Teaching Packet

Transportation

Part of Uncovering America

Grade Level

Subject

Language

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On this Page:

  1. Overview
  2. Selected Works
  3. Activity: Selecting, Ordering, Reasoning
  4. Activity: Bikes—Past, Present, Future
  5. Additional Resources
A multi-lane highway curves from the upper left corner to the bottom right edge of this nearly square aquatint and drypoint print. A row of sketchily drawn street lamps lines the top and right edge of the freeway. Black and white trucks and cars cast lapis-blue shadows on the charcoal-gray road. The artist wrote “Trial Proof III” in graphite in the lower left margin under the print and signed it with a heart and text reading, “Thiebaud 1979" in the lower right.
Wayne Thiebaud, Stephen Thomas, Parasol Press, Freeway Curve, 1979, color sugarlift aquatint and drypoint on wove paper, Corcoran Collection (Gift of the Women's Committee of the Corcoran Gallery of Art), 2015.19.3164

Overview

How does transportation affect our daily lives?

What can we learn about transportation and travel from works of art?

Planes, trains, and automobiles.

Perhaps horses, trucks, or jets?

Maybe ferries, scooters, buses, or bicycles.

Consider your typical day. What do you do and where do you go? More importantly: how do you get there?

The United States is a geographically diverse and large country, which means that people, goods, and information travel in a variety of ways.

For centuries, artists—keen observers of life—have depicted these modes of transportation and the ways people, cultures, and societies are affected by them.

How have the ways people get around changed over time? Where does public transportation exist, who are the people using it, and what are their stories? What do salty sea air, the noise of a city, and the rigging of a ship really look like?

Selected Works

  • 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.”
  • This horizontal black and white photograph shows the exterior of a trolley car cropped to show only the mid-section with six passengers inside. The passengers look out of five windows on the left side of the trolley, so their bodies face our left in profile. The four people at the front end, to our left, are white; two people at the back, to our right, are Black. From left to right: a man looks out through the glass of the closed window along the left edge of the photograph. The remaining windows are open. An older woman wearing a dark coat looks at us from under arched eyebrows, lips pursed, out of the next window, to our right. A boy and a young girl look out of the central window. Closer inspection reveals the dark form of a woman next to them, lost in the shadowy interior of the trolley. In the next window, a Black man wearing a long-sleeved, button-down shirt leans onto the window ledge with both forearms, and, in the right-most window, a woman wearing glasses looks over her shoulder, up and away from us. That last window is cropped by the edge of the photograph. The scene behind us is reflected in glass panes above the seats on the exterior of the trolley.
  • A multi-lane highway curves from the upper left corner to the bottom right edge of this nearly square aquatint and drypoint print. A row of sketchily drawn street lamps lines the top and right edge of the freeway. Black and white trucks and cars cast lapis-blue shadows on the charcoal-gray road. The artist wrote “Trial Proof III” in graphite in the lower left margin under the print and signed it with a heart and text reading, “Thiebaud 1979" in the lower right.
  • 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.
  • Several pieces of fruit, a bunch of green grapes, a stem of raisins, and several types of nuts in their shells are piled on a putty-brown tabletop or ledge with rounded corners against a dark background in this horizontal still life painting. The food is brightly lit from the front, and we look slightly down onto the table. There are two round red apples and two pieces of small yellow fruit, perhaps quinces, flanking a golden yellow pear at the back center. The bunch of grapes drapes over the fruit to our right and the raisins lie between the apples. Thirteen walnuts, peanuts, almonds, hazelnuts, and perhaps a brazil nut are scattered in a loose band in front of the fruit. The surface on which the still life sits becomes swallowed in shadow behind the fruit, and blends into the dark brown background. The artist signed and dated the work in dark paint in the lower right corner, almost lost in shadow under the ledge: “R.S. Duncanson 1848.”

