Thoreau's On Civil Disobedience and
Whittier's Anti-Slavery Poems:  The Shaw Memorial
author: Constantina Thibaut

Timeline of Lesson Unit:  Preferably this course would take place once a week on Thursdays over the course of one two-term semester.

Materials:  16"x20" masonite boards, rolls of plaster gauze ("Plastercraft" is one of many brand names), yogurt containers for water, scissors, stacks of newspaper, newsprint pads, Ebony pencils, kneaded erasers. 

Motivation and Procedure:  This lesson unit is a 3D-sculpture course for advanced art students in the 11th and 12th grades.  The texts the students will study and which will inspire their work are John Greenleaf Whittier's Anti-Slavery Poems:  Songs of Labor and Reform as well as On Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau.  The visual art teacher will work closely with the English teacher to prepare students with a historical background for reading these works.  Teachers will discuss with students the relationships these authors had with Transcendentalist writers we are currently studying such as Emerson and with the larger literary and political community.

The teacher will organize a field trip to see the Shaw Memorial, a bas-relief sculpture cast in bronze created by the celebrated 19th century sculptor Augustus Saint Gaudens.  It sits in a large stone frame, across the street from and facing the State House on the edge of the Boston Common.  The teacher will discuss the history of the 54th Regiment and the Colonel who led them, which the memorial commemorates.  The 54th Regiment was comprised entirely of Black soldiers, all of them volunteers, who marched from Boston down to South Carolina to fight for the Union cause.  They were led by one white man, the Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, who died beside his men in battle and was buried with his men in a mass grave.  A beautiful example of bas-relief sculpture, the figures and forms seem to emerge from the flat surface of the bronze as if from a still pool of water.  In the case of this bas-relief, some of the figures are almost completely detached from the background.

Colonel Shaw is pictured on horseback with the regiment troops marching in lines behind him and in front of him.  The figures and heads of the Black soldiers are beautifully conceived in profile three or four heads deep.  Some are bearded, some cleanshaven; some appear young, some appear old.  Saint Gaudens made model heads of the soldiers as studies for the final work.  Students will examine these busts and compare them to famous Nigerian terracotta and Bronze cast heads from Ife, thought to date approximately from the 10th century.

Over the semester, students will create at least four bas-reliefs on 16"x20" masonite boards.  The subject of two of the bas-reliefs will be portrait heads, at least one of which will be in profile.  The subject of the other two bas-reliefs will be figurative.  The teacher will demonstrate the method for modeling the plaster gauze bas-relief.  Students will work from and refer to sketches.  Students will fold and/or ball up shredded newspaper and tape it with acid free masking tape to the masonite board, which has been primed with gesso beforehand.  Students will engage in this process until the modeled newspaper resembles the drawing composition in relief.  Then, students will lay over this "maquette" strips of the plaster gauze to finish the effect.  When the plaster is dry, students will paint over it with gesso.  The reliefs may be painted in one or more colors, after the gesso is dry, if desired.

Assessment:  As with every one of the Transcendentalist lesson units, the student artworks will be critiqued and evaluated by the group at least four times over the two-term semester - during the middle and end of each term.  Students will include detailed artist statements with every critique.  Criteria for the (obligatory) grade will include over 50% for effort, class participation, and written artist statements, another 25% for originality (however that can be defined) and the last 25% for craftsmanship issues relating to the elements and principles of design. 

Objectives:

1. Students will become familiar with great examples of American literature and learn how ideas of social justice can be woven into visual compositions.
2. Students will learn about art history and how to compare periods.
3. Students will learn to translate a 2D drawing into a 3D conception.
4. Students will learn to craft a bas-relief sculptural piece using plaster casting gauze.
5. Students will review and enlarge upon their 2D and 3D portraiture and figurative rendering skills.

Connections Strand and Accompanying Learning Standards:

6.1, 6.3, 6.4, 6.7
8.2, 8.6
10.1

Nathaniel Hawthorne and The Marble Faun: 
Studies in Classicism and Romanticism.
author: Constantina Thibaut

Timeline of Lesson Unit:  As for each of the five lesson units in this curriculum, preferably this lesson or course would meet once a week for a two-term semester (and on Wednesdays for this particular lesson unit.) 

