VIRTUAL ART GALLERY

• In art classes, students are provided authentic and meaningful opportunities to develop the literacy skills in a contemporary age becoming increasingly visual in its communication. Visual literacy is the ability to interpret, comprehend, appreciate, use, and create visual media in ways that advance thinking, decision-making, communicating, and learning. Art education supports visual literacy across disciplines and learning goals related to the focus on close reading of artworks as text, logical evidence-based inferences, meaning-making through analysis and group discussions, and creating visual imagery.

• The visual arts challenge students to synthesize concepts and skills by engaging in a wide-range of media to create original work.

• Students are given opportunities in the visual arts to apply learning in new ways by connecting and integrating content across disciplines.

• The visual arts encourage students to take intellectual risks and to think critically and creatively when presented with opportunities to make choices and to solve complex, open-ended problems with the possibility of multiple solutions.

• Responding to visual art allows students multiple and varied opportunities to clearly articulate information about what they see, feel, know, and imagine.

• Observing, analyzing, and critiquing artwork requires higher level thinking as students must support claims with evidence.

• Visual art classes allow students to experience conventional as well as contemporary and emerging media to enhance learning.

• Engaging in the visual art develops empathetic awareness and understanding of society, culture, and history resulting in students who value and respect diversity.

• Visual art provides opportunities for both self-expression and collaboration.

• Excellence in art is developed through continuous practice, craftsmanship, refinement, and reflection. This creative process encourages students to build resilience, perseverance, self-awareness, and a growth mindset.

While students can learn about the visual arts through a textbook, true artistic literacy requires students engage in the artistic processes directly through the use of appropriate materials in appropriate spaces. The MCPS visual art curriculum framework is aligned with the National Core Arts Standards and the Maryland Fine Arts Standards. At each curricular level, the framework defines what students must know about visual art, and what they must be able to do with this knowledge to demonstrate artistic literacy. Artistic literacy is developed through authentic experiences in four artistic processes:

• CREATING: Conceiving and developing new artistic ideas and work.

• PRESENTING: Interpreting and sharing artistic work.

• RESPONDING: Understanding and evaluating how the arts convey meaning.

• CONNECTING: Relating artistic ideas and work with personal meaning and external context.

Enduring Understandings are the thoughts and concepts that connect students and the world of art to larger ideas that affect all humankind. These are big ideas that transcend the boundaries of traditional disciplines and make connections between the student, art, and real life issues. Students use the Enduring Understandings as a basis for exploration of their own thoughts, relationships, and imagination as they engage in self-expression, communication, and the creation of art. Each Anchor Standard has an Enduring Understanding that summarizes important ideas and core processes that are central to that standard and have lasting value beyond the classroom.

1. Creative and innovative thinking are essential life skills that can be developed.

2. Experimentation, risk-taking, and learning from mistakes are essential to the creative process.

3. Excellence in art is developed through continuous practice, craftsmanship, refinement, and reflection.

4. Applied criteria determines how and why work is selected for presentation and preservation.

5. Evaluating and applying appropriate presentation methods is essential to display artwork in a specific space.

6. Collecting, presenting, and preserving artistic work constructs meaning and documents the human experience.

7. Personal experience and engagement with art develops aesthetic awareness.

8. Describing and analyzing artwork leads to interpretation and artistic intent.

9. Criteria is used to critique and evaluate art.

10. Artmaking synthesizes perception, experience, and inquiry to create meaning.

11. Interacting with art develops empathetic awareness and understanding of society, culture, and history.