Question for Understanding
What are the background and life experiences of the maker?

Activity Ideas for All Students
Ask students to identify significant dates, places, and events in their own lives (birth date, school/s attended, travel or moves, hobbies and recreation, personal milestones, birth or death in family, etc.). 

Show the DVD segment, “The Days of Our Lives,” asking students to listen for significant events in the lives of the artists. Give students practice and feedback by using some or all of the interactive “The Days of Our Lives” CD activities, which you can project for an entire class or which individual students can view in a computer lab. Students can use the CD to 1) review what they learned on the DVD, 2) apply what they learned to their everyday visual world, and 3) recognize how inquiry about the personal lives and backgrounds applies to artists from the past and living today.

Help students identify a prominent artist to investigate on the Internet, such as Betye Saar, John Biggers, Carmen Lomas Garza, Luis Jiménez, Isamo Noguchi, Huang Liu, Maria Martinez, Fritz Scholder, Mary Cassatt, or Vincent Van Gogh.  Students should look for basic biographical facts such as birth date and place, death date and place, family, travel, education, etc.  Ask students to identify how the lives of these artists may have influenced their art.

Activity Ideas for Art Students
Encourage students to identify aspects of their personal lives as sources of ideas for their own art making.  For example, they might use their feelings, responses to events, or values as the inspiration for a collage, assemblage, or painting.

Complementary Activities from Stories of Art
A K-12 curriculum resource from CRIZMAC
The theme, Revolution, is based on “The Revolutionaries,” a story of the adventures of a young man and his family and his heroic actions to change their fate.

Supplementary Online Lessons
“Who Cares for Art” – Lesson One:  (The life of sculptor Luis Jiménez)