Resources for looking at art

A guide to some of the best websites, activities, and print resources for building visual literacy through the study of art.

By Melissa Thibault

Learn more

Related pages

• Learning to look at art: Strategies for helping students develop visual literacy in looking at paintings and other forms of visual art.
• Seasonal farm landscapes: Students will have visited the farm landscape four times throughout the year, recording their observations during four seasons. The drawings will incorporate their knowledge of farms from our visits, their exposure to the seasonal landscapes of Grant Wood and Claude Monet, and their knowledge of landscape art and its elements of color and perspective developed at the Museum. The final project will be individual student books containing their landscape drawings and text.
• What do you see? (post-visit): In this lesson, students will use observations and reflections made while visiting the Ackland Art Museum to draw conclusions about interpreting artwork (and other works/events), make quality scientific observations, and see how these concepts are related. Students will be reproducing artwork they viewed at the museum, sharing their personal interpretations of various works, and analyzing how the presentation of information (in any situation) can influence our interpretations of a work or event. This lesson is the final lesson in the series of lessons, "What Do YOU See?", which uses the Ackland Art Museum as a resource.

Related topics

• Learn more about aesthetics education, arts, fine art, thinking skills, and visual literacy.

Legal

The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions which have been hidden by the answers.

— James Baldwin

What essential questions may be considered when you learn to look at art? Build critical thinking skills while you build visual literacy with these art-related activities.

My Art Gallery

Learn from looking, ask questions, research, compare, and interpret as you act as curator and build your own art exhibit. Students keep a journal about the color, line, texture, space, and shape of their selections. An animated guide steps through the process with students, examining their selected works and encouraging their progress. These are great activities that help a student understand the decisions that go into building an exhibition. Published by the Seattle Art Museum.

ArtAccess

Art Access encourages the examination of objects for style and in historical context. Objects are classified in the following categories: Ancient Indian Art of the Americas, African American Art, Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, Modern and Contemporary Art, American Art to 1900, and Art of India, Himalayas & Southeast Asia. Articles describe the work in context, linking throughout to a subject-specific glossary with audio pronunciation of all terms, like this glossary for the African American Art collection. Also available are arts-integrated lesson plans: Ancient American Art and Geometry (Grades 7-8 Math), Ancient Gold Working (Grades 3-5 Social Science), and Sport as Social Ritual (Grades 4-6 Social Science).

The Artist’s Toolkit: visual elements and principles

Explore the tools that artists use, such as line, color, shape, and balance, to build works of art. Experience each visual element or principle by watching an animated demonstration, finding examples of the concept in works of art from museums, and creating your own composition. Don’t miss the Artist’s Toolkit Encyclopedia.

In Print

Visit the library and look for Eye Spy: An Alphabet in Art or I Spy Two Eyes: Numbers in Art by Lucy Micklethwait. Examine the works of art to discover an object beginning with that letter of the alphabet or count your way through great works of art. Either way, the youngest students are exposed to a variety of fine art while building visual skills and working with numbers and letters!

I am an Artist by Pat Lowery Collins celebrates the world we see and encourages children to see beauty in the natural world around them. This title is also available for preview in electronic format from Google Books.

Research

Visual thinking strategies can be assessed and taught. Research in this area is based upon a theory of aesthetic development by Abigail Housen. Ms. Housen has identified five distinct patterns of thinking about art which she described as aesthetic stages. Where are you (or your students) in your aesthetic development? For more information see Visual Thinking Strategies and Thoughts on Visual Literacy (in PDF format) by Philip Yenawine.