More Ideas for Engagement with Art History (Ep. 395)

And Kyle Wood is back on the show. Kyle, welcome back. So excited to see you. How are you?

I’m doing well. I am super excited and honored to be back, so thank you for putting up with me. I am always a little bit shocked that someone’s willing to speak with me, but honestly, things are going really well. Just like it’s the day after Halloween, which was absolutely miserable around here where I live, as is the tradition in Illinois.

Right. The weather has to be terrible otherwise, is it really Halloween?

Not in the Midwest, so my kids got to deal with an inch of snow as they’re going around, but it was so much fun and delightful because my kids are at just that right age, so that’s all good. And we have way too much candy because I think only two people came to my house. We left the bowl out and I don’t know, my community’s honest. I don’t know how it was still full at the end of the evening.

Wow.

The sign next to the bowl went from take one or two to take five or 10, take a handful.

You still can’t give it away. So maybe it was just terrible candy. What kind of candy was it?

Oh no, we get the good stuff. It was Reese’s, Kit Kats. It was M&M’s. I always buy the good stuff because I need something to be able to sneak through the weeks leading up to Halloween.

For sure. For sure. No, I’m with you on that. So it’s good. Yeah, my kids are a little too old for trick-or-treating now, and so they don’t bring the haul home. I’m used to a huge haul of bags and bags of candy and I don’t get that anymore, which is probably good for me in the grand scheme of things, but it’s disappointing to not have those big bags of candy coming home. Kind of sad. But anyway.

A pro tip I just learned from my librarian, tell the kids what your favorite candy is. He says they bring in just bags of it every year.

Smart. That’s smart.

I only have two kids bringing me candy now, so it’s rough.

Okay though, we do need to talk about more professional things, and as I said in the intro, we’re looking for lots more art history ideas. I know you have lots of art history ideas, but before we get there, I would just love an update on what’s been happening with you, just what’s going on with your classroom, what you’ve been doing professionally, anything else? How are things for you?

Classroom’s good. I am always tweaking things in there, coming up with some different games and stuff like that. I was actually just, I don’t know, a week ago, time’s lost all meaning to me, but I did the Illinois Art Ed Association’s annual conference where I gave an art history presentation. It was called Ridiculous History, just all the stuff you missed in history class. And I am proud to say that I was not chased out of the room. So that for me is a marker of success.

No, I was actually talking to one of my friends who went to the IAEA conference and she said that she was going to come see your presentation, but she couldn’t even get in the room. Congratulations on being popular and having a bunch of people want to listen to you. So that’s a good thing. It’s a sign that you’ve piqued some people’s interest.

Yes, after nearly 40 years of life, I have finally figured out how to be popular in elementary school circle.

I love it.

Late bloomer, but I’ll take it.

Take the wins where you can get them. But yeah, like I mentioned, we want to bring some more art history ideas to everyone and so as I said in the intro, I thought to myself, who has great art history ideas? And it’s Kyle Wood. So I would love to just go through a few ideas that you’re doing in your classroom that you and I have talked about off-air. But the first is the art imposter challenge, having kids reimagine a work of art in another artist’s style. So can you elaborate on that? Can you tell us about that project?

I mean, actually I just did this on Halloween. I was telling my classes, “We’re going to dress up this artwork in a different style, have fun.”

That’s good, that’s good.

But it really just gets back to my core idea in teaching. I’m always focused on understanding at that deeper level of why things are, and I think that’s because honestly, growing up as a kid, I always felt deficient as an artist. It was not really my best subject. I know that’s kind of an odd statement for someone who has dedicated their career to the arts. And actually art history was a weak area of mine as well. My understanding was always really superficial. In classes, I just remember being told, “Imitate the look of this, look at the impressionists, here are some Q-tips and make little dots of color,” but I didn’t really understand why. And so I’m always talking to kids about why things are the way they are, analyze it, look at it, respond to it.

