Before COVID-19 upended education in the United States, approximately 1.6 million children between the ages of five and seventeen were homeschooled, representing a little more than three percent of the total number of school-aged children.
But today, virtually every child, pre-K through grade twelve, is studying at home, utilizing a cobbled-together mix of online instruction, videos, and collaborative presentations using Internet-based meeting tools like Skype or Zoom.
“Art, culture, and creativity have always made a difference in powerful ways, especially during challenging times. Being inspired and creative have not been canceled.”
Their guardians, meanwhile, have had to become supplemental educators and are looking to the arts—from music and movies to theater, painting, and poetry—to keep kids engaged in learning and push panic to the sidelines.
Thankfully, many museums, galleries, and visual artists have stepped into the fray.
One example is Keep Kids Smart with ART, a program sponsored by the Boca Raton Museum of Art in Florida, which provides a free online program that not only introduces viewers to a wide array of existing art, but also offers constantly updated suggestions, via the museum’s Facebook and Instagram pages, for in-home spin-off projects.
“Art, culture, and creativity have always made a difference in powerful ways, especially during challenging times,” the museum’s Executive Director Irving Lippman wrote in a press statement. “Being inspired and creative have not been canceled.”
The seventy-year-old museum, with its own art school and art faculty, is showcasing two exhibitions in this educational effort. The first, Eye to I, zeroes in on sixty self-portraits from the Smithsonian Museum’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., that were completed between 1901 and 2015.
The selections on view include paintings, drawings, and woodcuts by renowned artists, among them María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Chuck Close, Edward Hopper, Jacob Lawrence, Alice Neel, Louise Nevelson, Alison Saar, Roger Shimomura, and Lee Simonson. The styles are varied, but all are meant to provoke an emotional response that gives students a jumping off point to create something of their own.
The second online exhibition, Edward Steichen: In Exaltation of Flowers, introduces viewers to seven ten-foot-high wall panels featuring two women and dozens of flowers that Steichen painted for the New York City home of Eugene and Agnes Meyer, he a hugely successful investment banker, and she a journalist and social activist. The website features the panels alongside a photograph of purple and blue delphiniums. The suggested assignment asks the viewer to cut shapes from multi-colored pieces of construction paper to create a “flower mosaic” in response.
The focus, the Museum emphasizes, should be on fun, not on output. And the goal? Pleasure.
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
Elaine de Kooning Self-Portrait. Oil on Masonite (1946).
But as important as it is to foster enjoyable activities for children who are cooped up indoors, art promotes more than just a healthy imagination. In fact, educators say that art provides a way for children to integrate sensory, cognitive, emotional, and motor development. What’s more, experts credit art, music, and literature with fueling awareness of, and respect for, other people. They also say that it promotes creativity, problem-solving skills, self-expression, and enhanced self-awareness. In addition, doing something inventive reduces stress—something that is increasingly necessary in these uncertain times.
Artist Marcia Annenberg, an art education instructor at Teachers College of Columbia University, calls Keep Kids Smart with ART evocative, and notes that the works on display in Eye to I suggest a variety of projects in addition to those offered by the museum.
Take María Magdalena Campos-Pons’s painting, When I Am Not Here/Estoy Alla [I Am There], which depicts the artist holding a plant native to her Cuban homeland while standing still, deep in thought.
“Have you ever felt stranded and longed to be somewhere else?” Annenberg asks. A parent or caretaker, she says, can ask a child to make a picture of themselves holding an object that reveals something about who they are—perhaps a basketball, a skateboard, something they’ve made, or a favorite item of clothing. They might also set the image in a place they hope to someday visit or a place they’ve been and miss.
Similarly, she says that Lee Simonson’s 1912 self-portrait, showing the artist standing with an apple in hand and a bowl of fruit nearby, “is unified by an intense saturation of color,” something that might lead to a discussion of primary and secondary colors and their impact on sighted viewers. Her suggested assignment? Using a color wheel and creating a self-portrait using two opposite hues.
Both suggestions, she notes, will work best with children in grades five or higher.
Elly Lonon, author of Amongst the Liberal Elite: The Road Trip Exploring Societal Inequities Solidified by Trump, columnist at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and mother of two elementary school-aged boys, agrees but adds another caution. “So much of this homeschooling thing is asking kids to be still,” Lonon says. “We’re all so anxious, we need to move at every possible opportunity. Lessons need to be twenty minutes or less. That’s the sweet spot of a young kid’s attention span.”
This explains why Lonon has not yet used Keep Kids Smart with ART with her children. Nonetheless, she says that she is grateful that the museum has stepped up and created the program—if not for her family, then for others.
Likewise, she notes that this trend has spread to other art museums around the country, including The Brooklyn Museum in New York and the Albany Museum of Art in Georgia (through its Facebook page).
Many individual graphic artists are also doing what they can. Among them, Mo Willems, Artist-in-Residence at the Kennedy Center (his class is offered at 1 p.m. Eastern Time daily on his YouTube channel); illustrator and author Jarrett J. Krosoczka (his class is offered at 2 p.m. Eastern Time daily on his YouTube channel); children’s book illustrator Carson Ellis (@carsonellis); and Wendy MacNaughton (her class is offered at 1 p.m. Eastern Time daily @wendymac).
A new extended video for "Eye to I: Self Portraits from the National Portrait Gallery" at the Boca Raton Museum of Art is now offered online for audiences at home.