Minimum Graduation Requirements: No Fine Arts Credits are required, but all students need 70 elective credits to graduate. Any of these classes qualify
College / University Requirements: 10 Fine Arts Credits*
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AP ART HISTORY
Grade Level: 10-12
Recommended Completion or enrollment in an Honors or AP course,
or Advanced/AP Visual Arts studio course.
Credits: 10
College Prep Course
AP Art History is a survey course that introduces students to discover the diversity in and connections among forms of artistic expression throughout history and from around the globe. Students learn about how people have responded to and communicated their experiences through art making by exploring art in its historic and cultural contexts. The AP Art History has a specified number of works of art students are required to understand in order to support their in-depth learning, critical analysis skills, and discovery of connections among global artistic traditions. The AP Art History course welcomes students into the global art world as active participants, engaging with its forms and content as they research, discuss, read, and write about art, artists, art making, and responses to and interpretations of art. This class requires a high degree of commitment to academic work. As students study works of art in the image set, they apply the essential art historical skills within the learning objectives, such as visual, contextual, and comparative analysis. The content of the course requires a certain level of maturity due to the study and depiction of the human form, and understanding context regarding historical and contemporary social and political issues.
The curriculum and content of the course are based on three sets of big ideas and essential questions intended to encourage investigation of art throughout time and place and to foster students’ understanding of the discipline of art history.
Big idea 1: Artists manipulate materials and ideas to create an aesthetic object, act, or event.
Essential Question: What is art and how is it made?
Big idea 2: Art making is shaped by tradition and change.
Essential Question: Why and how does art change?
Big idea 3: Interpretations of art are variable.
Essential Question: How do we describe our thinking about art?
Students will also make connections with other subject areas such as Literature, Music, History, Mythology, Religion, and Sciences and the concurrent art and/or architecture produced during a particular period. Students will be prepared to take the College Board’s Advanced Placement test.