Object Lesson: Francis Nakai and Family by Laura Gilpin
Through the course of the nineteenth century, white photographers making portraits of Native American sitters generally framed their subjects in stereotypical ways that exoticized their culture. Many of these photographs augmented the myth that Native American populations could not assimilate into white society and were destined to disappear. Such parallel ideas were often evoked to… Read More
Art-Making Activity: Shape Your World
Reimagine your neighborhood. Promote thinking about fundamentals elements of social justice: community, empathy, equity, activism, and advocacy by honing your observation of immediate surroundings within your community. Use a found-object viewfinder as a tool for isolating shapes in drawing and utilize shapes as building blocks for creating a geometric composition that represents a vision of… Read More
Art-Making Activity: Photo-editing lesson
American photographers Dorothea Lange, Gordon Parks, and Latoya Ruby Frazier turned their cameras on individuals and communities whose stories were less known to expose their daily trials, struggles, and celebrations. Dorothea Lange was a photographer and photojournalist, best known for her Depression-era work for the Farm Security Administration. Lange’s photographs influenced the development of documentary… Read More
Object Lesson: Frontlet Headdress of the Bella Coola Peoples
The Bella Coola Peoples of Canada’s Pacific Northwest, also known as the Nuxalk are renowned as carvers, with a mask-making tradition that includes physical representations of supernatural beings with animal-like features of species common to the tribe’s home region, including owls, killer whales, ravens, and wolves. This headdress in NOMA’s Native American art collection depicts an predatory bird. Read More
Object Lesson: Teapot by Sargent Johnson
With a body like a polished stone and a handle reminiscent of indigenous Mexican animal figures, a recently acquired teapot seems to be of both nature and man, both ancient and modern. This elegant 1941 teapot by the prominent African American Modernist sculptor Sargent Claude Johnson is an extraordinary new addition to NOMA’s decorative arts collection. Read More
Object Lesson: Coal, A Story in Pictures
As NOMA considers the various aspects of sustainability this week, this three-picture story looks at an unsustainable resource and practice: coal and its extraction. As an unrenewable fossil fuel that remains the number one source of carbon emissions globally, the reliance on coal is unsustainable, but so is the human toll that its extraction exerts…. Read More