Take some time and go through the sections on your own, doing your best to look over the images and answering the correlated questions (Click on any image below to reach a larger image and the object record). Don't be nervous if you are not sure where to start in "reading" a work of art! If it's a helpful place to start, try starting with identifying the Elements of Art:

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Portable Network Graphics (PNG)

Symbols: things that have a specific meaning or that represent something else—are a powerful part of how we understand the visual world. We recognize symbols by using personal knowledge gained through memory and lived experience.

Context: Culture and history influence how and what we see. Much of our reaction to an image depends on the context we see it in. What was the artist trying to convey and how does this relate to the time and place in which the work was created? Similarly, how do the values and beliefs of our own society shape our understanding of an image?

Warm-Up

Before you get started with the works below, take out a scratch piece of paper and a writing utensil. You will be drawing four lines, and without any words, draw the following:

1. An angry line

2. A fearful line

3. A sleepy line

4. A joyful line

How did you go about drawing each line? How did you know what to draw? Did you refer to a specific memory or action? For example, for the angry line, did you draw your line aggressively, resulting in darker, wider lines and angles? Even if you never had any formal art-making training or never "studied art", humans are engrained in visual culture from birth. So don't be afraid to make connections with what you are seeing and thinking.

Kara Walker

Below we have the following works in our collection, but it's easier to view in it's entirety at this link. Artist Kara Walker says, with regard to her art, that “most pieces have to do with exchanges of power, and attempts to steal power away from others.” Her work is layered with images that reference history, literature, culture, and the darker aspects of human behavior. The characters in her room-size tableauxs of black cut-paper silhouettes often examine the underbelly of America’s racial and gender tensions. The silhouette, popular in the 19th and 18th century as women’s art, is employed as a narrative device by Kara Walker to give a jolt of graphic recognition to a subject matter which some say would often be too gruesome to tell in any other format. By distilling the images to stark black and white, mostly in silhouette, Walker lulls her viewers into the murky waters of the history of African-Americans on this continent before the full scope of her subject matter is realized. An example of one of these paper cut-out installations is illustrated below.

  

  

  

  

1. What is going on in this series? How would you describe it (how it was made, the form, composition)

2. How does Ms. Walker’s art display power struggles of a physical, emotional, personal, racial, sexual, and historical nature? What about the artist’s story, her technique and process might invite discussion and inspiration for our students?

3. How does she employ narrative in her work?

Carrie Mae Weems

Carrie Mae Weems is another female artist that is also a gifted storyteller who works accessibly in text and image, she’s created new narratives around women, people of color, and working-class communities, conjuring lush art from the arid polemics of identity.  

  

1. Write out everything you see in this photograph (describe what you see). 

2. Interpretation: What do you think this going on? What story is the photograph telling?

3. This photograph is in direct response to a famous painting by Eduoard Manet titled Olympia.

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How has Carrie changed the image? What is she trying to say by her changes? How does her work touch on self-representation and images of beauty? 

4. We have another work in our collection in response to Manet's Olympia

  

How does this other work respond to Manet's Olympia? How is it different in it's storytelling than Carrie's work?

See the rest of the works for your course below:

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