Editor's Letter: Contemporary Art

Contemporary art is vibrant, diverse, exciting, and engaging. It can help you introduce more diverse, living, global artists to your students and spark meaningful discussions. However, many art teachers struggle to incorporate it into the teaching practices, or find it challenging to define. In preparation for this issue on teaching with and about contemporary art and ideas, I asked our contributing editors to share how they define contemporary art.

Face Space

I had to remind my students to use their “museum voices” and contain their excitement when we went to see Nix, a wacky collage by Tony Oursler. In a whole gallery of works on paper, it immediately drew their attention and enthusiasm! Oursler is perhaps best known for his wild video projection work featuring parts of faces (eyes, mouths, and sometimes noses) projected onto amorphous sculptures, buildings, water, or even billowing steam.

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Connecting with Artist Aaron Draplin

For the first part of this project, students had to create a logo that represented themselves. I shared some popular logos that students are familiar with, and we discussed that someone had to actually design those logos. Students don’t often realize that even the smallest designs were created by an artist. They started their logo creations by writing words to describe themselves. From there, they sketched images to represent the words they had written.

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Yayoi Kusama & Notan Mashup

The primary focus of my elementary art curriculum is contemporary art, but I still connect the present with concepts or artists from the past to reinforce how the latter informs the former. One example of merging the past and present is an art lesson my fourth-graders did this year—a mashup of the traditional Japanese concept of notan with the work of contemporary Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama.

Mosaic Madness

Constructed from colorful geometric patterns, mosaics exhibit beauty in their details and depth in their stories. Taking a modern twist on this ancient practice, students combined the use of technology, language arts, and elements of art and principles of design. This lesson quickly became a staple for each rotation of art students learning remotely this year.

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Fun and Function

Having a great idea is one thing, turning it into a successful project is another. This was all uncharted territory, so questions abounded: How do I go about obtaining enough blank, white expandable phone grips at an affordable price? Once acquired, can they support our available drawing and painting media? What media will work best?

Invisible Walls & Borders

In October of 2019, I asked my ninth-grade photography students to take photographs in the studio of everyday objects that conceal and separate them from other people and their community at large; e.g., designer handbags, clothing, religious icons, jewelry, hand sanitizer, cosmetics, and music. This introduced them to studio lighting, signs, and symbols, and how they contribute to meaning in photographic images.

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The Comedian

When I came upon the 2019 artwork called The Comedian by Maurizio Cattelan, I knew I had to share it with my students. Essentially, The Comedian is a banana duct-taped to a gallery wall. On the surface, it seems ridiculous, but upon further investigation and discussion, the controversy becomes evident. All students had strong opinions about the piece, including those who don’t see themselves as artistically inclined.

The Mindful Studio: Drawing

Drawing teaches students to observe their environment and learn to see what is right before them. Students are often fearful of drawing because they have preconceived notions of exceptional realism that they have seen in art museums, galleries, or examples provided in class. To scaffold this process and reduce the fear of drawing, I encourage students to focus more on their actions and feelings in the moment than on capturing the object realistically.

Symbolic Excess

Alicia Renadette’s work—ranging from sculpture/installations to costume design and performance—are amazingly complex and analytically organized psychological, ecological, and social statements on the prevalence of mass-consumption and materialism in Western culture. Her works critique traditional notions of femininity and domestic bliss in the objects she combines, such as discarded afghans, household product containers, plastic flowers, and faded drapery fabrics.

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