npg in your classroom - National Portrait Gallery

NPG IN YOUR CLASSROOM
Volume 3, no. 1. Fall 2008
Welcome!
Even those of us not
tied to an academic
calendar use this time
of year for gearing
up: the turning of
leaves and changing
of the season provide
a wonderful time to
reflect on summer and
to think of what is ahead
for winter and spring.
I think of children
returning to school
and answering the “What did you do over summer
vacation?” question. Although it may cause a moan
among students, this often-asked question is a great
way to ease back into the classroom and allow one
last glimpse of summer.
I spent the summer learning about the vast collections
and programs at the National Portrait Gallery. I began
my tenure as director of education in March and have
been running full speed since arriving. Those of you
who partake in our educational offerings know the
dedication and hard work that go into planning and
executing our school tours and teacher workshops.
These are only one component of what happens
in the Education Office. We offer programming to
youth and family groups, as well as adults—all aimed
at making our collection accessible to our visitors.
Even with the varied audiences we serve, we have a
strong commitment to you and your students. Here
in the Education Office, we feel that portraiture has
a place in your classroom. Having spent more than
fifteen years working in the classroom, museums, and
arts administration, I can tell you without a doubt that
the Portrait Gallery is a great resource for engaging
your students in not only history, but art and culture.
I have used objects as teaching tools throughout my
career, so I can also attest to the power of portraiture
in offering a better understanding of our lives and
the culture in which we live.
I hope you find the Portrait Gallery’s collections,
tours, and teacher programs to be valuable resources
in aiding your students to better understand history
and art. What better place to inspire your students
to delve into the lives of individuals who have made
(or are making) significant contributions to our lives
and the country at large?
It has been a summer of learning and inspiration for
me. And as I look ahead at our upcoming exhibition
schedule, I see remarkable programs for you and
your students. I especially look forward to meeting
many of you and to engaging your students with our
programs here at the National Portrait Gallery.
Enjoy the school year.
Rebecca Kasemeyer, Director of Education
What’s Inside
K Learn how Bailey’s Elementary School for the Arts and Sciences uses portraits as biography
K Peek inside the new exhibition “Ballyhoo! Posters as Portraiture” with an excerpted blog entry by its curator and lesson ideas for your classroom
Smithsonian
Donald W. Reynolds Center for
American Art and Portraiture
National Portrait Gallery
By Melanie Layne, Steve Miner, and Tricia Brown
Imagine second and third graders interacting with
portraits—observing, discussing, and questioning
the significance of the details in the images, followed
by eager research, searching for answers to their own
inquiries. We discovered the power of portraiture
ourselves last year and collaborated to pass along
our passions with our ethnically, linguistically, and
economically diverse students at Bailey’s Elementary
School for the Arts and Sciences in Falls Church,
Virginia.
We introduced portraits to students as biographies.
In comparing how we read biographical books and
portraits, we quickly learned that students were
reading portraits merely as images that reflected a
person’s appearance rather than as biographies full
of information about the sitters’ lives. We spent a
few days teaching students to notice the features
of a portrait (setting, objects, facial expression,
clothing, and gesture/pose) before proceeding
to the processes of making deductions, drawing
conclusions, and asking questions about the sitter’s
life. We began with a portrait of someone the students
felt connected with—one of their teachers, Charlotte
Gonzalez—followed by portraits of people from the
social studies curriculum with whom students were
somewhat familiar, until we felt that they knew what
to look for in a portrait. Students were now ready to
begin interpreting all that they noticed.
“Reading” a portrait requires us to apply what we
know about the sitter or to ask questions in order
to further research. Students began by applying
what they already knew about a person. We had
them return to Gonzalez’s portrait and discuss the
significance of every single thing in the portrait. We
had them use the phrase “I think
because I
know
”: for example, “I think that the artist
chose a setting of a classroom because I know
teaching is an important part of Ms. Gonzalez’s life.
