A collection of intensive discussions about the role of visual arts in public life The past decade has seen American culture deeply divided by debates over social identity, public morality, communal values and freedom of expression. A key focus of these polarizing discussions has been the role of visual arts in public life. In Art Matters, five leading cultural critics and two prominent contemporary artists show the ways that this debate has profoundly reshaped our view of American culture. Lucy Lippard investigates the extraordinary recent transformations in visual art; Michele Wallace takes on high art, popular culture, and African American identity; David Deitcher discusses queer culture and AIDS; Carole S. Vance ponders censorship and sexually explicit imagery; and Lewis Hyde considers democracy and culture. Projects by artists Julie Ault and Andrea Fraser provide a context for these debates. Art Matters also offers a close examination of attempts to develop alternative funding sources for artists, focusing specifically on the influential private foundation Art Matters-a foundation which became an important proponent for new forms of art and for protecting freedom of expression through its funding and advocacy efforts.

"What's going on in this picture?" With this one question and a carefully chosen work of art, teachers can start their students down a path toward deeper learning and other skills now encouraged by the Common Core State Standards. The Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) teaching method has been successfully implemented in schools, districts, and cultural institutions nationwide, including bilingual schools in California, West Orange Public Schools in New Jersey, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It provides for open-ended yet highly structured discussions of visual art, and significantly increases students' critical thinking, language, and literacy skills along the way. Philip Yenawine, former education director of New York's Museum of Modern Art and cocreator of the VTS curriculum, writes engagingly about his years of experience with elementary school students in the classroom. He reveals how VTS was developed and demonstrates how teachers are using art-as well as poems, primary documents, and other visual artefacts-to increase a variety of skills, including writing, listening, and speaking, across a range of subjects. The book shows how VTS can be easily and effectively integrated into elementary classroom lessons in just ten hours of a school year to create learner-centred environments where students at all levels are involved in rich, absorbing discussions.

These bright, compact hardcovers introduce young readers and their parents to six visual building blocks--Lines, Shapes, Colors, People, Places and Stories--via an assortment of the great masterpieces of twentieth century art. Author Philip Yenawine, the longtime Director of Education at The Museum of Modern Art, is currently co-director of Visual Understanding in Education, a developmentally based education research organization. He has also been affiliated with education programs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. In Shapes Yenawine asks questions like, "Can you find buildings? And roofs?" while looking at a Picasso study. Other Shapes artists include Seurat, Gauguin, Malevich, Mondrian, Arp, Klee, Smith and Dali. Colors looks at Monet, de Kooning, Kandinsky, Albers, Stella and Johns, among others. Places includes 21 artworks by artists such as Hopper, Munch, Klimt, and Bonnard, while People highlights works by Balthus, Degas, Freud, Cezanne, Neel and Rivera. Lines features 16 works by van Gogh, Matisse, Pollock, Morandi, O'Keeffe and others. And Stories includes Chagall, Wyeth, Lichtenstein, Dubuffet, Shahn, Moore and Magritte. Each volume comes with an illustrated summary of artworks.