National Visual Arts Standards

1. Creating

Anchor Standard 1: Generate and conceptualize artistic ideas and work.

Enduring Understanding: Creativity and innovative thinking are essential life skills that can be developed.
Essential Question(s): What conditions, attitudes, and behaviors support creativity and innovative thinking? What factors prevent or encourage people to take creative risks? How does collaboration expand the creative process?

• 1.1P: Use multiple approaches to begin creative endeavors.
• 1.1Ac: Individually or collaboratively formulate new creative problems based on student’s existing artwork.
• 1.1 Ad: Visualize and hypothesize to generate plans for ideas and directions for creating art and design that can affect social change.

Enduring Understanding: Artists and designers shape artistic investigations, following or breaking with traditions in pursuit of creative artmaking goals.
Essential Question(s): How does knowing the contexts histories, and traditions of art forms help us create works of art and design? Why do artists follow or break from established traditions? How do artists determine what resources and criteria are needed to formulate artistic investigations?

• 1.2P: Shape an artistic investigation of an aspect of present-day life using a contemporary practice of art or design.
• 1.2Ac: Choose from a range of materials and methods of traditional and contemporary artistic practices to plan works of art and design.
• 1.2Ad: Choose from a range of materials and methods of traditional and contemporary artistic practices, following or breaking established conventions, to plan the making of multiple works of art and design based on a theme, idea, or concept.

Anchor Standard 2: Organize and develop artistic ideas and work.

Enduring Understanding: Artists and designers experiment with forms, structures, materials, concepts, media, and art-making approaches.
Essential Question(s): How do artists work? How do artists and designers determine whether a particular direction in their work is effective? How do artists and designers learn from trial and error?

• 2.1P: Engage in making a work of art or design without having a preconceived plan.
• 2.1Ac: Through experimentation, practice, and persistence, demonstrate acquisition of skills and knowledge in a chosen art form.
• 2.1Ad: Experiment, plan, and make multiple works of art and design that explore a personally meaningful theme, idea, or concept.

Enduring Understanding: Artists and designers balance experimentation and safety, freedom and responsibility while developing and creating artworks.
Essential Question(s): How do artists and designers care for and maintain materials, tools, and equipment? Why is it important for safety and health to understand and follow correct procedures in handling materials, tools, and equipment? What responsibilities come with the freedom to create?

• 2.2P: Explain how traditional and non-traditional materials may impact human health and the environment and demonstrate safe handling of materials, tools, and equipment.
• 2.2Ac: Demonstrate awareness of ethical implications of making and distributing creative work.
• 2.2Ad: Demonstrate understanding of the importance of balancing freedom and responsibility in the use of images, materials, tools, and equipment in the creation and circulation of creative work.

Enduring Understanding: People create and interact with objects, places, and design that define, shape, enhance, and empower their lives.
Essential Question(s): How do objects, places, and design shape lives and communities? How do artists and designers determine goals for designing or redesigning objects, places, or systems? How do artists and designers create works of art or design that effectively communicate?

• 2.3P: Collaboratively develop a proposal for an installation, artwork, or space design that transforms the perception and experience of a particular place.
• 2.3Ac: Redesign an object, system, place, or design in response to contemporary issues.
• 2.3Ad: Demonstrate in works of art or design how visual and material culture defines, shapes, enhances, inhibits, and/or empowers people’s lives.

Anchor Standard 3: Refine and complete artistic work.

Enduring Understanding: Artist and designers develop excellence through practice and constructive critique, reflecting on, revising, and refining work over time.
Essential Question(s): What role does persistence play in revising, refining, and developing work? How do artists grow and become accomplished in art forms? How does collaboratively reflecting on a work help us experience it more completely?

• 3.1P: Apply relevant criteria from traditional and contemporary cultural contexts to examine, reflect on, and plan revisions for works of art and design in progress.
• 3.1Ac: Engage in constructive critique with peers, then reflect on, re-engage, revise, and refine works of art and design in response to personal artistic vision.
• 3.1Ad: Reflect on, re-engage, revise, and refine works of art or design considering relevant traditional and contemporary criteria as well as personal artistic vision.

2. Presenting

Anchor Standard 4: Select, analyze, and interpret artistic work for presentation.

Enduring Understanding: Artists and other presenters consider various techniques, methods, venues, and criteria when analyzing, selecting, and curating objects artifacts, and artworks for preservation and presentation.
Essential Question(s): How are artworks cared for and by whom? What criteria, methods, and processes are used to select work for preservation or presentation? Why do people value objects, artifacts, and artworks, and select them for presentation?

• 4.1P: Analyze, select, and curate artifacts and/or artworks for presentation and preservation.
• 4.2Ac: Analyze, select, and critique personal artwork for a collection or portfolio presentation.
• 4.2Ad: Critique, justify, and present choices in the process of analyzing, selecting, curating, and presenting artwork for a specific exhibit or event.

Anchor Standard 5: Develop and refine artistic techniques and work for presentation.

Enduring Understanding: Artists, curators and others consider a variety of factors and methods including evolving technologies when preparing and refining artwork for display and or when deciding if and how to preserve and protect it.
Essential Question(s): What methods and processes are considered when preparing artwork for presentation or preservation? How does refining artwork affect its meaning to the viewer? What criteria are considered when selecting work for presentation, a portfolio, or a collection?

• 5.1P: Analyze and evaluate the reasons and ways an exhibition is presented.
• 5.1Ac: Evaluate, select, and apply methods or processes appropriate to display artwork in a specific place.
• 5.1Ad: Investigate, compare, and contrast methods for preserving and protecting art.

Anchor Standard 6: Convey meaning through the presentation of artistic work.

Enduring Understanding: Objects, artifacts, and artworks collected, preserved, or presented either by artists, museums, or other venues communicate meaning and a record of social, cultural, and political experiences resulting in the cultivating of appreciation and understanding.
Essential Question(s): What is an art museum? How does the presenting and sharing of objects, artifacts, and artworks influence and shape ideas, beliefs, and experiences? How do objects, artifacts, and artworks collected, preserved, or presented, cultivate appreciation and understanding?

• 6.1P: Analyze and describe the impact that an exhibition or collection has on personal awareness of social, cultural, or political beliefs and understandings.
• 6.1Ac: Make, explain, and justify connections between artists or artwork and social, cultural, and political history.
• 6.1Ad: Curate a collection of objects, artifacts, or artwork to impact the viewer’s understanding of social, cultural, and/or political experiences.