Field Trip

Art Tales: Not a Box

Art Tales is a field trip designed for our youngest learners. This field trip includes an exploration of two works of art, the reading of Not a Box by author Antoinette Portis, and an art-making experience.

This nearly square, abstract painting is filled with circles within circles, like nested rings, each of a single bright color against the ivory white of the canvas. Each ring is made up of a series of short, rectangular dashes, and some bands are narrower while others are a bit wider. The majority of the rings are crimson and brick red, and they are interspersed with bands of lapis blue, army green, and pale pink. One of two pumpkin-orange bands is the smallest, innermost ring at the center. There is one aqua-blue colored ring just inside a pale, shell-white ring, which is the first to get cropped by the edges of the canvas. A few red, green, and blue rings beyond the white band are only seen at the corners of the canvas.
Alma Thomas, Pansies in Washington, 1969, acrylic on canvas, Corcoran Collection (Gift of Vincent Melzac), 2015.19.144

Grade Level

Subject

Duration

60 minutes

Language

Schedule a Field Trip

Book Summary

In Not a Box, a rabbit uses its imagination to transform a cardboard box into a race car, a robot, and a spaceship. With a bit of creativity, the ordinary becomes extraordinary!

Looking and Learning Skills

During the Art Tales: Not a Box field trip, students will discover how artists use their imaginations and draw inspiration from the world around them to create modern sculptures and paintings. On this field trip, students will:

  • Observe, describe, compare, and contrast works of art.
  • Create a three-dimensional multimedia work of art.
  • Feel a sense of belonging in a museum setting.

  • In-Person Field Trip Information

    Group Size: Up to 60 students
    Length: 60 minutes 
    Meeting Location: East Building Atrium

  • Virtual Field Trip Information

    Length: 60 minutes
    Materials needed: cardboard box, glue/tape, crayons.

  • Important Scheduling Information

    Field trips must be scheduled at least four weeks in advance. Groups must contain at least 15 students.

    Once your field trip has been scheduled, you will receive an email confirmation within ten business days.

  • Bus Transportation

    Bus transportation is available for DCPS (District of Columbia Public Schools) participating in our docent-led school field trips. Teachers should follow the guidelines to apply for bus transportation.

Examples of Works Featured on Field Trip

This free-floating sculpture, called a mobile, hangs from the ceiling and branches into two separate, vertical sections that hang from a shared wire. To our left, the larger part of the mobile is made of twelve flat, uniquely shaped paddles suspended on curving, painted wires in bowing, branch-like forms. Three black, leaf-like shapes are clustered at the top over a royal-blue form, a lemon-yellow form, two more black shapes, and five crimson-red shapes that get smaller as they get closer to the bottom. They are loosely spaced but hung to taper like a bunch of grapes. To our right, a second smaller set of branches and shapes, like a mini mobile, is made of seven branches. In this photograph, five of the rounded, black shapes hanging from the dangling wires face us and the others are seen from their edge, so appear as vertical lines.
Alexander Calder, Cascading Flowers, 1949, metal, wire, and paint, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Klaus G. Perls, 1996.120.5
This nearly square, abstract painting is filled with circles within circles, like nested rings, each of a single bright color against the ivory white of the canvas. Each ring is made up of a series of short, rectangular dashes, and some bands are narrower while others are a bit wider. The majority of the rings are crimson and brick red, and they are interspersed with bands of lapis blue, army green, and pale pink. One of two pumpkin-orange bands is the smallest, innermost ring at the center. There is one aqua-blue colored ring just inside a pale, shell-white ring, which is the first to get cropped by the edges of the canvas. A few red, green, and blue rings beyond the white band are only seen at the corners of the canvas.
Alma Thomas, Pansies in Washington, 1969, acrylic on canvas, Corcoran Collection (Gift of Vincent Melzac), 2015.19.144
The bodies and bicycles of five stylized cyclists fill this nearly square painting so parts of some of their bodies and bicycles are cut by the edges of the canvas. Shown against a background of mottled shell pink and light gray, the riders are closely packed, their wheels and bodies overlapping, and they seem close to us as they race to our right in profile. All lean low over their handlebars. The faces of the three riders at the front of the pack have lemon-yellow skin. The person at the top of the composition, seeming the farthest away from us, has ivory-colored skin, and the person at the back, to our left, has brown skin. They all wear different colored clothing. The racer at the front wears all black, and the one closest to us celery green with fuchsia around the hips. The cyclists farthest from us wear rust orange or canary yellow. The racer with brown skin wears frosty blue. The frames of the bicycles are dark forest green or black, and the colors of the wheels are either yellow or turquoise. The people’s faces and bodies are abstracted into flat, hard-edges shapes. The angles formed by their torsos, arms, and legs are echoed by the angles of their bicycles’ dark metal frames.
Lyonel Feininger, The Bicycle Race, 1912, oil on canvas, Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, 1985.64.17
The top section of this abstract sculpture is made up of a vertical, elongated form cast in gleaming brass that swells gently at the center and tapers to a point at either end. Near the bottom point, the form flares out slightly to make a tall, conical foot. This sits atop a short, cylindrical, white limestone base on a wood pedestal. The pedestal is carved to look like a disc at the center flanked above and below by semicircles with the flat edges facing up and down. The sculpture is photographed against a pale gray background.
Constantin Brâncuși, Bird in Space, 1927, brass, limestone, and wood, Given in loving memory of her husband, Taft Schreiber, by Rita Schreiber, 1989.31.3

