Identity in the artroom.

Self-portraits are a good way to start the school year and to begin exploring concepts of identity with students. Depending on the grade level of your students, you might also encourage them to consider how culture, popular media, race, family, gender, and place shape our personal identities and our perceptions of others. The following sites provide engaging materials and ways to address issues of identity in the artroom.

Van Gogh Color and Portraiture 

Have your students study how Vincent van Gogh used color to express mood and emotions in his many self-portraits and portraits of others at www.atara.net/vangogh. Then, challenge students to use color to express a quality or characteristic about themselves in a self-portrait, as seventh-grade students did at Tandem Friends School in Charlottesville, Virginia. You can view a slideshow of their artwork at tandemfs.org/arts_msgallery_selfportraits.htm.

See Self-Portraits in the UK

Channel 4 in the United Kingdom recently sponsored a national campaign titled "Self Portrait UK 14-19," which invited young people, ages 14 to 19, to explore their culture and identity by creating self-portraits about who they are, what they want to say, and how they want to be seen. You can view 100 of the most distinctive self-portraits submitted at www. channel4.com/learning/microsites/S/selfportraituk14to19/. The diversity of work represented in the exhibition offers an excellent opportunity to illustrate to your students a wide variety of approaches to self-portraiture.

Symbol Self-Portraits

The Kentucky Educational Television (KET) website includes a lesson plan for middle school (www.ket. org/painting/selfportrait_middle. htm), in which students combine various collage elements with a drawing of themselves to convey different aspects of their personalities and interests.

Create a Self-Portrait as a Chair

For an interesting twist on self-portraits, check out the self-portrait chairs by students at Sweeney Elementary School in Santa Fe, New Mexico featured on the Art:21--Art in the Twenty-First Century Web site at www.pbs.org/art21/education/studentartprojects/project3/ artwork6.html. Students were first introduced to the work of New York-based Puerto Rican artist Pepon Osorio, who explores issues of cultural identity and place by altering and decorating objects and environments. They were then challenged to create portraits of themselves by decorating 12" wooden chairs with images and symbols of their cultural heritage.

Identity with Art and Writing

The National Gallery of Art provides a set of art and writing activities on their Web site (www. nga.gov/education/classroom/ self_portraits) designed to help middle school students delve into the question of "Who am I?" After examining and comparing a range of self-portraits painted in different periods, and for different reasons, students are invited to create their own self-portraits and write poetry, a speech, and a letter about themselves--all of which are placed in their self-portrait portfolios.

Identity and Ethnicity

Teacher Cathy Fine and artist Wendy Ewald collaborated to develop a thought-provoking lesson called "Black Self/White Self," found at cds.aas.duke.edu/ltp/blackwhiteself.html, which involved fifth-grade students at Pearsontown Elementary School in Durham, North Carolina in exploring issues of ethnicity and identity through writing and photography. Ewald shot photographs of students, posing as their black-and-white selves, which they then manipulated and wrote about to describe their characters.

Hair and Social Identity

Illinois art teacher Sandra Campbell collaborated with her students to develop an in-depth art project called "Hair Today," found at www.uic. edu/classes/ad/ad382/sites/Projects/ P011/P011_first.html. The project combines teaching basic drawing skills with investigating an important subject in teenagers' lives--hair. The project culminates in a public display of the students' explorations into the subject of hair. This project is related to the work of Lorna Simpson, a photo-based conceptual artist and filmmaker, who combines images (often of hair) and text to address issues of identity, race, and gender in our society.

Craig Roland is an associate professor of Art Education in the School of Art and Art History at the University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida. and the author of The Art Teacher's Guide to the Internet (Davis Publications, 2005)--see the review on page 60. [e-mail]