I think she is holding a book to show that she loves
to read because I know that reading and writing
are her favorite things to teach.” If students were
unsure about something in the portrait, they posed
a question for further research rather than make
an uninformed guess: “I wonder why she is sitting
in a rocking chair. Is it because the rocking chair is
special to her? Does she like to read in that rocking
chair?” Students were practicing the reading skills of
inference and questioning without even realizing it!
To build more background knowledge about the
lives of specific historical figures, we watched several
short video clips and read short picture books about
the lives of Martin Luther King Jr., Helen Keller, and
George Washington. Students used evidence from
the videos and books to prove what they noticed in
the portraits of these people. The portraits naturally
elicited the students’ independent research because
they were invested in figuring out the symbolism
contained within the portraits.
Each student then worked with a partner to research
a president or a civil rights leader who was not only
in the social studies curriculum but also had his or
her portrait on view in the National Portrait Gallery.
We provided every pair of students with portraits
of “their” sitter from various points in his or her life.
Students were far more interested in researching and
Melanie Layne
Guest Feature: Reading Portraits
to Unlock Our Past
The ultimate synthesis occurred when we went on
a field trip to the National Portrait Gallery, where
students applied their ability to read portraiture.
They were eager to connect their background
knowledge about various sitters with the portraits
in the museum. After a short discussion time, in
which students explored several portraits, we asked
students to “step into the shoes” of the person they
had been researching and write a journal entry from
his or her perspective. The journal needed to inform
a reader about this person’s life in relation to the
portrait. Many students who traditionally struggled
with language and writing were highly motivated
and seemed to discover a method for using esoteric
facts about a famous person in a personal way. They
constructed meaning for themselves of why “their”
person is famous enough to have a portrait in this
rather imposing museum. Quite frankly, we loved
seeing students so focused and comfortable on the
museum’s floors writing, thinking, and connected. It
made the museum . . . well, less like a museum and
more like a building that was bursting with ideas!
This experience was meaningful and rewarding to all
involved. Our teaching has forever changed, and we
are certain that portraiture will forever be viewed as
biography for fifty elementary students at Bailey’s
Elementary School for the Arts and Sciences.
The authors are second- and third-grade teachers at
Bailey’s Elementary School for the Arts and Sciences in
Falls Church, Virginia.
Melanie Layne
knowing the story of each person’s life because they
were eager to understand the portrait. For example,
one portrait of Rosa Parks showed her wearing a
winter coat and an “old-fashioned” warm hat. Her
clothing made students want to know the month
of her famous civil disobedience, which was in
December. These details in the portraits piqued their
curiosity and gave them a context for remembering
the date that Parks made history, rather than just
trying to memorize it.
Ballyhoo! Posters as Portraiture
Excerpted from a Face-to-Face blog entry by Wendy
Wick Reaves, NPG’s curator of prints and drawings
Why does a museum that usually exhibits art choose
to exhibit posters? How do you characterize a poster
anyway? Is it high culture when done by a fine artist
and low culture when it reproduces a photographic
face? Is it a historical document, an inexpensive
decorative item, a symbol, or an ephemeral piece of
commerce?
The National Portrait Gallery’s new exhibition
“Ballyhoo! Posters as Portraiture” has given me the
opportunity to muse about these questions. But I
can’t say I’ve decided on an easy way to explain the
poster and its impact.
Sometimes a pictorial poster is a decorative
masterpiece—something I can’t walk by without
a jolt of aesthetic pleasure. Another might strike
me as extremely clever advertising: you can feel
the persuasive tug of words and image working in
tandem. Occasionally, a poster is more like a punch
in the stomach that takes you aback and makes you
think. Posters can also be collectible icons for your
wall, promoting your favorite cause or rock band.
Indeed, there is no one tidy category for these pieces.
But collectively, these “pictures of persuasion,” as we
might call them, offer a wealth of art, history, design,
and popular culture for us to understand.
