This Curriculum Guide was created by the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures to support the special exhibition Regeneration: Black Cinema 1898 – 1971, on view at the DIA February 4–June 23, 2024. Containing five standalone modules, this robust set of lessons and activities provides students with historical context and the film studies terms needed for critical thinking and discourse to prepare for a visit to the exhibition. High School teachers of history, social studies, film studies, visual art, and ELA can use this inquiry-based learning resource to explore historic and contemporary issues around race, gender, discrimination, power, and activism.

Explore the resource online or download below

Image: Glenn Ligon, Double America 2, 2014. ©Glenn Ligon; Courtesy of the artist, Hauser & Wirth, New York, Regen Projects, Los Angeles, Thomas Dane Gallery, London, and Chantal Crousel, Paris

Art by Italian women artists between 1500-1800 prompts investigation of the intersection of artistic skill, gender, and power in the creation and viewing of these artworks.

Students will learn how young, Black image-makers seize control of their representation to broaden the spectrum of Black experience in photography — complicating a limiting view of Blackness historically shaped by the white gaze. Students will also explore how to use art as a tool for revolution and change, and to challenge society's representation of beauty.

Students will explore the idea that there are many forms of beauty found in people around the world. Students will discover that there is no such thing as "normal" and that "normal" is used as a control technique.

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 understand the meaning of the Day of the Dead and making personal connections to what they have learned. Students will become familiar with the traditional elements of the ofrenda and create their own classroom ofrenda. 

In this lesson students will explore the cultural celebration of Día de Muertos by visiting traditional ofrendas. Students will learn about the celebration along with the key elements in each ofrenda (in Spanish). They will also compare this celebration to Halloween. 

In this lesson, students will explore, observe, analyze, interpret and respond to various Día de Muertos ofrendas, as well as other original and authentic sources in order to analyze and interpret what “the act of remembering” means in Mexican Día de Muertos culture.  Students will be asked to incorporate elements of Día de Muertos into their own ofrenda or artistic rendering, as they are invited to create their own “act of remembering”.