The National Endowment for the Humanities has a new project, Picturing America, in co-operation with the American Library Association. From the NEH website:
Great art speaks powerfully, inspires fresh thinking, and connects us to our past.
Picturing America, an exciting new initiative from the National Endowment for the Humanities, brings masterpieces of American art into classrooms and libraries nationwide. Through this innovative program, students and citizens will gain a deeper appreciation of our country’s history and character through the study and understanding of its art. …
Because “democracy demands wisdom,” NEH serves and strengthens our Republic through promoting excellence in the humanities and conveying the lessons of history to all Americans.
As part of the program, more than 26,000 American schools and public libraries will receive “40 large, high-quality reproductions of great American art and a comprehensive teachers resource book to facilitate the use of the works of art in core subjects”, around August 2008.
This project appeals to me in so many ways, as a home educating mother, as the daughter of parents who established (and still run) on of the top commercial historical picture libraries, as a once and always student of history, and as someone interested in North American education who has been sad to see subjects such as history and arts get left behind as part of NCLB.
Last month, John Updike gave the NEH’s 37th annual Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, and his subject was the Picturing America initiative, “The Clarity of Things: What Is American About American Art?”. “It was my idea,” he said in the lecture, “invited to give the 2008 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, to use some of these forty works, with others, to pose the question, ‘What is American about American art?’ ”.
Picturing America Picture Gallery
Picturing America Educators Resources page, where you can download for free the full pilot version of the Resource Book (all 118 pages)
Additional resource page, with links to the Smithsonian National Gallery of Art “Exploring Themes in America Art” website
Filed under: American history, Art, Civics, Education, History
Very cool project indeed. And it is nice to know that American tax dollars fund at least one useful project. (or is that too snarky)
No, not too snarky at all, considering that back in 1995 the NEH, along with the National Endowment for the Arts and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, were *this close* to getting the axe. And before that, in the early eighties, Ronald Reagan appointed Bill Bennett as head of the NEH. Bennett was followed by Lynne Cheney, wife of Dick Cheney, Dubya’s VP; LC jumped ship a few years ago before the axe threatened to fall, and she and Bennett were in favor of said axe…
And I was reminded of it all when Bill C-10 was introduced. Very much the same “culture wars” discussion.