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A winged person blowing a horn stands silhouetted in lilac purple against a field of alternating celery and muted lime-green bands in this abstracted vertical painting. The person’s body is angled toward us but they look over their shoulder, to our left in profile, as they hold a horn to their lips. The horn reaches into the top left corner of the composition, and the wings extend off the top edge of the canvas. A shallowly curving slit indicates the eye. The person stands with each foot on two rounded forms like stylized hills. The mound on our right is higher so the knee is bent, and the person holds a skeleton key in the hand propped on that knee. The hill to our right has wavy bands of muted pine and sage green, and the hill to our left has a zigzag line of the sage across the darker green. Farther from us, four people, smaller in scale, are outlined as amethyst-purple silhouettes. One person to our right of the angel kneels and raises their hands high overhead, face turned to the sky. Two more people standing on or behind the left mound are framed between the trumpeter’s legs. The fourth person stands with hands clasped, also looking up. Concentric arcs of lemon yellow and pale green suggest a sun in the upper left corner. The artist signed and dated the work with dark green paint in the lower right corner: “A. Douglas ’39.”

Aaron Douglas, The Judgment Day, 1939, oil on tempered hardboard, Patrons' Permanent Fund, The Avalon Fund, 2014.135.1

Connecting Art, Social-Emotional Learning, and Poetry: Finding Our Voices

MOOC Meetup: Live via Zoom

Online Courses

  • Thursday, April 8, 2021
  • 4:00 p.m.
  • Virtual
  • Registration Required

Join National Gallery of Art museum educators, a guest teacher presenter, and a community of participants from the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) Teaching Critical Thinking through Art for a live, online MOOC Meetup session for teachers, connecting works of art to social-emotional learning (SEL) and poetry in order to explore the voice of the artist, the poet, and ourselves. Experience a lesson that can be easily applied in virtual or in-person classrooms.

This online teacher workshop includes a discussion (via the Zoom chat feature) of a work of art by 20th-century American artist Aaron Douglas. In honor of National Poetry Month, we will use thinking routines to explore complexities of the work and the poetry that inspired it. Special guest teacher Tondra Odom will share documentation of student work as a picture of practice from her virtual SEL classroom. We will discuss how to apply art to support student voice and expression in various teaching and learning contexts. Ready-to-use, adaptable resources will be available for teachers to replicate and integrate into their own lesson planning.

The format of these programs is an online Zoom meeting. This means that your image and voice may be recorded if you choose to turn on your camera and/or microphone. By registering, you give consent for the National Gallery of Art to use that recording in any media, including on the Gallery’s website and social media accounts, as well as in a noncommercial educational online course that will be made available to the general public on a third-party platform.