Art Making and Meaning:

Understanding through Questions

The World Around Us -- Physical Environments

Question for Understanding
What are the natural and built environments like where the maker lives and works?

Art Making Question
If you were thinking about making an artwork, could you get ideas or materials from your environment?

Objectives
Students recognize features of the natural and/or built environments in which artists live and work.
Students recognize how some artists use tools and materials from their environment.
Students recognize how some artists incorporate features of their environment into their art.

Activity Ideas for All Students
Ask students to share and compare experiences in various built environments, such as downtown among skyscrapers, in non-residential areas (rail yard, manufacturing district, trucking depot, mine), in neighborhoods of apartments, rowhomes, mobile homes, or single-family homes, etc.), near bridges, highway intersections, grain elevators, pubic squares or plazas, etc. Next, ask students to share and compare experiences in natural environments, such as in a park, on a farm, in the woods or open plains, on mountains, in canyons, on deserts, near rivers or brooks, at the shore, or on an island.  Finally, ask students to describe and compare the sights and sounds of these different built and built environments.

Show the DVD segment, “The World Around Us,” asking students to listen for ways the natural and built environments affected the artists. Give students practice and feedback by using some or all of the interactive “The World Around Us” 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 into the natural environments applies to artists from the past and living today.

Display and lead a discussion of how artists, such as Charles Sheeler, Tomas Moran, Edward Hopper, Grant Wood, or Georgia O’Keeffe, have been inspired by the environment.

Activity Ideas for Art Students
Ask students to draw views of their classroom, school interior or exterior, or nearby structures. 

Ask students to investigate art materials used in the art of indigenous people across the globe.  They might experiment with refining their own clay, making ink from soot, using sticks and ink for drawing, assembling sculptures from found objects, etc.

Complementary Activities from Stories of Art
A K-12 curriculum resource from CRIZMAC
The theme, Our Place in the World, is based on “Fee of the Meadow People,” a story of people living close to nature and of a young woman who saved her brother from one of nature’s fiercest hunters, a bear.

Back