Turner Elementary School
ArtLinks
Exhibition on view:
The Phillips Collection at 21st St.: Summer 2019
The Phillips Collection at THEARC: Fall-Winter 2019
During the 2018-2019 school year, over 300 Turner Elementary kindergarten, first, second, and third grade and Medical and Educational Support Needs students participated in the Art Links: Museum-in-Residence program. In the classroom and in the galleries at the Phillips, teachers and museum educators connected works of art in the museum’s permanent collection to themes and subject areas such as math and English Language Arts.
ART LINKS TO LEARNING: MUSEUM IN RESIDENCE
Art Links to Learning is The Phillips Collection’s portfolio of educational programs for District of Columbia Public and Public Charter Schools (DCPS and DCPCS). To meet our community’s need for more productive teaching and learning, the Phillips has developed innovative methods that have been shown to increase student engagement and understanding and enhance teaching. Art Links programs weave visual arts education with other core subject areas such as language arts, social studies, and science, while helping students develop 21st-century skills, including critical thinking and problem solving.
Art Links is designed to adapt to the needs of individual school communities, educators, and learners. The Museum-in-Residence program is a multiple-visit museum/school partnership that includes professional development for teachers, pre- and post-visit in-classroom workshops, a museum visit, and an exhibition of student’s arts-integrated projects at the Phillips. Phillips educators also provide ongoing one-on-one coaching for teachers on arts integration throughout the school year. Through the Museum-in-Residence program, teachers and Phillips educators collaborate to create arts-integrated lessons that connect the classroom curricula to the museum’s collection.
Mixed-Media Collage
TEACHERS: Ms. Burt, Ms. Cogsdell, Ms. Fouts, and Ms. West
CLASS: Medical and Educational Support Program
PRISM.K12 STRATEGIES: Connect, Identify, and Empathize
PHILLIPS ARTWORK INSPIRATION: Purple Antelope Space Squeeze (1987)
Students in the Medical and Educational Support (MES) program, working with teachers and a group of their peers in Ms. Hinnant’s kindergarten class, mapped their journey to the Phillips. These mixed-media collages recall the trip they took in four school buses across the Anacostia River and through Washington, DC.
At the museum, students explored the Music Room, first IDENTIFYING colors and patterns in Sam Gilliam’s Purple Antelope Space Squeeze and then exploring texture in a raised-line reproduction of the work. After the gallery experience, students CONNECTED to Gilliam’s process by painting large pieces of paper, mixing colors of tempera paint, and making marks using a variety of tools. In the classroom, students selected one of the painted papers to use as a background. With support from the kindergarten students and their teachers, they created a visual map of their trip to the museum.
Storytelling Accordion Books
TEACHERS: Ms. Childs, Mr. Cooper, and Ms. Hinnant
CLASS: Kindergarten
PRISM.K12 STRATEGIES: Identify and Synthesize
PHILLIPS ARTWORK INSPIRATION: Sam Gilliam’s Red Petals (1967) and Purple Antelope Space Squeeze (1987); historic photographs of the Phillips’s home
Turner Kindergarten students studied narrative elements and sequence by listening to, retelling, and discussing stories. During the Art Links partnership, students learned The Phillips Collection’s story, discovered stories in art, and composed the story of their museum visit. Students integrated English Language Arts with Visual Art, creating maps and books to reinforce their understanding of narrative sequence. Through close looking at historic photographs of the original house, students IDENTIFIED key details in Duncan Phillips’s story. At the museum, students investigated Sam Gilliam’s Red Petals and Purple Antelope Space Squeeze.
In the classroom, they SYNTHESIZED what they learned about Gilliam’s artistic process to create painted paper for accordion books. Some students created self-portraits to put in the accordion books. With pipettes, students dropped liquid watercolor onto wet paper, allowing the colors to mix under stretched plastic wrap, which, when dry, resulted in surprising visual textures, mirroring Gilliam’s improvisational experiments. Other students created illustrated pages, by mixing primary colors of tempera paint and making abstract marks with a variety of tools, to insert in their accordion books. These illustrated pages could be rearranged to tell different stories.
