Appreciating Artistic Forms

Two websites helpful in learning to appreciate a variety of artistic forms appear below. Each includes information about several artistic styles.

• The Lively Arts: This is a companion website for a course offered at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. It includes a wealth of study guides teaching how to appreciate a variety of art forms and topic guides for better understanding those forms.
• Access Art: This site is designed to help teachers integrate a variety of visual art forms into classrooms. It includes instructions for engaging with certain media formats (e.g., mod roc) and includes excellent online applets allowing students to learn about various art forms and how to replicate those forms.

In addition to the above sites, the attached document (source unknown) outlines guiding questions to use with groups of students when reviewing works of art. The intention of the sheet is to separate a classroom of students into groups of five students each, having each group evaluate a work of art using a different set of questions.

Finally, an excellent source for familiarizing oneself with artistically-designed primary source artifacts is the collection of primary source analysis sheets from the Library of Congress.