We’re trying to interpret things as this week in my entry routine, we’re talking about sugar skulls and we’re talking about like, “Okay, we see these bright bold colors. What does that signify? It’s happy. It’s on a skull. What does a skull typically signify? Well, death and sadness and spooky stuff.” And so then it’s like, “Well, what does that combination tell us about the attitudes in this celebration and all that?” So every week in my classroom, we’re talking about characteristics of different artworks and the stories behind them and why they look that way.

And so I thought let’s try to get to that deeper connection and response piece to it by having kids reimagine it. So it’s remixing a work of art. You could describe it in lots of ways. I started doing this just referencing Among Us because people always like that kind of stuff, but it’s really just trying to get kids to rethink what something could be. So I put a collection of artworks up on the board. I had the Mona Lisa, Hokusai’s Great Wave, The Scream, and stuff like that. And then I said, “Okay, I want you to reimagine this in a different style.” We called it the art imposter challenge, but it’s just applying different characteristics, different techniques to it. I had a student who did the Mona Lisa, but like Mondrian style. So it’s like the Mondriana Lisa and it’s-

That’s a good pun. I like that.

Primary colors and all that, and it worked. Or what would Starry Night look like if it were pop art or what would cubist Water Lilies look like? All that sort of stuff. Very much ripping off of Roy Lichtenstein’s idea of remixing art stuff.

Yeah, for sure. But I think it’s a good lesson. I think there’s a lot of creativity that asks of students. There’s a lot of creative thinking that goes into that. So I think that’s a good one. I guess similar, you also have the steal this art challenge where kids are making their own version of a famous work. I would love to hear you talk about similarities and differences there, but I’m also curious, when you’re doing the steal this art challenge, what kind of teaching do you need to do before that one and how do you begin introducing that concept to your students?

Well, I think a big part of it, I’m always talking to students about taking work, taking ideas and building off things and making it your own. You’re pushing things further. I think that comes naturally to a lot of us who are in sort of choice-based classrooms where you’re focusing on generating ideas and coming up with your own twist on stuff. And I think I would often introduce it with the classic Picasso quote that I think he actually stole from someone else. I think he stole it from T.S. Eliot or something, but it was, “Good artists copy, great artists steal.”

Yes. I don’t know if that’s T.S. Eliot or I mean it very well could be. I’m just saying the name escapes me. But yeah, he did that. And then I don’t know if you’ve seen Banksy’s take on that where he stole the Picasso quote and carved it into a rock and then just crossed out Picasso’s name and wrote Banksy underneath it. It’s spectacular.

It works on so many levels, but from what I’ve read, because I did try to hunt this down, it’s first documented coming from a poet before him, a writer of some sort. But that’s really going off on a tangent and I’m going to try to keep it the tangents to a minimum. Actually, that was one of the first sort of gamified things that I did in my classroom, the steal this art challenge. That came about when I was working a lot closely with a good friend of mine who’s another art teacher. At that time, he at an elementary school in my district, now he’s moved up to the middle school. But we introduced that challenge to both of our classes at the same time saying, “Here’s a collection of artworks and we want you to think of your own version of it.”

And then two weeks later, we compared the results. And that was a really cool experience and very motivating for students to try to think of creative ways to work with those prompts. And I still remember, it was probably almost 10 years ago now, but the most brilliant thing I had a student create probably or among them, was she was looking at Hokusai’s Great Wave, and she made a tea set out of it and the tsunami wave was on the teapot pushing towards the spout.

Love it.

And I just thought that was such a perfect connection and re-imagining of that subject and the medium of her choice and all of that. And so that’s the kind of thing that I think is really fun is kids start to bring in the areas where they feel comfortable or the areas that they’re really interested in, but it still has that tie to the art history. And they think about what are the elements that I need to incorporate to make it recognizable is based on that, but not a copy of that. And so my steal this art challenge is more about the individual student voice and choice and developing their unique viewpoint. And the art imposter is really more about trying to get them to understand other people’s viewpoint.