The poster is a familiar part of our world, and we
intuitively understand its role as propaganda,
promotion, announcement, or advertisement. But in
this exhibition, we’ve added another set of questions
to ponder. How can we think about the poster as
a form of popular portraiture? So often a poster
does feature a famous face. And when it does, it is
conveying information about that individual, while
at the same time announcing the arrival of a circus,
hawking a product, building wartime morale, or
promoting a movie or political movement. What
are those messages about the celebrity figure?
Does the poster reinforce his or her public image?
Undermine it? Subtly transform it? How does each
poster express a specific moment in the life of the
person depicted?
In my role as a curator at the National Portrait Gallery,
I have enjoyed the opportunity to collect these
posters as portraits of prominent Americans. They
are bold and fun; each one, in my view, captures a
moment of history and tells a story about its famous
subject.
I find that I am always learning something new about
the subtle complexities of this popular art form. It
isn’t enough to learn the history of poster art. One
must weave in the history of celebrity promotion and
the history of advertising. Only then can we really
understand the poster and ask the biographical
questions.
I hope, when you visit our exhibition—in the museum
or on the Web site—that you’ll share my attraction
to these images as art, history, and portraiture.
Check out the NPG’s blog at face2face.si.edu/
my_weblog/.
Loïe Fuller (1862–1928) by Jules Chéret (1836–
1932), color lithographic poster, 1893. National
Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
The National Portrait Gallery is offering a
“Ballyhoo!” school program through February
6, 2009, and a professional development
workshop on December 4, 2008. For more
information, please contact the school and
teacher program coordinator at whitebz@
si.edu.
Dorie Miller (1919–1943)
Dorie Miller by David Stone Martin (1913–1992), color photolithographic poster with halftone, 1943
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
Dorie Miller (1919–1943)
Serving as a messman on the battleship USS West Virginia, anchored in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii,
Dorie Miller was doing laundry rounds on the morning of December 7, 1941, when the
Japanese attacked. He went on deck to help the wounded to safety, including the captain
and executive officer. He then manned a .50-mm machine gun, which he had not been
trained to use, and fired at enemy planes until ordered to abandon the burning bridge.
Miller’s heroism was ignored or forgotten in the mainstream press until African American
newspapers rallied for Miller to be honored. President Franklin D. Roosevelt personally
ordered that Miller be awarded the Navy Cross, the navy’s second-highest award, in 1942.
Promoted and reassigned to sea, Miller was one of the 644 men lost when the escort carrier
Liscome Bay sank in 1943 during the battle for Makin Island, in the Pacific.
Created by David Stone Martin, an Office of War Information (OWI) art director, this poster
was displayed to boost African American morale and participation in the war effort during
World War II.
Learning to Look
1. What event is depicted in the background of the
portrait, and why was this included?
2. With its limited color palette, how do you think this
poster would attract viewers and get noticed?
3. What is this poster’s message? What persuasive
tools does the poster use to convey its message?
Suggested Activities
Explain to students that they will be creating an
exhibition about African Americans in World War II
in order to better understand and teach others about
this important aspect of U.S. history. Divide students
into small groups, and have each group create a
“panel” of the exhibition with its own topic. Assign
any of the following topics or create your own:
•  Introductory panel (including a WWII timeline)
4. Examine the style of the portrait. In what ways
does the style resemble commercial advertisements or fine art? If you were designing an OWI
poster, would you use an artistic or commercial
style to get your message across to 1940s viewers? Which type of poster do you think would be
most effective?
5. What types of reactions did viewers living in the
1940s have when they saw the poster? How are
the reactions of today’s viewer different?
•  Branches of the U.S. armed services
•  Jazz musicians performing for troops
•  OWI’s role in shaping African American involve-
ment in the war effort
•  Executive Order 8802, which prohibited discrimi-
nation in hiring defense workers
•  The African American press and the “Double V” campaign
•  African American involvement in war bond drives, food rationing, etc.