Art/Artists/Art Museums

Art has probably been around as long as there have been humans. Prehistoric art was linked to magic, religious expression, and hunting glories. Ancient Greek and Roman art gloried in the "ideal". Medieval art was mostly about teaching--instructing the general population about religion and life after death. Renaissance art celebrated humanism. What all art has in common is its link to imagination.

Sample some of the following activities to learn more about art and artists.

Places To Go | People To See | Things To Do | Teacher Resources

Places To Go

The following are places to go (some real and some virtual) to find out about art.

The Art Room
Visit the Art Room. Its mission is to provide a virtual learning environment for exploring the world of art. It is a great site designed for kids, but teachers may find the activities and information useful in their curriculum planning.

Metropolitan Museum of Art
Experience the online exhibits from this world famous art museum. Check out the Met's section that helps students explore famous paintings or get to know well-known artists.

Saharan Rock Art
Travel to the Sahara Desert in Africa to see prehistoric rock art. By studying rock artworks of different ages ,scientists have reconstructed some of the history of the tribes who lived there. The oldest art dates to 12,000 years ago when the area was not desert, but fertile grassland.

The Louvre Museum
This is the true magic of the internet--the ability to visit the Louvre from our classrooms or from home in our pyjamas. Take this online virtual tour of the most famous museum in the world. And then visit this companion site, Treasures of the Louvre.

ArtCom Museum
Visit the Getty Center in Los Angeles or the Red River Railroad Museum in Texas. This site has links to over 1600 U.S. museums.

The Lines of Peru
Travel to the Nazca desert in Peru to see huge works of art etched into the desert plain. "Across this plain, in an area measuring 37 miles long and 1 mile wide, is an assortment of perfectly straight lines, many running parallel, others intersecting, forming a grand geometric form. In and around the lines there are also trapezoidal zones, strange symbols, and pictures of birds and beasts all etched on a giant scale that can only be appreciated from the sky." Are these lines art or did they serve some other purpose?

ArtMuseum.Net
Experience the awe of looking at beautiful artwork. This site has been featuring the work of Van Goghs and will soon have an exhibit highlighting the artwork of our country called The American Century, Art and Culture 1900-2000.

Monet at Giverny
Travel to the gardens of Giverny, France and experience not only the gardens, but Monet's famous paintings as well.

ArtSafari
Go on an art safari! This site is sponsored by the Museum of Modern Art and helps students explore the paintings and sculptures at MOMA.

Georgia O'Keefe
Visit Georgia O'Keefe in New Mexico at her Ghost Ranch house. She lived there until her death in 1984 at the age of 98.

Paul Gaugin
Sail to the South Pacific with Paul Gaugin.

Hermitage Museum
Visit this museum in St. Petersburg that contains over 3,000,000 items of art. The museum is housed in five buildings created by architects of the 18th to 19th centuries. The Winter Palace, formerly the residence of Russian Emperors which was constructed between 1754 and 1762 after a design of Bartolomeo Rastrelli, is part of the museum.

Detroit Institute of Art
The Detroit Institute of Art is the he fifth-largest fine arts museum in the United States with holdings of over 60,000 works. Visit it virtually for its fine online collection. It currently has a great exhibition of the self-portraits of Vincent Van Gogh.

The Incredible Art Department
Visit the art department created by high school teacher, Rohrer to find Art News, Art Site of the Week, Lesson Plans, and much more.

National Gallery of Art
The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. has painting, sculpture, and graphic arts from the Middle Ages to the present. The online exhibits are searchable by artist or title.

People To See

A. Pintura Art Detective
Develop a relationship with A. Pintura, Art Detective. Follow the clues and help him solve international art mysteries.

Art Business
This art columnist and author will be glad to answer questions about fine art.

National Portrait Gallery
Meet many of the important people who helped to shape our nation by viewing their portraits at the National Portrait Gallery which is part of the Smithsonian Institute.

Exploring Leonardo
Meet this this fascinating scientist, inventor, and artist.

