Creating a piece of art from smaller pieces of paper, fabric, or other objects is known as collage. American artist Romare Bearden, developed his unique approach to collage in the 1960s, as seen in his 1971 Stamping Ground, that captures the richness of contemporary African American life in a New York neighborhood.

Create your own collage, inspired by Romare Bearden’s Stamping Ground, using things you have around the house to show your neighborhood, or another favorite place. Think about who lives there, what kind of buildings do you see, or what sort of plants start popping up this time of the year. Before you glue the paper down, try out arranging and overlapping the pieces in different ways.

Using Jean-Antoine Houdon’s portraits of Benjamin Franklin and George Washington at the Detroit Institute of Arts, students will explore the life stories of these figures to deepen their understanding of the importance of individual political and social contributions during the American Revolutionary period.

Students will use the Houdon exhibit to analyze different ways Benjamin Franklin and George Washington were perceived in the face of many challenges and conflicts during the American Revolutionary period.

Through the use of Core Democratic Values (CDV) and the Houdon exhibition materials, students will explore the ways in which ideals promoted by the founding generation connect to the present.

Using the Spanish Language and Culture AP suggested themes of “Families and Communities,” “Personal and Public Identities,” “Contemporary Life” and “Global Challenges,” students will explore the objects from an ofrenda to understand and analyze how they represent, summarize, and encapsulate the lives, challenges, and preferences of beloved individuals and/or public causes.

Students will learn about Día de Muertos in Mexico and the United States. They will learn the altar elements, history, tradition, concept of death, and its significance/relevance in Mexico’s past and today. 

Students will analyze American art from historical, geographic, and economic perspectives to propose solutions to a current, local challenge.

Through classroom and museum experiences students will deepen their understanding of the writing process, specifically in the areas of symbolism, descriptive writing and character development within the genre of fantasy.

Through exploration of portraiture and self-portraiture across time and cultures in the DIA’s collection, students will understand how artists use pose, symbolism, clothing, facial expression, objects and other details to communicate information about people’s identity in portraits and their place within their culture.

Using the five themes of geography to guide their inquiry, students will explore objects from ancient civilizations to understand how human culture has evolved and how those advances affect our lives today.