Art Museum Field Trip To Study Art Fundamentals

If at all feasible, a trip to a museum provides a great benefit to young students. Much of art appreciation happens by physically being in the presence of the art object. The meanings the viewer experiences through his or her relationship to the the scale of the work are not communicated in reproductions, not to mention accuracy of color and detail is lost in photographs. Many times classes make trips to museums to see specific exhibits, as the content of the exhibits and the related museum provided activities/lectures support the already topical classroom curriculum. Another reason to bring a class to a museum is to give the students an opportunity for an exercise to identify the formal elements and principles of art used in the works. Any permanent museum collection would work for this exercise.
Exercise:
Ask the students to select at least three works in the museum collection and spend a minimum of 5 minutes studying each work for a total of 15 minutes of observation.
Ask them to guess how much time it took the artist to create the work. Tell them that some works take months or years to make and can't be appreciated in the time it takes to watch a TV commercial. It takes a "slower" type of observation to begin to "see" what an artist is "saying" in his or her art.
Ask them to record: the name of the artist, title of the work, medium and year created.
Answer the questions: What is the artist communicating/expressing in this work?
How does the artist use the elements of art (line, shape, form, color, texture space) and the principles of artistic design( balance, unity, contrast, emphasis, pattern, movement and rhythm)
as the vocabulary of visual language to express and communicate -(what the student identified)- in the work?
Ask them to share their observations with each other as the beginning point for a discussion about the art they observed that day.