Family Guides for Younger Children Lesson Plans
Berenice Abbott was born in Ohio in 1898; she lived and worked in Paris, Berlin, New York, and Maine, where she lived until the end of her life in 1991. She is best known for the photographs she made in the 1930s when she was working for the Federal Art Project. During the Great Depression, the government supported many artists who were out of work. Photographers, painters, and writers all recorded typical American life by documenting the daily activities of people throughout the country.
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Charles Knoll was born in Germany, but he immigrated to the United States and worked as an artist in New York City in the 1880s. Not much more is know about him. After he made this painting, he vanished. He may have gone back to Germany. Knoll is called a folk artist because he probably taught himself to paint rather than learning to make art in a school.
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Claes Oldenburg is well known for his large scale sculptures and for being a leader in the Pop art movement. Oldenburg radically changed the size of ordinary objects and used unexpected materials in making them. Have you ever seen a spoon with a cherry the size of a three-story building? He made a sculpture like this to be used in the outside garden fountain in Minneapolis!
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Fred Wilson is an artist born in the Bronx, New York in 1954. Wilson's work examines, questions, and takes apart the traditional way we display art and artifacts in the museums. For instance, he will sometimes put things in a museum that you would not expect to find there. By making art from non-traditional objects, he shows viewers that art and artifacts can mean different things in different places.
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Georgia O'Keeffe was born near Sun Prairie, Wisconsin and died at the age of 98. As one of the few female painters to gain recognition in a field dominated by men, she played a major role in American art. Mostly known for her abstract paintings of flowers, rocks, shells and animal bones, the second retrospective of her work in 1946 at the Museum of Modern Art was the first for a woman artist. The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, dedicated to her work, opened in 1997 in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
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Jacob Lawrence was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey in 1917 and moved to Harlem, New York when he was 13 years old. He first studied art at the Utopia Children's House, a community daycare center that he went to after school. He worked in a very personal manner, creating modernist, abstract views of everyday life as well as epic narratives of the history and social realities of the black community. His historic series "Migration of the Negro," 1941, became the first work by a black artist to be part of the collection at the Museum of Modern Art. From 1946 to 1998, Lawrence made paintings based on the theme of builders. Lawrence said, Building is a symbol of progress, a symbol of hope." He usually painted with just a few colors, believing that fewer colors could make a stronger work.
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A portrait can tell you a lot about a person. Embedded in each portrait are clues about the subject’s background: their class, their hobbies, their personality, and whatever else the artist chooses to portray or the sitter requests be transmitted. For this reason, portraits are among the most personal works of art, carefully constructed representations of a chosen subject, advertisements of who they are. One can act as a detective in looking at a portrait, searching to see what can be uncovered about a person’s life and personality.
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