Teaching Packet

Islamic Art and Culture

Grade Level

Subject

Language

Prepared in conjuction with the exhibition Palace and Mosque: Islamic Art from the Victoria and Albert Museum, this packet is a resource for teaching Islamic art and culture, from its beginnings in the 7th century up to the 18th century. Drawing on 20 examples of architecture, calligraphy, manuscript illumination, and the decorative arts (textiles, metalwork, glass, ceramics), it addresses four general areas: arts for the mosque, Islamic science and learning, arts for the court, and exchange between East and West.

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This grayscale photograph shows a group of young girls standing close together. Their right hands are positioned over their hearts, their mouths are opened, and their eyes are looking up at something above us. The girl in the center of the image has short, dark hair with bangs, and is holding a paper bag in her left hand. She wears a plaid coat that reaches just below her knees, with the collar turned down. We can see the tops of her white socks. The other children also wear long coats or dresses. They stand on a flat, gray surface.

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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.”

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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.

The sculpture is a geometric structure resembling a sphere made up of triangular facets. The triangles are crafted from a translucent yellow material that allows light to pass through, casting yellow patterns on the surface the sphere is hanging from. Some sections appear to be either colorless or have no material in them. In the center, there is a smaller sphere that appears darker, covered by illuminated triangular patterns.

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What is “modern” about modern art? Together, we’ll investigate how modern artists broke the rules by embracing the abstract and inviting the viewer to make their own meaning.