Yeah, no, that’s very cool. And I think that’s a worthwhile goal for both of those lessons. Now, I was just going to tell you, I did need to look it up. I wish we had a bunch of money. I could just have a producer look these things up while we’re conversing. But it is a T.S. Eliot quote originally, then Picasso took it from him. So you were correct. So thank you for that.

Thank you for giving me that validation. That’s all I really need in life is to hear the words, “You are correct.”

Well, you got it right here. So no, we appreciate that, but I feel like we couldn’t move on without figuring that out for sure. So we’re in good shape now. Now, I wanted you to also talk about the story that I had learned from you that I was not familiar with the story of the fallen astronaut and artworks traveling into space. So can you tell us that story and also talk about how you’ve turned that into an art assignment?

So this is one that I didn’t know about either. I’ve already confessed. My art history background was really weak prior to my podcast. But in doing research for the podcast, I especially try to find fun facts. I’m trying to do stuff that would appeal to kids too. So I try to do some stuff that’s just like, “Hey, did you know Michelangelo smelled? They had to peel his clothes off him. He never bathed,” just humanizing stuff. And so in doing that, sometimes when I’m struggling for ideas, I’m just googling fun facts from art history and stuff, whatever. And I think actually I’ve come across your article on AOE of 10 fun facts or odd stories that include the dude who used fireworks to communicate with aliens.

Yes, yes. And he also draws with gunpowder. He likes his explosions.

So after coming across that, I just thought, you know what? Google’s going to find me something. So I put art in space and I thought there’s probably going to be something with the ISS or something has to have happened. And I came across, there have actually been two things sent to the moon. One was Moon Museum that may or may not have actually made it there. And honestly, it’s really disappointing looking at the pictures of it’s like a tile that they etched with a phallus and some other stuff. It was six artists doing different stuff that’s like, “I can’t show this to my class.” And then the one that I thought was just brilliant and a delightful story is Fallen Astronaut. And basically the short version of this story is an astronaut is at a dinner party where he meets an artist.

It’s 1971, he’s going up on Apollo 15, he’s going to go to the moon and they’re talking about what a monumental occasion this is. And just the Neil Armstrong, “It’s one small step for a man, but one giant leap for mankind.” And there should be something to sort of memorialize this monumental event. And they decided there should be literally a memorial on the moon. And the astronaut, what was his name? David Scott. He says, “You know what? You make something, I’ll smuggle it aboard.”

And so they work out the logistics. It’s got to be something durable, so it’s got to be metal. It obviously can’t be that big. So in real life it’s three and a half inches, give or take. And so he made this abstracted human-like figure. And one of the many controversies about this, Paul Van Hoeydonck, the artist who designed it, he wanted it to be standing upright as a symbol of all people. And it’s this aluminum sculpture that they wanted it to represent all people, not a specific man or woman or from a specific culture and all of that. So it’s a great [inaudible 00:17:01] type of connection.

And then David Scott said, “No, this should represent those who gave their lives in service of space travel.” And so only one of them actually made it to the moon to install the piece. So guess who won out? David Scott laid him down as a Fallen Astronaut and put a little plaque there with the names of astronauts and cosmonauts who had died in service of the space industry. No word on whether Laika and Albert and the other animals were memorialized there because I could not make out the text on the card in the photos that I’ve seen. But yeah, so it’s this bonkers fact that yeah, there’s art on the moon. An astronaut just smuggled something aboard. And so what I do with my students is I start class by just saying, “Here’s the background. Imagine you’re the artist at the dinner party. You meet this astronaut, he’s going to go to the moon. He’s willing to take your artwork up there. What do you give him?”

And you can draw it out a little bit by doing the quick-pair-share. What are the logistics you would need to work out? What are the ideas that you can incorporate some of that brainstorming type stuff? And then I do it as a quick and easy oil pastel drawing. So I do the demo and guided drawing of like, “Okay, we’re going to draw the surface of the moon and we’re going to layer and blend a little bit.” I show the blue marble photo of the Earth so that I can talk about, “Okay, we’re going to get the light hitting the earth here, and the other parts receding into shadow of space,” yada, yada, yada. And then they have most of class to draw what their monument would be. And then at the very end of class, I reveal the actual one and we talk about, “Well, why do you think he designed it this way? And what do you think of that, comparing yours to his?” And all of that.

