are important as well to help us shape evidence based perceptions. Pairing art with poetry teaches students how their interpretations will be fluid, how their encounter can lead to further exploration in different disciplines, and how print and non-print texts can express similar themes. Why does the outside world invade a private space in Morell’s Empire State Building in Bedroom? After students share their personal reactions and connections, this piece can mean something entirely different for students upon reading Blanco’s poem America. Students need opportunities to learn how to synthesize their initial perspectives with their reflections at different points throughout their conversations around art, supporting their reactions with details of what they see. This type of discourse will allow students to see the bigger picture, find relevance in what they are learning, discover their innate creative ability, and hone their critical thinking to lead richer lives in the 21st century.
Painter and Sculptor Keith Haring said: “Art should be something that liberates the soul, provokes the imagination and encourages people to go further. It celebrates humanity…” Our lessons should give students opportunities to achieve this type of relationship with art!
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