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Robert Rauschenberg |
Before beginning the lesson with your students, please be sure to read the lesson plan all the way through.
SUPPLIES:
Paper; glue; objects (see A Walk to Remember - the walk);
paint, markers, or crayons; tape
Play a game with your students to help them understand how sounds can be translated into colors and lines. Give each student a turn to make a sound. Ask the rest of the class to use their crayons to draw a picture of that sound. The results will be sounds depicted as lines, shapes, and colors! Do the same thing with emotions. Ask students to draw a happy line, a sad line, an excited line, etc. These drawings can be referred to later, before the students start the activity A Walk to Remember – the remembering.
Please remember that all answers to these questions should be accepted, as students are responding to what they see and how they interpret what they see. You can add information from your teacher information (back page) when it seems to be appropriate.
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Look at the artwork and its details. Explain to the students that the small pictures are close-ups of the parts that are hard to see on a transparency. Look at the details and ask if they can find where each one belongs on the larger canvas.
Ace is divided into five rectangular sections. Can you find them? In real life, each panel is bigger than a whole blackboard in most classrooms. When Rauschenberg was new to New York, a city much larger than Buffalo, he created this piece after taking a walk. He chose the objects and paint to create a memory of the walk. Artists have to make decisions when choosing colors and materials to create a composition. Rauschenberg referred to this artwork as one of his "combines" because he used a combination of painting and objects.
Isn’t it funny that Rauschenberg’s memory of this walk did not include any buildings, cars, or familiar objects from a city? Instead he used colors, shapes, textures, and found objects to represent what he felt and saw. The way he used paint was also different from a painting that shows a realistic city scene. Even though his work was not realistic, Rauschenberg considered himself a "journalist" because he wanted to record everyday life. That is why he included parts of real objects, expressive painting, color, texture, and line to communicate his ideas about an experience he had.
A Walk to Remember – the walk.
As a class, take a walk anywhere - your classroom, cafeteria, or neighborhood.
You can even use your Gallery visit as your walk! Ask your students to remember
the colors, sounds, smells, and objects that they see.
Choose a way for your students to obtain found objects. You can:
A Walk to Remember – the remembering
Back in the classroom, have the students choose objects that remind them of
the walk. Remind them to think of themselves as "visual journalists"
recording the feelings, colors, sights, sounds, and weather of the environment
they visited. Have the students glue the objects to a rectangular sheet of paper.
Be sure to use the same size paper for all the students. Note: for heavier
objects use heavier paper and allow for glue to dry at least an hour or overnight.
Have students use paint, crayons, or markers around their glued objects to depict
more details about the walk. Remind them not to illustrate real objects.
Encourage students to use color, line, and shape to represent what they saw
and felt. Refer to their earlier drawings for ideas!
After each paper is dry, divide the students into groups of five. Like the artist, they will have to decide how to make one composition out of five panels to make a larger combine. Encourage them to try different arrangements. When they decide on the final composition have them tape the sections together and title their combine. Hang them up to show how they collaborated.
Have each group present its final composition, answering these questions:
Ask the class to imagine stepping into each final composition:
When the work comes down, separate the five panels and return each student’s individual composition.
Robert Rauschenberg was born in 1925 in Port Arthur, Texas. As a young man he studied art in Kansas City, Missouri; Paris, France; and Asheville, North Carolina. In 1949 Rauschenberg settled in New York, where he studied for a year at the Art Students League. In the early fifties, Rauschenberg developed his "combines" bringing together freely painted areas of canvas and real three-dimensional objects. At this time, New York had become the center of the western art world, taking the place held by Paris, France for much of the twentieth century. In addition to many now famous visual artists, New York had become a center for music, dance, and film as well. Many of the artists living there knew each other and collaborated on projects. One of the most inventive artists of the twentieth century, Rauschenberg has worked in many different visual mediums, saying that, "there is no reason not to consider the world as one gigantic painting." Rauschenberg designed set and costumes for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and worked closely with the composer John Cage, whose music you and your students may have already heard in Nam June Paik’s Piano Piece, which is another work featured in this year’s lesson plans.
Ace is actually about New York itself. Rauschenberg has said, "I’ve always thought that I’m more of a reporter than I am a painter." Composed of five separate panels, it originally would have been accompanied by a sound collage as well, but electronic problems caused that project to be abandoned. It contains items that Rauschenberg found on New York streets, including a crumpled piece of metal, a small suspended can, cardboard, paper, an old shirt, and an umbrella fragment. Some of these items are visible in the details of the work on the transparency. The shifts in texture, rhythm, and focus that the paint and objects create across the five panels of Ace convey the complex texture and rhythm of contemporary life.
This lesson plan was written by Esperanza Altamar and Nancy
Spector and published for use in the Albright-Knox Art Gallery’s Looking
and Learning program, a component of ARTStart.
Looking and Learning has been made possible by a generous grant from the
Cameron Baird Foundation.