Essential Questions in Art

• What is art?
• Who is an artist?
• How does art expand and enhance our thinking?
• How does art record and communicate the human experience?
• How does art represent personal expression, exploration, and/or insight?
• How does art help us learn about other people?
• What can we learn about a culture through its art forms?
• How does art reflect human culture?
• Do the arts reflect or shape culture?
• How does art influence what we can learn about ourselves and about our society?
• How is art used everyday life?
• In what ways are everyday sites and sounds rooted in the arts?
• How do artists benefit society?
• Why is art necessary?
• How can I use my artistic talents to benefit my community, state, country, world?
• How do people express themselves through art today?
• How will technology change the way images are constructed and interpreted?
• What role does graphic design play in consumers' choices?
• What will art be like 10, 20, 30 years from now?
• What inspires me?
• What sparks the creative process?
• How do we use materials to make an artistic statement?
• How do artists choose tools, techniques, and material to express their ideas?
• What skills and vocabulary do I need to appreciate visual art?
• How do I use my knowledge of art skills & vocabulary to create art?
• What ethical issues are involved in the creative practices of the visual and performing arts, and how can they be understood in relation to universal concepts of human rights?
• Which appropriate information resources and technologies help us to understand the broad humanistic influences of the arts, and to facilitate integration of visual art, dance, theater and music with essential skills in other subject areas?
• How are visual and performing art skills used to help us adapt to an ever-changing technological world, and to construct suitable creative expressions of this world in visual art, dance, theater and music?
• How can central visual and performing arts concepts and skills, such as artistic rendering of cultural values, principles of organization, collaboration and design, sense awareness, intuitive understanding and creative thinking be applied to solve problems in local, national and global communities?
• What is the role of the visual and performing arts in developing interdisciplinary projects that investigate relevant issues in local, national and global communities?

Sources:
"Essential Questions." Greenville County Schools. Web. 19 Feb. 2009. http://www.greenville.k12.sc.us/index.asp

"Art Essential Questions." Miss Valenti's Art Room. Web. 19 Feb. 2009. http://teachers.saschina.org/cvalenti/art-essential-questions/

"Essential Questions." Hannibal Central School. Web. 19 Feb. 2009. http://www.hannibalcsd.org

"Subject Areas Essential Questions." Web. 03 Oct 2005. Sonoma State University.

Illinois Arts Learning Standards: Visual Arts Standards (2016)

 CREATING 

Anchor Standard 1: Generate and conceptualize artistic ideas and work.

• Enduring Understanding: Creativity and innovative thinking are essential life skills that can be developed.
  Essential Questions: (a) What conditions, attitudes, and behaviors support creativity and innovative thinking? (b) What factors prevent or encourage people to take creative risks? (c) How does collaboration expand the creative process?
• Enduring Understanding: Artists and designers shape artistic investigations, following or breaking with traditions in pursuit of creative art-making goals.
  Essential Questions: (a) How does knowing the contexts, histories, and traditions of art forms help us create works of art and design? (b) Why do artists follow or break from established traditions? (c) How do artists determine what resources are needed to formulate artistic investigations?

Anchor Standard 2: Organize and develop artistic ideas and work.

• Enduring Understanding: Artists and designers experiment with forms, structures, materials, concepts, media, and art-making approaches.
  Essential Questions: (a) How do artists work? (b) How do artists and designers determine whether a particular direction in their work is effective? (c) How do artists and designers learn from trial and error?
• Enduring Understanding: Artists and designers balance experimentation and safety, freedom, and responsibility while developing and creating artworks.
  Essential Questions: (a) How do artists and designers care for and maintain materials, tools, and equipment? (b) Why is it important for safety and health to understand and follow correct procedures in handling materials and tools? (c) What responsibilities come with the freedom to create?
• Enduring Understanding: People create and interact with objects, places, and design that define, shape, enhance, and empower their lives.
  Essential Questions: (a) How do objects, places, and design shape lives and communities? (b) How do artists and designers determine goals for designing or redesigning objects, places, or systems? (c) How do artists and designers create works of art or design that communicate effectively?

