FOR ALL TO SEE:
HOW PUBLIC ART TEACHES

"Public art can express civic values, enhance the environment, transform a landscape, heighten our awareness, or question our assumptions. Placed in a public site, this art is therefore for everyone, a form of collective community expression from the once celebrated but now unrecognized general on a horse to the abstract sculpture that may baffle the passer-by on first glance."

- Penny Balkin Bach

Unit Overview and Rationale

Public art is as old as prehistoric cave paintings and as new as postmodern murals on contemporary structures. Typically when we think of public art, we consider such things as location, purpose, media, artist, and size. Specifically, murals are included in public art because they meet many of the these criteria. Murals tend to evoke images of large paintings on walls and ceilings, but they can be much more far-reaching forms of public art. Murals span the timelines of history, traverse cultural boundaries, and have been created from a variety of media on many kinds of surfaces. Although the intent of murals is as diverse as the artists who make them, for the purpose of this unit of study, we limit our exploration to murals that instruct.

Some of the earliest murals are probably the cave paintings at Lascaux in Southern France. During the 20th century, artists such as Diego Rivera and Thomas Hart Benton used the art form as a type of social and political commentary, thereby educating the viewing public about these ideas. Today Richard Haas paints historic and trompe l'oeil facades on buildings, prompting the public viewer to contemplate historic events and architectural heritage. This unit of study will investigate the instuction that public art can provide through the four foundational disciplines of art.

Students will learn why and how murals are created. These concepts will be applied to other public murals to determine the range of instructional applications that public art can provide. The Chisholm Trail Cattle Drive by American artist, Richard Haas, will be the main focal point of the unit of study. After exploring the work of Haas and other muralists, students will then use their understanding about how and why public art instructs to ultimately design, plan, and create a mural within their school.

Unit Objectives

1. Students will communicate an understanding of the purposes of public art, supporting their beliefs with reasoned responses by studying examples of different murals.
2. Students will investigate specific examples of murals and demonstrate an understanding of how these works of public art instruct and inform viewers, supporting their interpretations with compelling reasons.
3. Students will express an understanding of how artists have chosen to depict important viewpoints of different times and cultures by analyzing selected murals.
4. Students will draw upon the universal experience of public art to express meaning through art participation in the design and creation of a mural.

Lesson Overviews

Lesson One
During interactive discussions about murals, students will discover important vocabulary words and raise questions. They will apply critical thinking and problem-solving skills to acquire and organize new information from print and electronic technology and role-play to demonstrate an understanding of the purposes of public art.

Lesson Two
Following a review on the purposes of public art and discussion of examples of public art from other cultures, students will analyze messages of public art and each write an interpretative poem to reflect the meaning of a mural that they select. The results will be read aloud and saved for display at the end of the unit.

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