Yeah, I really like that idea. I think that’s really cool. So a good story and yeah, great way for kids to put something interesting together. So I like that a lot. So now changing gears a little bit, you’ve been on before to talk about gamification and to talk about art history. And I know just sort of your mind is always churning. I know you’re always trying new things. Do you have any new ideas for fun games or lessons that you’ve done recently or anything that’s working well in the classroom?

Yeah, I don’t know, a week, two weeks ago, something like that, I debuted a new game for my classroom. I bought some of those dots that PE teachers use and they spread around the gym and I basically just spread them around my classroom so that my class was a giant board game. And then I spread out different clue cards around the board. So teams roll my giant foam dice and they move around the game board and they pick up clues from different artists. It’s a combination of the game Clue and Guess Who? If I were being really specific, I would say it’s probably very, very similar to a board game called Junior Detective.

But kids are trying to figure out and solve a mystery. So the mystery I set up, I told them my nemesis, Dr. Meanie bad guy, is back and he has stolen another work of art, but he’s a smart criminal. He’s replaced it with a forgery. So we have to figure out which is the forgery in this collection. And all of the clue cards have some sort of characteristic of the artwork. So it’ll say it’s got at least one person in it. It was inspired by a window on a farmhouse. It’s an American painting from 1930. And by this point I can see you’ve probably already figured it out-

I was going to say I feel I’ve solved. I feel like I can pass the Junior Detective test at this point.

So it would be in that case Grant Wood’s American Gothic. But I make things a little bit harder for my students than I do for you because I would also include in there a red herring or basically I just say one of the artists is a liar. So you have to write down the clues that you got and whom you got them from so you can figure out which one is not true. So one clue might say it’s American, one clue might say it’s Egyptian and you have to figure out, okay, which matches the other criteria? Or you have to go around the board until you get to the clue card that says Picasso is a liar. I don’t make it too hard for them, but I like to incorporate these different things. And by having one thing that is a lie that they have to figure out, it forces them to keep track of the clues. And then they’re writing down artists’ names, which I’m hoping is going to help make a little bit more of that stick.

And they’re just paying closer attention to things too. It’s not just like a speed run to see how many clues they can collect and how quickly they can do it. So they probably need to think a little bit more. So I think that’s good. So let me ask you, how long did you take to set all this up?

The setup for it’s not that bad because you’re just sprinkling the dots around. Creating the game took a little bit more time because as I think you know by now, I like things that are needlessly complicated. So it wasn’t just like I’m printing out text on a card. I also had to have those color filters so it reveals the text. So I went on Adobe and created a card template that has red lettering that just says, “I’m writing a bunch of red texts so that when this is passed through a filter, you won’t be able to see it anymore.” And I just copied and pasted that several times. So it’s just this massive red lines. And then I put some cyan lettering on top of that. And so then as I’m introducing the game, I also have an excuse to talk to students about color theory and see this is why it works, so I can filter out this text. And when you have that stuff where they see, “Oh, you know how to do that thing that I’ve seen as a gimmick in these other games?”

And I’m like, “Yeah, and you can do it too. And this is exactly how, and that’s why you pay attention to color theory.” I like to cram in as much as I can. That part of it took me a little bit longer.

Yeah, well, I can see why. But no, I think that’s all really good stuff. Okay. I have one last question for you before you go, and it might be a little bit out there, but I am curious, do you have any just really big ideas for art history that you would love to do, but just because of logistics or cost or any of those million constraints that are on us as teachers you don’t think you’ll ever be able to do? What are your great big ideas? And would you like me to share mine while you’re thinking of yours? Would that be helpful?

Any way that I can stall, yes.