You may also like

Educational Resource:  Beyond the Frame: Dorothea Lange

The spruce-green silhouette of a broad-shouldered man standing among palm fronds looks up at a faint red star against a field of green circles radiating out from the horizon in this abstracted vertical painting. The scene is made with mostly flat areas of color to create silhouettes in shades of slate and indigo blue, lemon-lime and pea green, plum purple, and brick red. To our right of center, the man faces our left in profile. His eye is a slit and he has tight curly hair. The position of his feet, standing on a coffin-shaped, brick-red box, indicate his back is to us. He stands with legs apart and his arms by his sides. Terracotta-orange shackles around his wrists are linked with a black chain. A woman to our left, perhaps kneeling, holds her similarly shackled hands up overhead. A line of shackled people with their heads bowed move away from this pair, toward wavy lines indicating water in the distance. The water is pine green near the shore and lightens, in distinct bands, to asparagus green on the horizon. On our left, two, tall pea-green ships sail close to each other at the horizon, both titled at an angle to our right. Concentric circles radiate out from the horizon next to the ships to span the entire painting, subtly altering the color of the silhouettes it encounters. To our left, a buttercup-yellow beam shines from the red star in the sky across the canvas, overlapping the man’s face. Spruce-blue palm trees grow to our right while plum-purple palm fronds and leaves in smoke gray and blood red frame the painting along the left corners and edge. The artist signed the painting in the lower right, in black, “AARON DOUGLAS.”

Educational Resource:  Storytelling: Aaron Douglas

We look slightly down onto a crush of pedestrians, horse-drawn carriages, wagons, and streetcars enclosed by a row of densely spaced buildings and skyscrapers opposite us in this horizontal painting. The street in front of us is alive with action but the overall color palette is subdued with burgundy red, grays, and black, punctuated by bright spots of harvest yellow, shamrock green, apple red, and white. Most of the people wear long dark coats and black hats but a few in particular draw the eye. For instance, in a patch of sunlight in the lower right corner, three women wearing light blue, scarlet-red, or emerald-green dresses stand out from the crowd. The sunlight also highlights a white spot on the ground, probably snow, amid the crowd to our right. Beyond the band of people in the street close to us, more people fill in the space around carriages, wagons, and trolleys, and a large horse-drawn cart piled with large yellow blocks, perhaps hay, at the center of the composition. A little in the distance to our left, a few bare trees stand around a patch of white ground. Beyond that, in the top half of the painting, city buildings are blocked in with rectangles of muted red, gray, and tan. Shorter buildings, about six to ten stories high, cluster in front of the taller buildings that reach off the top edge of the painting. The band of skyscrapers is broken only by a gray patch of sky visible in a gap between the buildings to our right of center, along the top of the canvas. White smoke rises from a few chimneys and billboards and advertisements are painted onto the fronts of some of the buildings. The paint is loosely applied, so many of the people and objects are created with only a few swipes of the brush, which makes many of the details indistinct. The artist signed the work with pine-green paint near the lower left corner: “Geo Bellows.”

Educational Resource:  Exploring Identity through Modern Art

How do artists draw on memories and experiences to create art that reflects their identities? How does an artist’s connection to place spark inspiration? Through guided looking, sketching, and writing activities, students will consider how artists explore identity through their art.