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or $160 for 10 classes
Class

Intro to Art History for High School IV (Indigenous North and South America)

Completed by 20 learners
Ages 13-18
Live Group Course
Ten-week art history class for high schoolers, exploring the artistic traditions of the Americas, including the Aztec, Inca, Maya, and native North American communities from the ancient period to today! Taught by a College Professor!
Average rating:
4.9
Number of reviews:
(895 reviews)
Star Educator
Popular

Live video meetings
1x per week, 10 weeks
5-10 learners per class
50 min

What's included

10 live meetings
8 hrs 20 mins in-class hours
Homework
1-2 hours per week. Each week, students will respond to questions that correlate with the week's topics in 1-2 paragraphs. There are two larger writing assignments--one visual analysis where the student describes a work of art in detail and one short research paper where the students select an art form from a community we will explore and write a five-paragraph exploration of the art form.
Assessment
Learner progress is assessed through in-class discussions, online discussions, and written assignments. Grades are available upon request.
Grading
included

Class Experience

US Grade 9 - 12
Beginner - Intermediate Level
In this class, students will explore the development of artistic production of the Indigenous Americas throughout history over the course of ten weeks, starting with South and Central American communities and moving to North American tribes in the latter weeks of the course. This class is designed for students aged 13-18 as a way of exploring art histories that they may not encounter in traditional introductory courses that tend to be Eurocentric in nature. Students will be able to identify key historical events that shaped the history of various Indigenous traditions, different art techniques and styles, and the cultural significance of each style of art, such as religious or political factors. Students will look at arts from the ancient period through the contemporary period in this course. Each week, students will attend a 50-minute lecture and participate in a class discussion in the classroom message boards on the given topic for the week. Students will participate in two writing assignments over the course of the semester to invite students to think critically about artworks that interest them. 

While this is "Part IV" in the Introduction to Art History Series, it is not necessary to take them in order! Students interested in the arts of the Americas are welcome to join this course without taking Parts I, II, or III first!

The class schedule can be found in the syllabus section below! 

Sources used include: Imagining Identity in New Spain: Race, Lineage, and the Colonial Body in Portraiture and Casta Paintings by Magali M. Carrera, A Culture of Stone: Inka Perspectives on Rock by Carolyn Dean, The Art of Professing in Bourbon Mexico: Crowned-Nun Portraits and Reform in the Convent by James Cordova, Possessions: Indigenous Art/Colonial Culture by Nicholas Thomas, and a variety of sources from the National Museum of the American Indian, Templo Mayor Museum, New Mexico Museum of Art, the Denver Art Museum, National Geographic, and more.

Week 10: Contemporary Indigenous Artists

In our final class, first, students will have the opportunity to share what they researched for their final paper should they like to discuss it with their peers. We will wrap up our class with a discussion of contemporary Indigenous artists operating today, highlighting how these communities are thriving and incorporating art practices we have discussed with a contemporary spin. We will discuss performance artists James Luna, Kent Monkman, and Gregg Deal, and how they expose injustices committed upon Native American communities and stereotyping, We will also discuss well-known artists like Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera and how they incorporated their indigenous heritage into their works. Further, we will discuss the political works of artists like Alfredo Jaar, Doris Salcedo, and Rodrigo Matheus.

Learning Goals

--The characteristics of art of different movements and cultures
--How to think critically about art and images that are presented to you

Syllabus

Curriculum
Follows Teacher-Created Curriculum
Standards
Aligned with National Curriculum Standards for Social Studies (NCSS)
10 Lessons
over 10 Weeks
Lesson 1:
Early Pre-Columbian Art
 Students will be introduced to early peoples of Central and South America, discussing how people likely migrated onto the American continents, including theories of the Bering strait or oceanic crossings, and Indigenous creation stories and perspectives of the arrival of the first peoples. We will be focusing on some of the earliest groups in this region. Students will discuss glyphs and communication of these groups, focusing specifically on the Nazca and the infamous Nazca lines of Peru. 
50 mins online live lesson
Lesson 2:
Maya Art and Architecture
 Our second week of class focuses on the Maya people of southern Mexico and Central America. We will discuss the hierarchical structure of their society and how we see this reflected in stoneworks of the period that employ hierarchical scaling. In relation to stoneworks, we will also discuss how the Maya created pigments, which were used to paint the many stone sculptures and stucco works of the society. We will discuss monumental architecture, specifically, pyramid structures 
50 mins online live lesson
Lesson 3:
Aztec Art and Architecture
 When discussing the Aztecs, we will discuss the production of Codices and how they are similar and different to books we read today. We will also talk about the use of metals to create art and how difficult it was to work with metal at this time, discussing a brief evolution of metalworking from the Maya to the Aztecs! An emphasis will be placed on special materials, specifically jade and feathers, and how they were utilized. 
50 mins online live lesson
Lesson 4:
Inca Art and Architecture
 We move into South America to discuss the Inca communities of Western South America. We will discuss the close connection the Inca people have to their surroundings, discussing the concept of Huacas and mummification in the Incan world, as well as stone-stacking, or huacas. We will discuss textiles and their significance in the varied environments of this group, and how the Inca communicated without written language with Quipus. There will be an emphasis on gold works and body modification. 
50 mins online live lesson

Other Details

Learning Needs
This class is ideal for those with unique learning needs. Students will be provided with study guides after each class for continued support and have access to all recordings for each week. Students can opt out of assignments if preferred.
Parental Guidance
Some art may be violent in nature, depict nudity, or religious imagery. Colonization, racism and stereotyping, and Native American removal will be discussed in class.
Supply List
Additional resources will be available to learners in the classroom following each class.
Language of Instruction
English (Level: Pre-A1)
External Resources
In addition to the Outschool classroom, this class uses:
    Sources
    Students will be provided with outside resources after every class to elaborate on our lessons, available online. Sources used include university lectures, art historical textbooks, including Gardner's Art Through the Ages and Stokstad's Art History, cultural center websites from these regions, and museum information. Whenever possible, information will be pulled from institutions grounded within these areas, to inform the discussion from a decolonized perspective. When available, primary sources from the time period and area are used to include these voices prominently.

    Meet the teacher

    Joined September, 2018
    4.9
    895reviews
    Star Educator
    Popular
    Profile
    Teacher expertise and credentials
    Master's Degree in History from University of Colorado at Boulder
    I have been teaching art history for seven years now. I started my career teaching at the university level and in museums and have been teaching art history on Outschool since 2018. I developed this introductory series for middle and high schoolers so that they could have a foundation for talking about the arts earlier than at the college level and be exposed to history in a new way! Further, this course is particularly important, as we are covering art and communities that are traditionally ignored by art historical study. I have been studying art history for nearly a decade and want to teach students that there is more to art than European voices. I have taken a large number of courses in my own Graduate studies covering these topics from a decolonized perspective and from experts in the fields of non-Western art historical study. I have a Masters's degree in Art History, where I focused on the exclusionary nature of Art History and use my knowledge of the structure of the discipline to decolonize my approaches for my students. These lectures are adapted from lectures that I taught at the university level. 

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