Okay. So when I was teaching high school, I had a classroom that was not very wide, but it was very, very long. It was a giant rectangle. And what I always wanted to do was an art history timeline that went all the way around my very long room where kids would just do paintings in the style of different artists and then we hang them at the top of the walls and they would just circle the room in chronological order. And so the first year you could get however many different paintings and you hang them up just sort of randomly around the room where they might fit on an art history timeline.

And then every year from there you would fill in a few more and just rearrange them so they’re still in chronological order. And then after, I don’t know, two decades or so, we would have a comprehensive art history timeline going all the way around the room, but for a lot of obvious reasons that really never got up the ground. I never really followed through with that. I thought it would be so amazing, but there’s just so many reasons not to do it. So it really never came to fruition. But I don’t know. What about you? Do you have any grand ideas, any master plans that may or may not actually happen?

Well, first off, I love that idea and I think somebody needs to do that.

Well, I was going to say I still love the idea. It’s not realistic.

It’s not. But just to add one more element of realism to it, I would love to see a version of that that is like, you know how we’ve got feeder schools? I would love to see it grouped with artists who influenced other artists so you see that development of ideas through the artworks.

That would be really cool.

But I guess if I’m thinking about what I would like to do, honestly, I love my job. I love what I do. I just wish I were good at it. My grand ideas are just a better version of what I do. I make a podcast about art history. I would really love the dream, the whole reason I actually started my podcast. My podcast, I started with the idea that I wanted to teach students how to share their ideas. And you can’t teach a medium until you’ve experienced it yourself. So it was like a pilot program just to learn the medium so I could teach it to students.

What I would love is to help students create five to 10 minute podcasts about the art that they love, get students to do that, and talking about their artworks, maybe responding, having conversations, having dialogues, and just putting together a massive database of just hundreds of children having conversations, sharing fun facts and their insights and connections to different artists and artworks. And then finding a programmer who could make that a sortable database, put filters on like, “Okay, I want to find women artists,” or “I want to find 20th century artists,” or “I want to find Japanese artists,” or whatever it might be. That would be my dream scenario.

I realized that I do not have the time to teach myself to code to that level. I just can’t. If I had the time, I would love to do that because I am a huge tech enthusiast. I really used to like making my own websites and doing JavaScript and ActionScript and all that stuff that really shows just how old I am, but I can’t do that anymore. And I would love to have that kind of thing. But I don’t have 20 different podcast rooms set up that are all soundproofed with mics, and I don’t have an entire-

Everything you would need to make that come to fruition. It’s not there.

Yeah. And not all the kids have the same enthusiasm as my top 10%. So that would be it. Or I try to share my lesson plans with a lot of people. I would love to get a bigger database of that stuff. Basically, I wish I could be a one man AOEU and just have all that stuff ready to go, but I am not as good as your entire crew of people that does this full time for a living passion.

I was going to say there’s a lot more than one person putting all this stuff together, for sure.

Yeah. But like I say, my big dreams would be doing that kind of stuff, trying to get resources out to people, share my games and stuff like that.

No, I think all that’s cool. Cool. All right, well, Kyle, thank you for sharing your hopes and dreams with us and also all of your most recent art history ideas. I know that’s something people have been asking for, so I really appreciate you taking the time to come on and share more of what you’re doing. I always love talking to you and hopefully people will take some things from this episode and like you said, put them to use in their classroom. So thank you for all of that.

Oh, it’s a pleasure and a privilege as always. Thank you very much.

Tim Bogatz:

Thank you again to Kyle for coming on the show! Everyone who was looking for more art history ideas, I hope you found some good takeaways, some things to bring to your classroom, some fun ideas to engage your students. Make sure you find Kyle online and make sure you check out the who arted podcast

And like we talked about last week, we would love for you to check out AOEU’S Instagram, especially if you are listening to this on Tuesday the 14th. Amanda is going to be taking over the AOEU Instagram page. Make sure you check that out. We have some fun plans and a very special announcement coming. Keep an eye out for that!

Art Ed Radio is produced by the Art of Education University with audio engineering from Michael Crocker. Thank you as always for listening. I will be back next Tuesday with another episode.