Art and Middle School Drama & Library

Art teacher Denise Mastroieni and librarian/drama teacher Kathy Tilley developed an interdisciplinary study unit on early modernism for their middle school students. The teachers credit their work at the 1994 Teacher Institute as providing the foundation and inspiration for incorporating the study of art into the wider school community. Administrative support enabled them to schedule similar classes at the same time so they could coordinate their teaching. As a result of their work, the whole school is considering ways in which the study of art as a visual language could enhance learning for their deaf and hearing-impaired students.

To start the unit on expressionism, art and library classes are combined to look at and discuss the works of Joan Miró, Henri Matisse, Käthe Kollwitz, and Pablo Picasso. Discussion focuses on the ways these artists expressed personal feeling through color and design and on how the concurrent rise in technology affected their art.

To establish a cultural, historical, and technological context, the library classes develop a timeline of technology from 1880 to 1994. Using the 1924 Matisse painting Pianist and Checker Players, students research machines invented by that date. This information is developed into a play that takes Matisse's work as its starting point.

Art classes focus on the concepts of point-of-view and framing, as they consider the impact of the development of photography on artists. Students are asked to use very specific language to describe what they can see of the room by looking in a normal way versus looking through the viewfinder of a camera. They focus on what the camera does (frame) and what is included in the frame (point-of-view). Comparisons are made between paintings created before and after the development of photography.

In an art studio activity, each student takes a photograph of a fellow student using two criteria: 1) the point-of-view must be interesting; 2) the framing must attract the viewer's eye into the composition. Upon examination of their first set of photographs, students quickly discover that frontal, centered photographs may be boring. They soon become creative and adventurous: some students stand on tables, while others lie on the floor to take photos. The two criteria are used to critique each image as students select and defend their opinion of the most successful photographs in the class.

Figure drawing sessions use a view-finder to create interesting compositions. Works by Kollwitz and Picasso are studied to understand the use of line and monochromatic color. The final figure drawing projects are bold, expressive, and personal creations.

Through facial and body language, drama students try to convey the same emotions identified in the paintings. Some classes work on a mime performance where they express their reactions to being trapped in a glass box. Students respond to these performances on a worksheet that asks for details about the character's age, emotional state, intent, and action. Another class, studying prejudice, identifies the emotions seen in Picasso's The Tragedy and Kollwitz's The People. Two plays about prejudice were written to explain the story suggested in the art, ending in a living tableau that recreates the painting, while a slide of the work was shown for comparison. Students visited the Montclair Art Museum to view the exhibition Precisionism in America,1915-1941: Reordering Reality as a reinforcement of their theme of early modernism.