This pre-visit activity will help prepare your students for their museum visit to see 15 Minutes of Fame: Portraits from Ansel Adams to Andy Warhol and New Art for a New Century: Contemporary Acquisitions 2000–2010. Featuring more than 150 works primarily from the Orange County Museum of Art’s significant collection of photography, 15 Minutes of Fame: Portraits from Ansel Adams to Andy Warhol explores a diverse range of portraits from early modernism through contemporary practices. New Art for a New Century: Contemporary Acquisitions 2000–2010 focuses on a broad range of contemporary work from the last decade, highlighting 75 works from the museum’s permanent collection including drawings, paintings, sculpture, video, and installations.
Your museum visit and pre-visit activities support interdisciplinary learning by connecting Visual Arts, Social Studies and Language Arts, and address the California State Content Standards in the Visual Arts.
1.0 Artistic Perception
2.0 Creative Expression
3.0 Historical and Cultural Content
4.0 Aesthetic Valuing
5.0 Connections, Relationships, Applications
Please adapt these activities according to your classroom needs.
What’s the Big Idea?
Artists have an important social role in documenting and visualizing the times in which we live. The artworks they make—whether photographs, paintings, or sculptures—can capture and reflect specific moments in time. These works help us to define history, clarify the current moment, or look to the future. Students will consider the artist’s role in interpreting the past and explore how portraits affect our understanding of history.
Featured Artists:
Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California, 1936, printed ca. early 1960s
Andy Warhol, Mao, 1972
Materials:
Powerpoint
Smart Board
Paper
Pencils
Getting Started
Tell students that they will visit the Orange County Museum of Art to view the exhibition (or display of objects that have something in common) 15 Minutes of Fame: Portraits from Ansel Adams to Andy Warhol.
Ask students to share their experience taking photographs. What do they take photos of? When do they take photos? What are they trying to capture in their photographs? What do they do with their photographs after they are printed? How do they feel when they look at old photographs? Tell students that photographs capture a moment in time and can tell us a lot about whatever is reflected in the camera’s frame. Ask students how the photographs they take help them remember the past.
Tell students the photographs featured in 15 Minutes of Fame are all portraits. Ask students to define the term portrait (or an image that is representative of a person). Ask students to describe some portraits they are familiar with. Who or what are these portraits of?
Tell students that before photography was invented in the 1840s, the only people who could afford to have portraits taken were the rich and famous. Portraits were expensive because artists had to draw or paint each individual. Ask students what they can learn about people from their portraits. What can they learn about the time and place people lived from portraits? Ask students how our understanding of the past is distorted if we base it only on portraits of the rich and famous. Tell students that photography was a more democratic medium, meaning it was less expensive and more people had access to it. With cameras, portraits could capture the faces of well-known and ordinary individuals alike. Today we will look at how a photographer can transform the ordinary individual into an icon and an artist’s intervention can make a well-known face nearly unrecognizable.
Faces from the Past
Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California, 1936, printed ca. early 1960s
Project the image of this photograph by Dorothea Lange.
Ask students what they notice first in this picture. Where is your eye led?
How many faces do you see?
How would you describe the people in this image?
What is the mood of the image? What makes you say that?
Tell students that this is a photograph by Dorothea Lange. Lange was a documentary photographer who used her camera to record the effects of the Great Depression, a time of great economic distress and unemployment in America in the 1930s. During that time, she focused her camera on rural populations, particularly migrants moving from middle America to California.
Ask students what do they think of when they hear the word documentary. Tell students that as a documentary photographer, Dorothea Lange tried to capture the world as it was. She wanted her photographs to reflect reality, so she photographed people in their environments. She had to use what she called her “cloak of invisibility” to blend into the background, so that she could capture people in their everyday lives.
Direct students’ attention back to the photograph. Where do think Lange was standing when this photograph was taken?
Tell students that Lange zoomed in on the subjects of this photograph, deciding to remove much of the background, just focusing on the faces pictured. When a photographer crops an image it can alter a photograph’s meaning entirely. Ask students how this photograph would be different if they were able to see more of the background behind the subjects.
Tell students the title of this work is Migrant Mother.
Ask students what story the photograph is telling. What details in the photograph help to tell the story?
Tell students this photograph was published in newspapers across the country. Ask students how they think the American public responded to this photograph?
Dorothea Lange believed in the power of photography to effect social change and create reform. She thought photographs could be just as powerful as newspaper stories or statistics. What do you think?
Altering an Icon
Andy Warhol, Mao, 1972
Project the image of this print by Andy Warhol.
Ask students what they notice about this image. Where is your eye led?
Do you know the person who is depicted? Where else have you seen this image?
Tell students this is an image of Mao Zedong. He was the political leader of the People’s Republic of China from its establishment in 1949 until his death in 1976.
Tell students that Mao maintained tight control of his image. There were large scale official images of Mao reproduced and displayed all over China, in every classroom and every town square. Ask students how they think the official images differed from Warhol's representation of Mao.
Show students a comparison of an unaltered image of Mao and Warhol’s Mao.
Ask students to compare the images. Ask students how Warhol altered Mao's appearance. How does Warhol use color? How does he use line? What other elements of design does Warhol use? How does these changes affect our perception of Mao?
Ask students why they think Warhol chose to repeat the image, creating four copies of the same image. What effect does the repetition have on your interpretation of the work? How is this different from a single image of Mao?
Tell students that Warhol chose to depict Mao because of the media's attention to the opening of diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China in the early 1970s. Mao was a world leader and icon that everyone recognized. Warhol appropriated (or borrowed) this image from the cover of Time magazine from earlier that year when he was declared “Man of the Year.”
Ask students why they think Warhol chose to reproduce images of Mao like this. What’s the purpose of covering Mao’s face with the bright colors? How is this depiction of Mao different from how we generally see other world leaders? Why would an artist choose to depict a leader in this way? How would it change your opinion of a world leader if you saw them depicted like Warhol depicted Mao?
Write
Ask students to list historic figures and record their responses on the board. Instruct students to select a single figure that resonates with them and close their eyes, imagining this person. Next, ask students to write a detailed description of the image that came to mind. Finally, ask students to explore where they got their ideas about this historical figure. How do they know what this person looks like? How do they know about this person if the historical figure was alive before they were born? Did they learn about this person in school? What images have they seen of this person? Where are the images from (history books, magazines, television)? What stories do they know about this person? How did that affect their image of this person?
For homework, ask students to look for images of their chosen historical figure on the internet, in their textbooks, or in newspapers and magazines. How closely did their description conform to the images they found? Have students reflect on how images impact our memory of historic figures. What role does the photographer or artist play in creating our understanding of these figures and, by extension, history.