NAEA in Boston.

As a longtime member of the National Art Education Association (NAEA), I heartily endorse membership in the NAEA and attendance at its national conferences. I believe there is no greater evidence of your professionalism than joining over 22,000 art educators from every level in membership. Since the conference is in March in Boston, I hope you will use the following websites to prepare yourself to get the most out of the conference if you attend or to see what you might be missing if you don't. Once you come to a national conference, I think you will be rejuvenated and will want to return every year. Usually, the convention offers around 800 participatory workshops, panels, and seminars, along with exhibits, tours, and keynote addresses by worldacclaimed educators, artists, and scholars.

For Teachers

www.naea-reston.org

At the NAEA's website, you can learn about upcoming conventions, find pre-registration schedules, and print out convention proposal forms and membership applications.

www.decordova.org

The DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park is a contemporary museum, outdoor gallery, and art school in Lincoln, Massachusetts. Take an online tour of the Sculpture Park which includes works by Jim Dine, Sol Lewitt, Isamu Noguchi, John Wilson, and others.

www.mfa.org

Explore the searchable database of over 30,000 objects or a guide to the collection of more than 500 highlights from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. A one-hour tour of fourteen highlights will help you plan your visit and an online interactive site, Explore Ancient Egypt, features one of the finest Egyptian collections in the world. Five downloadable resource guides and curriculum packets are also available.

www.gardnermuseum.org

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is a Venetian-style palace turned museum, the home and art collection of its namesake. Three floors of galleries that surround a garden courtyard are filled with paintings, sculpture, tapestries, furniture and decorative arts, including works by Rembrandt, Botticelli, Raphael, Titian, and Matisse. The online Teacher's Room contains excerpts from the museum's Eyes on Art series.

www.artmuseums.harvard.edu/ home/index.html

Explore the Harvard University Art Museums, the Arthur M. Sacklet Museum, the Busch-Reisinger Museum, and the Fogg Art Museum and search their collections online, along with intriguing Presentations of Research.

www.peabody.harvard.edu/exhi bitions.html

The Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology, also at Harvard, is one of the oldest museums in the world devoted to anthropology. It also offers some extraordinary online exhibitions, such as the Ethnography of Lewis and Clark, which includes artifacts collected by the expedition on their mission a hundred years ago, and Rainmakers from the Gods, a feature on Hopi katsina dolls.

www.icaboston.org/Home

Likeness: Portraits of Artists by Other Artists is one of the exhibitions that will be on display at the Institute of Contemporary Art during the convention. Under Education, explore projects that provided ways for students to interact and respond to contemporary art. The institute is also building a new museum at Fan Pier in downtown Boston. Though the new building won't be completed until 2006, you can take a virtual tour online.

www.ncaaa.org

Take a virtual tour of recent exhibitions at the Museum of the National Center of Afro-American Artists, a museum that presents both historical and contemporary exhibitions.

www.nequiltmuseum.org

Visit the online Collection Gallery of the New England Quilt Museum, located in Lowell, Massachusetts, to view quilts both historic and contemporary. On display during the conference will be Thrilled to Pieces, antique quilts made with from 1000 to 25,000 individual pieces.

www.museumofbadart.org

The Museum of Bad Art ("Art Too Bad to be Ignored") is the world's only museum dedicated to the collection, preservation, exhibition, and celebration of bad art in all its forms. This humorous site is great to share with students to stimulate some interesting aesthetic discussions about art. The museum actually has a physical location in the Dedham Community Theater in Dedham, Massachusetts, that is open whenever movies are showing.