Storytelling House-Museums
TEACHERS: Mr. Vinson and Ms. Whitener
CLASS: Kindergarten
PRISM.K12 STRATEGIES: Identify and Synthesize
PHILLIPS ARTWORK INSPIRATION: Sam Gilliam’s Red Petals (1967) and Purple Antelope Space Squeeze (1987); historic photographs of the Phillips’s home
Turner Kindergarten students studied narrative elements and sequence by listening to, retelling, and discussing stories. During the Art Links partnership, the students learned the story of The Phillips Collection, discovered stories in art, and imagined stories for their own museums. Students integrated English Language Arts with Visual Art, creating three-dimensional models of house-museums to reinforce their understanding of Duncan Phillips’s story. Through close looking at photographs of the original house and architectural details in the galleries, students IDENTIFIED key details in the museum’s story. At the museum, students explored Sam Gilliam’s Red Petals (1967) and Purple Antelope Space Squeeze (1987). In the classroom, they SYNTHESIZED what they learned about Gilliam’s artistic process to design and build collaborative house-museums. On the walls they placed sketches of the objects they collect, creatively connecting their stories to that of Duncan Phillips.
Imaginary Moons
TEACHERS: Ms. Hanna, Ms. Lubin, and Ms. Wilkerson
CLASS: Grade 1
PRISM.K12 STRATEGIES: Connect and Synthesize
PHILLIPS ARTWORK INSPIRATION: Arthur Dove, Me and the Moon (1937)
Grade 1 students CONNECTED their study of the moon and astronomy with artworks from the Phillips. In the classroom, students explored reproductions of Me and the Moon by Arthur Dove, and had a conversation about what might happen next in the painting. Then, students designed their own drawing that showed themselves with the moon. At the museum, students explored how artists depict the night sky and made personal connections to their own thoughts about the artwork. To complete the unit, students SYNTHESIZED what they had learned about the moon with their imaginations to create an “imaginary moon” using water-based materials on a nontraditional surface—coffee filters!
Can you use your imagination to connect with these unique and expressive celestial beings?
Mathematic Cityscapes
TEACHERS: Mr. Bonhomme, Ms. Logan, Ms. Martin, and Ms. Nolan
CLASS: Grade 2
PRISM.K12 STRATEGIES: Connect and Synthesize
PHILLIPS ARTWORK INSPIRATION: Jacob Lawrence, The Migration Series (1940-41); Allan Rohan Crite, Parade on Hammond Street (1935) and School’s Out (1936)
Students in Turner’s grade 2 classes CONNECTED their math skills to their art knowledge to create collaborative cityscapes. In the classroom, students were studying the use of mathematical arrays as a structure for basic multiplication. Students studied Allan Rohan Crite’s depictions of dynamic scenes of community events. They used their math skills to create array sentences to count the number of windows and window panes in Crite’s paintings. At the museum, students looked closely at Jacob Lawrence’s The Migration Series and other artworks that show numerous windows and buildings. Back in the classroom, each student created a distinct building with multiple windows, and used their math knowledge to create sentence arrays for their buildings. Finally, each class SYNTHESIZED their understanding of math and art to collaborate on creating a truly unique and dynamic cityscape collage.
Geometric Quilts
TEACHERS: Ms. Gilbeaux, Ms. Hooks, and Ms. Taylor
CLASS: Grade 3
PRISM.K12 STRATEGIES: Connect and Synthesize
PHILLIPS ARTWORK INSPIRATION: Piet Mondrian’s Painting No. 9 (1939-42) and Composition III (1921/25); Paul Klee, The Way to the Citadel (1937)
Grade 3 students CONNECTED their understanding of fractions, parts of a whole, and area of shapes throughout the ArtLinks partnership. In the classroom, they used their math skills to create artworks that used shapes to show area. In the museum, they looked closely at Piet Mondrian’s Painting No. 9 and Composition III, Paul Klee’s The Way to the Citadel, and other artists who used geometry in their work. Students SYNTHESIZED this knowledge back in the classroom to create a collaborative artwork.
Students worked to answer the following questions as they created a quilt square that shows their own personality and character traits:
- How do you contribute to the whole class? What makes you unique?
- How are you an important part of the whole?
