I like to hang artists' self-portraits and notable works above my classroom tables. I sort them by color. My six classroom tables go in rainbow order, ROY G. B(I)V. I choose an artist to correspond to each table color, and instead of always calling "red table, go get your glue..." I will say "Suerat's go get your glue." This helps reinforce artists' names and gets my students familiar with many different artists.
This year I chose six artists with a a Chicago connection. The artists in this series are:
Jonathan Green
Faith Ringgold
Georges Seurat
Pablo Picasso
Alexander Calder
and Frank Lloyd Wright.
You can download a printable pdf of their portraits and visuals here.
I print the pictures and mount them to construction paper, and laminate. This year I also took the students through a little PowerPoint with a bit of information about each artist. We used Visual Thinking Strategies and studied each work carefully.
After our PowerPoint presentation, we learned about how to act in a museum. I had several other works of art by these artists printed and laminated too.
