Today's Featured Artists

Activity Overview

Storytelling has always been a powerful way for humans to be exposed to and understand multiple perspectives. In this activity, students are presented with several artists who have shared their brave and unique visual points of view with the world. Artists are unified in the courage they exhibit and the risk they take to share their creative ideas. The way they accomplish this, though, is entirely unique and speaks to the personal way they make meaning of the world. Students will see some of these featured artists’ works and tell the stories they see in each of the images. This activity allows for deepening of visual thinking strategies and the acknowledgement that every person has a unique story to tell.

What You Need

• Today's Featured Artists Slideshow

• Paper, paint and brushes

• Collage materials

• Drawing materials

• If Picasso Painted a Snowman on Epic

Steps

1. Begin by sharing Today's Featured Artists Slideshow, which showcases one example of each artist’s work and gives a short biography. Notice with your student how each artist’s style is unique and inspired by their background, culture and life.

2. Model how artists seek to tell a story with their work. They also like it when new stories are created by the people who are looking at their work. It can be real or made up! Take turns practicing using the image as a jumping off place for a creative story to tell. It can be anything - silly, serious, sad, or happy.

3. Present the idea of creating our own artwork as a storytelling method.

4. Gather creative materials and lay them out for the student to experiment with their own art. The supporting adult makes their own art too, as a paired activity.

5. When complete, trade artworks and see what stories can be told by viewing each other’s artwork. For example, the student looks at the adult’s artwork and tells a story that they see, and then compares to what the adult had in mind when making the piece and vice versa.

Guiding Questions

• What's going on in this picture? What makes you say that? What else can we find?

• What story do you think this artist was trying to tell? What story can you tell when looking at this image?

• Why is it important that we share stories? Why is it good that our stories are different?

Extensions

• Challenge your student to listen to a story you tell and then paint a representation of it.

• Read the story If Picasso Painted a Snowman on Epic as a follow up to the activity - in this text, the motif of a snowman is the same, but is represented in vastly different ways depending on the artist’s point of view.

• Yayoi Kusama’s pieces of art are at New York Botanical Garden (NYBG) in The Bronx until Halloween 2021! Kusama: Cosmic Nature is a sprawling exhibition of installations, paintings and sketches from her seven-decade career. Several of Kusama's signature works, such as her massive polka-dotted flora sculptures, will be on display across the outdoor gardens, as well as inside several historic buildings on the grounds. Learn more here!