Anchor Standard 3: Revise, refine, and complete artistic work.

• Enduring Understanding: Artists and designers develop excellence through practice and constructive critique, reflecting on, revising, and refining work over time.
  Essential Questions: (a) What role does persistence play in revising, refining, and developing work? (b) How do artists grow and become accomplished in art forms? (c) How does collaboratively reflecting on a work help us experience it more completely?

 PRESENTING 

Anchor Standard 4: Select, analyze, and interpret artistic work for presentation.

• Enduring Understanding: Artists and other presenters consider various techniques, methods, venues, and criteria when analyzing, selecting, and curating objects, artifacts, and artworks for preservation and presentation.
  Essential Questions: (a) How are artworks cared for and by whom? (b) What criteria, methods, and processes are used to select work for preservation or presentation? (c) Why do people value objects, artifacts, and artworks and select them for presentation?

Anchor Standard 5: Develop and refine artistic techniques and work for presentation.

• Enduring Understanding: Artists, curators, and others consider a variety of factors and methods, including evolving technologies, when preparing and refining artwork for display or when deciding if and how to preserve and protect artwork.
  Essential Questions: (a) What methods and processes are considered when preparing artwork for presentation or preservation? (b) How does refining artwork affect its meaning to the viewer? (c) What criteria are considered when selecting work for presentation, a portfolio, or a collection?

Anchor Standard 6: Convey meaning through the presentation of artistic work.

• Enduring Understanding: Objects, artifacts, and artworks collected, preserved, or presented by artists, museums, or other venues communicate meaning and a record of social, cultural, and political experiences resulting in the cultivation of appreciation and understanding.
  Essential Questions: (a) What is an art museum? (b) How does the presenting and sharing of objects, artifacts, and artworks in uence and shape ideas, beliefs, and experiences? (c) How do objects, artifacts, and artworks collected, preserved, or presented cultivate appreciation and understanding?

 RESPONDING 

Anchor Standard 7: Perceive and analyze artistic work.

• Enduring Understanding: Individual aesthetic and empathic awareness developed through engagement with art can lead to understanding and appreciation of self, others, the natural world, and constructed environments.
  Essential Questions: (a) How do life experiences influence the way you relate to art? (b) How does learning about art impact how we perceive the world? (c) What can we learn from our responses to art?
• Enduring Understanding: Visual imagery influences understanding of, and responses to, the world. Essential Questions: (a) What is an image? (b) Where and how do we encounter images in our world? (c) How do images influence our views of the world?

Anchor Standard 8: Construct meaningful interpretations of artistic work.

• Enduring Understanding: People gain insights into meanings of artworks by engaging in the process of art criticism.
  Essential Questions: (a) What is the value of engaging in the process of art criticism? (b) How can the viewer “read” a work of art as text? (c) How does knowing and using visual art vocabularies help us understand and interpret works of art?

Anchor Standard 9: Apply criteria to evaluate artistic work.

• Enduring Understanding: People evaluate art based on various criteria.
  Essential Questions: (a) How does one determine criteria to evaluate a work of art? (b) How and why might criteria vary? (c) How is a personal preference different from an evaluation?

 CONNECTING 

Anchor Standard 10: Synthesize and relate knowledge and personal experiences to make art.

• Enduring Understanding: Through art making, people make meaning by investigating and developing awareness of perceptions, knowledge, and experiences.
  Essential Questions: (a) How does engaging in creating art enrich people’s lives? (b) How does making art attune people to their surroundings? (c) How do people contribute to awareness and understanding of their lives and the lives of their communities through art making?

Anchor Standard 11: Relate artistic ideas and works with societal, cultural, and historical context to deepen understanding.

• Enduring Understanding: People develop ideas and understandings of society, culture, and history through their interactions with and analysis of art.
  Essential Questions: (a) How does art help us understand the lives of people in different times, places, and cultures? (b) How is art used to impact the views of a society? (c) How does art preserve aspects of life?

Source: Illinois Visual Arts Standards, 2016 (PDF)

"What the Arts Teach and How It Shows"

1. The arts teach children to make good judgments about qualitative relationships. Unlike much of the curriculum in which correct answers and rules prevail, in the arts, it is judgment rather than rules that prevail.