Activity: Selecting, Ordering, Reasoning

A multi-lane highway curves from the upper left corner to the bottom right edge of this nearly square aquatint and drypoint print. A row of sketchily drawn street lamps lines the top and right edge of the freeway. Black and white trucks and cars cast lapis-blue shadows on the charcoal-gray road. The artist wrote “Trial Proof III” in graphite in the lower left margin under the print and signed it with a heart and text reading, “Thiebaud 1979" in the lower right.
Wayne Thiebaud, Stephen Thomas, Parasol Press, Freeway Curve, 1979, color sugarlift aquatint and drypoint on wove paper, Corcoran Collection (Gift of the Women's Committee of the Corcoran Gallery of Art), 2015.19.3164
Frances Flora Bond Palmer, Currier and Ives, Currier and Ives, A Midnight Race on the Mississippi, 1860, color lithograph with hand-coloring on wove paper, Donald and Nancy deLaski Fund, 2012.16.1
Fred Becker, Federal Art Project (New York City), Rapid Transit, c. 1937, woodcut in black on wove paper, Reba and Dave Williams Collection, Gift of Reba and Dave Williams, 2008.115.819

Select 3–5 works of art from this module that feature different modes of transportation, such as boats, trains, planes, cars, and bikes. Using the following prompts, ask students to work together in small groups to identify modes of transportation and arrange images along a continuum. These questions may have a range of correct answers, but students should provide support for their choices, using prior knowledge and evidence found in the images.

  • Which form of transportation do you think is the fastest? Which one might be the slowest? Arrange the images in order from fastest to slowest transportation.
  • Which form of transportation might use the most fuel? Which one might use the least?
  • Which form of transportation might go the longest distance? Which one might go the shortest distance?

Ask students to think about how grownups in their lives get around. Where do they go? What modes of transportation do they use? How much time do they spend getting from one place to another?

Activity: Bikes—Past, Present, Future

John Cutting, Bicycle, 1935/1942, watercolor, graphite, pen and ink, and gouache on paper, Index of American Design, 1943.8.8655

Collect your students’ current knowledge, experiences, and questions about bikes. What do your students know about bicycles? What does it feel like to ride one? What questions do they have about bikes? Document their responses publicly in the classroom. Ask them to draw what they think a bike looks like.

Next, share images of bikes from the works of art in this module with students. Ask them to look closely and describe the bikes. What do they notice about these bikes? How would it feel to ride the bikes in the artworks, especially the historic bikes? What do they wonder about these bikes?

Then, bring in an age-appropriate bike for them to study. Invite students to draw it, try riding it, and ask more questions about how it works. Ask students to compare the real-life bike to the bikes featured in the works of art. What is similar, and what is different? Deepen their learning by inviting a bike advocate, rider, or mechanic to visit your classroom and share more information about bike design and use. If possible, visit a local bike path or bike store, or observe a bike race.

Finally, invite students to design a bike for the future. What features would their new bike include? Ask them to think about the materials, tires, seat, safety features, and overall appearance. Show them Ellen Lanyon’s Ostricart for inspiration. Where would they like to travel on this new bike? Students may work individually or in groups; their final product might be a drawing or painting, or they can use recyclable materials to construct a three-dimensional model.

Assess their individual learning by asking them to draw a bike again and share what they think is most important for other people to know about bikes.

Additional Resources

Getting to the Game, a PBSKids interactive

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Educational Resource:  Transportation

A pale-skinned young woman with copper-orange hair, wearing a turquoise-blue robe, stands in a pastel-infused landscape in this stylized, vertical painting. The woman fills most of the left half of the composition. She faces our right in profile with her head bowed as she looks down at the silver and brown box she holds in her right hand, closer to us. Her body angles away from us so we see her back. Her hair is held back under a gold-colored headand, and her blue robe falls over a white skirt. Beyond her, rocky mountains in ice blue and pale lilac purple span the horizon, which comes about three-quarters of the way up the painting, beneath a pale, rose-pink sky. An area of mottled parchment-white to our right of the person could be a field. Along the bottom edge of the canvas, rounded and organic shapes in scarlet red, turquoise, lapis blue, golden and lemon yellow, and pumpkin orange could be abstracted earth or flowers at the woman’s feet.

Educational Resource:  Pandora's Box

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