Art and Design

This month we bring you a selection of art sites to browse during the summer. You'll find information on art education, art lesson plans and activities as well as galleries of online art from many museums. Happy surfing!

Art and Design Education | Art Museums

Art and Design Education

The Minneapolis Institute of Arts features an exploration of visual elements and principles in The Artist's Toolkit. For each element, the site provides an animated explanation, practice identifying the element in works of art, and an interactive work space in which to use that element to create their own simple drawing. Topics covered include line, color, space, shape, balance, and movement/rhythm.

Red Studio from the Museum of Modern Art is designed to let teens explore issues about modern art. It is also an art playground, with several neat interactive tools for creataing digital art such as Fauxtograpm and Remix.

Building Surprises: The Architecture of the Weisman Art Museum presents an interactive lesson on the process of architectural design and on architect Frank Gehry.

ART Pintura, Art Detective is an art history lesson in the form of an interactive mystery.

The Children's Museum of Indianapolis features an interactive tutorial on glassblowing, an online puppetmaking studio and more.

A Lifetime of Color from Sanford provides loads of art resources for teachers and students, ideas for projects using Sanford products and some fun online activities.

Crayola Art Education contains a host of ideas for projects and techniques using crayons, markers, and other Crayola products, as well as online activities for younger students.

The Artroom from University of Florida Art Education Department is a virtual art room designed around the idea of activity centers that encourage kids to create, to learn and to explore new ideas. The site includes lots of creative ideas to help elementary students get started on art projects and a gallery displaying student art.

The Incredible Art Department from ArtsWire features pictures and stories from art teachers, lesson plans, and a section on jobs in the field of art.

NGAKids from the National Gallery of Art features animated information about various artists and their works for younger students. Check out the Art Zone, with neat interactive tools for making art online.

Explore and Learn from the Metropolitan Museum of Art includes an interactive timeline of art history and educational exhibits such as the Art of Ancient Egypt.

The Minneapolis Institute of Arts site includes digitized versions of over 2,000 of the museum's works, and several online art lessons such as "Modernism" and "World Ceramics." KidsWorld contains games, activities and coloring pages for younger children.

ArtsEdNet, from the Getty Education Institute for the Arts, includes lesson plans, curriculum ideas, and resources for professional development. The site also features an image gallery which links each image to educational materials, and a guide to building visual arts lessons.

ArtsEdge, from the Kennedy Center, is an information service for art educators. The site features interdisciplinary lesson plans based on the National Art Education Standards, art and music listserves, and other professional development resources. "Mini-sites"provide explorations of a particular theme or subject such as Louis Armstrong, Ballet, or the National Symphony Orchestra tour of Asia.

Art Images for College Teaching (AICT) provides photographs of ancient, medieval, Renaissance European and non-western art and architecture. Each image includes a concise description, and images are indexed according to their inclusion in a number of widely used undergraduate art history survey textbooks. Students and teachers may use these image resources in any application that is both educational in intent and non-commercial in nature.

PBS Arts & Drama is a gateway to all of PBS' television and Web programming concerning the arts. It features daily schedules of art related programs, Arts for the Classroom, which has lessons and activities for music, literature, and fine arts, and more.

Artstudio Chalkboard from the University of Evansville Art Department provides detailed lessons on drawing and painting topics.

The National Art Education Association home page provides information about the NAEA national conference and news releases of interest to art educators.

Art Museums

The Kyoto National Museum of Japan features online versions of its past exhibits, as well as an engaging interactive tour of Japanese art for younger students.

The Louvre Web site features virtual tours of the museum's galleries and selected works from each of its collections.

Virtual Uffizi Web site allows users to explore the gallery's famous collections by room, by artist or by work. Biographies of artists and a glossary are also available.

The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco features an "Imagebase" of more than 75,000 digitized images from the museum's collection. The imagebase is searchable by artist, country, period, or even the subject represented in the work of art.

The J. Paul Getty Museum of Art site displays a well organized sample of artworks from various collections (antiquities, decorative arts, drawings, manuscripts, etc.). Images of the artwork as well as historical information and biographies of the artists are provided in the overview to each collection.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art provides highlights from each of its collections online, including digitized versions of the entire collection of over 2,000 European paintings.

MoMA (The Museum of Modern Art) provides several interactive exhibits including the Art Safari which guides children to write about what they see in art. Samples of art annotated by the curator from the museum's collection are also available.

The National Museum of African Art presents online versions of its exhibitions on contemporary African artists, African musical instruments, Kente cloth and many other topics.

The online exhibits of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art include The Arts and Crafts Movement : 1880-1920 in Europe and America, American Art: Historical Periods, European Painting: Historical Periods, Japanese Prints: Edo/Tokyo and many more.

The National Museum of Wildlife Art Web site provides a searchable collection of wildlife art, as well as comprehensive lesson plans which integrate art with other subjects such as science and writing. An online activity called "Art Tales" allows students to use wildlife art, music and writing to create their own multimedia presentation. Teachers may request "Traveling Trunks," self-contained units that contain lesson plans, hands on activities, reference materials and study specimens.

The Smithsonian American Art Museum features 16 online exhibits such as "An Edward Hopper Scrapbook," "Posters American Style," and "American Photographs: The First Century."

WebMuseum is an electronic museum; users can view full-screen digital images as well as information about artists and their works from museum collections around the world.

Portal Wisconsin's Online Art Gallery features works by contemporary Wisconsin artists. Students can view photographs of works in a variety of media, and read what artists say about their own work.

The Text-only menu provides accessible and printer-friendly access to the Surf Report Archives.

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