Information & Planning Guide

Carnegie Museum of Art's Life on Mars school programs provide students of all ages with meaningful opportunities to create and engage with original works of contemporary art produced by 40 different artists from around the world.  Unique possibilities abound for creating Pennsylvania standards-based interdisciplinary connections to your K-12 or university curriculum. Through inquiry-based gallery discussions and writing exercises led by trained docents, as well as innovative studio art-making projects conducted by certified artist-educators, students deepen their appreciation of visual culture and sharpen their creative, analytical, and critical thinking skills.

Gallery Tour, Confronting the Unknown: students in small groups participate in 60 or 90-minute, discussion-centered tours of Life on Mars with museum docents.  Students are prompted to use visual evidence to explore issues in contemporary art as they relate to the thematics of the exhibition. This tour may be extended with a 30-minute independent viewing activity during which students respond in writing to prompts that help them formulate their own critical and aesthetic responses to an artwork of their choice.

Gallery Tour, Art and Literature: students learn the parallels between modes of analysis in contemporary visual art and contemporary literature. Through practicing four approaches in the art galleries that are also applicable to texts studied back in the classroom--subject matter, form, context and content--critical, transdisciplinary thinking skills are strengthened.

Gallery Tour, Art Inspires Narrative Writing: contemporary art inspires great stories! After defining key creative writing concepts, including character, setting, theme, and plot, docents deliver innovative writing prompts that allow students to produce their own narratives based on careful observation of visual art objects. Students are given journals they take back to the classroom to fully develop their stories.

Studio Workshop, Everyday Materials and Everyday Life: students look at our world with fresh eyes by considering artists' interpretations of everyday experiences in the Life on Mars galleries using four analytic strategies. In the studio, brief writing prompts help inform art making, and an experiment with eclectic materials reveals how the familiar can be transformed when seen from creative perspectives.

High School Interdisciplinary Program, Writing the Expository Essay: high school students learn how professional art historians and critics respond to fine art objects by working through a taxonomy consisting of five steps for engaging with contemporary art.  Gallery discussion, writing prompts, and quick sketches are used as research methodologies to help students develop a thesis statement for an essay based on their own reactions to, and interpretations of, an artwork of their choice in the exhibition. The three-hour experience includes time for eating brown bag lunches at the museum.

60-minute tour: $7.00 per student

90-minute tour: $8.50 per student

30-minute independent viewing activity supplement to a tour: $1.50 per student

Register for tours by emailing the museum's group visits office, or by calling 412.622.3289. Scholarships are available for all school districts! Please inquire with group visits. Visit the museum's School and Teacher Programs page to learn more about CMA's School and Teacher programs based in the permanent collection.
 

Image: Mario Merz, A Mallarmé, 2003