Katsushika Hokusai
Meet Japanese artist,Katsushika Hokusai.He lived from 1760 to 1849 and is famous for his landscape prints. He often only use the colors blue, brown, and green. Have students discover other artists who were particularly noted for landscapes such as Joseph Turner and John Constable.

Artist Profile - Mary Cassatt
Meet Mary Cassatt, American artist. She was influenced by the Impressionists and is noted for her paintings of mothers and children.

Henri Rousseau
Get to know the French artist, Henri Rousseau. He was called a primitive artist because he had no formal training. He painted lush, dreamlike scenes in the late 1800s. Primitive artists are sometimes called folk artists. Have students find out about other primitive/folk artists like Edward Hicks and Anna Mary Robertson (Grandma Moses).

Things To Do

Refrigerator : An Art Contest for Kids
Help your students enter this weekly contest for student art work.

How To Read a Painting
From this instructional unit, help students learn art criticism skills to enrich museum experiences.

Art Edventures
Follow along with Carmine Chameleon and learn how great artists made their famous works. This is a great site with hands-on activities for students and teacher resources for each section.

Artcyclopedia
Use the Artcyclopedia to find information about art museums, artists, art news, and works of art.

Inside Art
Take students on this fun and engaging art adventure. The premise is that you get "sucked into" a painting at an art museum. Through clues and by looking at actual art masterpieces, the students try to guess what painting they are inside of and who the artist was. Along the way, they learn about art from "the inside out". This is part of the great Educational Web Adventure site that has adventures in art, science, history, and geography.

Eyes on Art - A Learning to Look Curriculum
Learn how to critically view art using examples from the Museum of Modern Art.

Art Images by Period
Find images from Greek, Roman, Renaissance, Baroque, and Modern art.

Art History Resources on the Web
From prehistoric art to modern art, find what you need at this all-encompassing site.

ArtsEdge
Don't miss this excellent Arts Education resource. You can find lesson plans and web links that connect the Arts with other subject areas: Math, Science, Social Studies, Language Arts and more. The site is sponsored by the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts.

WorldWide Art Resources
This interactive arts gateway will give you access to artists, museums, galleries, high quality art, art history, arts education, and more.

Web Museum: Famous Paintings Exhibition
Help students find images of famous paintings from the medieval times to modern. The site also includes Japanese art.

Etch-A-Sketch
Find out the top ten tips and tricks about how to use this high-tech tool effectively. Tip #7 is particularly helpful. Check out their art gallery of actual pictures that people have drawn with their Etch-A-Sketch.

They Still Draw Pictures
Discover this site that shows how children of the past dealt with the conflicts that surrounded them. It's an online collection of drawing by children who lived in France and Spain during the Spanish Civil War. This conflict took place in 1938, and these drawings show how they dealt with their feelings during that confict.

Collage
Choose from an image database containing 20,000 works from the Guildhall Art Gallery in London.

Art Kids Rule
Browse through this collection of arts-related sites for students. It has links to art tutorials and arts education sites.

The History of Art Virtual Library
Find a meta-list of art resources. It includes specific artists, artistic movment, art museums, and more.

How Tattoos Work
Are tattoos considered one of the "fine arts"?

Find out more about M.C. Escher. Send your students to this excellent tesselation tutorial that includes templates for them to make their own tesselations.

ArtsConnectEd
Choose "ForYour Classroom" from the menu to go to a section where you can search an art educational database by grade level or learning area.

Teacher Resources

Hotlists from UEN provide internet sites to visit to find out more about specific topics--in this case, art! (You can learn how to use this WWW Activities tool created by UEN for Utah educators).

Online activities are a listing of internet sites with fun, interesting, and educational tasks attached to each one. (You can learn how to use this WWW Activities tool created by UEN for Utah educators).

Vincent Van Gogh

Virtual Field Trips are teacher and student-created tours of curricular topics. (You can learn how to use this UEN Virtual Field Trip tool created by UEN for Utah educators).