This past weekend, my colleague Shannon Karol and I took a trip down I-35 to Austin for the annual Texas Art Education Association (TAEA) conference. TAEA brings together art educators in K-12 classrooms, universities, and museums.
My favorite part of TAEA has been getting to hear what other museums in the state are doing. This year, I learned how ArtPace works with community partners in a program called ¿Como Vives?, how the Meadows Museum structures a multiple-visit program with area 6th graders, and how the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston engages audiences with contemporary art. There was a lot to take in!
Shannon and I also got a chance to talk about the DMA in presentations we gave. Shannon shared her expertise in African art with conference-goers in her session, Themes for Teaching with African Art. The session included themes (including family, proverbs, and royalty) that can be used to engage students of all ages with African art. If you are interested in integrating African artworks into your classroom, I hope you’ll check out Shannon’s African Art Resources.
In my session, Close-Looking, Collaboration, and Creative Response: Interactive Experience with Works of Art, I shared three activities that allow for my favorite kinds of gallery experiences: ones that are open-ended, involve groupwork, and art-making or writing in response to a work of art. My favorite of the three is Post-It poetry. I like poetry exercises; I think they’re a great way to get students to distill their ideas about an artwork into brief, meaty responses. With Post-It poetry, students write words that describe an artwork on individual Post-Its and stick them to a board that serves as a group word bank. After all group members have contributed responses, the group works together to rearrange Post-Its to create phrases or sentences. Click here for more detailed Post-It poetry instructions.
What I like most about this activity are the unexpected resonances that happen when students read poems. Hearing different, fresh combinations of words always enriches the experience of looking at an artwork for me. Below are some Post-It poetry pictures, and a Post-It poem participants made during my TAEA session.
The two of us also took in the sights in Austin. We checked out the Blanton Museum of Art, stopped by the capitol, shopped funky stores on South Congress, and had a blast eating out of trucks! (Not the F-150 kind, but the street-food-vending kind). All in all, it was quite the weekend.
Amy Copeland
Coordinator of Go van Gogh Outreach