Materials:  18"x24" white and tinted drawing or charcoal paper, soft drawing pencils and/or charcoal pencils, kneaded erasers, drawing boards and clips, 18"x24" black construction paper, scissors.

Motivation and Procedure:  Over the course of the semester, students will read the 19th century romance novel by Hawthorne The Marble Faun.  The teacher will introduce the reading by contrasting the two competing aesthetics of the 19th century, Classicism (and Neo-Classicism) and Romanticism.  In order to clarify how these ideals were applied, the teacher will show slides of the art of the period (such as Ingres and David versus Delacroix and Gericault) and encourage students to discuss why certain artists considered themselves to be NeoClassical traditionalists and why other artists needed to break away from that tradition.  Questions will be asked such as:  Why did the NeoClassicists associate their work with Reason, Rationality, Order, Balance, the Light, and why did the Romantics associate their work with Emotion, Intuition, Asymmetrical Compositions, Mystery, and the Heart? 

The teacher will also show slides of classical Greek and Roman sculpture to demonstrate the origins of traditional classicism.  The teacher will organize a field trip to the Ancient Greek and Roman Galleries of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (MFA).  Students will be assigned a series of drawings of specific sculptures at the Boston MFA with special emphasis on fauns, satyrs, nymphs, sirens and other mythological characters reminiscent of the mysterious faun character named Donatello in Hawthorne's romance.  The teacher will perform a detailed demonstration piece to help students understand how to approach this kind of classical drawing technique from start to finish.  The teacher will commence with a gesture drawing and end with a finished piece replete with a value scale - for the shading - from one to five.

 Other themes of Hawthorne's novel include social issues such as American artists studying in Europe and the reception of their work, Catholicism versus Protestantism, as well as Classicism versus Romanticism.  The English teacher and the visual arts teacher will work together to explore these subjects in class discussions and written English assignments.  Hawthorne confessed in the "Preface" to his novel that he based the descriptions of certain artworks, which were discussed in the text, upon the works of several contemporary American artists, notably a certain William Story and Harriet Hosmer, among others.  He disclaimed, however, to have based the characters of the protagonists upon these particular contemporary artists.  The class will look at reproductions of the art of these 19th century American sculptors, whose work Hawthorne loved, as well as the work of the celebrated African American sculptor of the time, Edmonia Lewis.  At the Content Institute this summer, the art historian Elise Madeleine Ciregna declared that "Harriet Hosmer encouraged Edmonia Lewis to go to Italy to study."  Clearly the lives of all of these American artists of the period were interdependent. 

The second phase of this assignment will focus upon the art form of the silhouette cutout.  Students will compare the sculpture of Edmonia Lewis with the monumental and imaginative silhouette murals of the contemporary African American silhouette artist, Kara Walker.  Kara Walker's art is extremely critical of the antebellum South, the subject of most of her work.  Accordingly, students will read Emerson's lecture on Abolition, "The Fugitive Slave Law," and Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.  In order to appreciate further the achievement of Edmonia Lewis, students will compare the two worlds of The Marble Faun and the Narrative of Frederick Douglass.  Students will create a series of silhouette compositions on a theme of their choice.  Written artist statements, explaining their ongoing work will accompany their silhouette series at every critique.

Assessment:  As with the previous two lesson units, the series of drawings of sculptures and the series of silhouette pieces will include no less than four serious works, in this case - on 18"x24" paper.  Written statements will also be evaluated - as part of an ongoing process - during four critiques at the middle and end of each of the two terms which comprise one semester.  The teacher will accord a letter grade to each student at the end of each term.  Perceived effort, class participation, and originality will be the most important criterion for the grade, although craftsmanship issues will also be strongly considered on balance.

Objectives:

1. Students will learn to think about aesthetic problems in philosophical terms.
2. Students will learn to compare periods and movements in art history.
3. Students will learn to compare visual artists who work in different visual media.
4. Students will learn classical figure drawing techniques.
5. Students will learn to think visually in positive and negative space.

Connections Strand and Accompanying Learning Standards:

6.1, 6.3, 6.5, 6.7, 6.8  7.8, 7.9   |    8.4, 8.6,.8.7, 8.9, 8.11 10.1