2. The arts teach children that problems can have more than one solution and that questions can have more than one answer.

3. The arts celebrate multiple perspectives. One of their large lessons is that there are many ways to see and interpret the world.

4. The arts teach children that in complex forms of problem solving purposes are seldom fixed, but change with circumstance and opportunity. Learning in the arts requires the ability and a willingness to surrender to the unanticipated possibilities of the work as it unfolds.

5. The arts make vivid the fact that neither words in their literal form nor numbers exhaust what we can know. The limits of our language do not define the limits of our cognition.

6. The arts teach students that small differences can have large effects. The arts traffic in subtleties.

7. The arts teach students to think through and within a material. All art forms employ some means through which images become real.

8. The arts help children learn to say what cannot be said. When children are invited to disclose what a work of art helps them feel, they must reach into their poetic capacities to find the words that will do the job.

9. The arts enable us to have experience we can have from no other source and through such experience to discover the range and variety of what we are capable of feeling.

10. The arts' position in the school curriculum symbolizes to the young what adults believe is important.

Source: Eisner, E. (2002). The Arts and the Creation of Mind, In Chapter 4, What the Arts Teach and How It Shows. (pp. 70-92). Yale University Press. Available from NAEA Publications. NAEA grants reprint permission for this excerpt from Ten Lessons with proper acknowledgment of its source and NAEA.

"Arts education aids students in skills needed in the workplace: flexibility, the ability to solve problems and communicate, the ability to learn new skills, to be creative and innovative, and to strive for excellence."
– Joseph M. Calahan, Director of Corporate Communications, Xerox Corporation

“GE hires a lot of engineers. We want young people who can do more than add up a string of numbers and write a coherent sentence. They must be able to solve problems, communicate ideas and be sensitive to the world around them. Participation in the arts is one of the best ways to develop these abilities.”
– Clifford V. Smith, President of the General Electric Foundation

Young people who consistently participate in comprehensive, sequential, and rigorous arts programs are:

• 4 times more likely to be recognized for academic achievement.
• 3 times more likely to be elected to class office within their schools.
• 4 times more likely to participate in a math and science fair.
• 3 times more likely to win an award for school attendance.
• 4 times more likely to win an award for writing an essay or poem.

Source: Americans for the Arts (www.artsusa.org).

The Arts provide students with:

• different ways to process information and express their knowledge.
• the ability to think creatively in areas like math and science.
• the ability to be independent and collaboration skills.

Source: Young Audiences, Inc. (www.youngaudiences.org)

The Arts:

• teach students to make good judgments about qualitative relationships.
• celebrate multiple perspectives - showing students that there are many ways to see and interpret the world.
• make it clear that neither words in their literal form nor numbers exhaust what we can know. The limits of our language do not define the limits of our cognition.
• help students learn to say what cannot be said. They must learn to reach into their poetic capacities to find the words to describe how the work of art makes them feel.

Source: National Art Education Association website - (www.naea-reston.org/tenlessons.html) From Elliot Eisner's book: The Arts and the Creation of Mind The Skills Connection Between the Arts and 21st-Century Learning By Bruce D. Taylor

The Arts are Uniquely Human as they Embody The Four Key Characteristics of the Human Mind

• Generative Computation The ability to create a limitless variety of “expressions” from a generative catalyst of modest content. (Think Beethoven’s four-note theme, which he spun into the Fifth Symphony.)
• Promiscuous Combination of Ideas Mingling of different domains of knowledge, thereby creating new products, relationships, techniques, and technologies. (Think of a recipe that combines the chemistry of ingredients with knowledge of temperature and time, along with taste, feel, and smell.)
• Mental Symbols Encoding sensory experiences, both real and imagined, into complex systems of communication. (Think metaphor or analogy.)
• Abstract Thought The ability to imagine what isn’t yet.

Source: Marc Hauser, Harvard University, The “Four Key Characteristics of the Human Mind”. The Skills Connection Between the Arts and 21st-Century Learning By Bruce D. Taylor