Learning to Connect to the Art-World
Connecting to Artists and Artworks
Observing, analyzing, and researching artists and artworks are common in many curricula, but making connections to them has been integral to the IB Visual Arts syllabus for decades. The 2024 IBDP Subject Brief for Visual Arts (first assessment 2027) emphasizes that Connecting, along with Creating and Communicating, will be central to the two-year syllabus. Here, we’ll explore a couple of pre-teaching strategies to scaffold students’ abilities to make art world connections before beginning their IB Visual Arts journey.
Connect
The 
new IBDP Subject Brief for Visual Arts (June 2024) describes several facets of the key objective to Connect, including that teachers will "introduce ways to investigate artworks from different times and contexts. Students [will] consider the relationships between artwork, artist and audience" (p. 3). While we await the new syllabus, it is clear that the Art-making inquiries portfolio (HL & SL), the Connections Study (SL), and the Artist Project (HL) will cover content related to students making meaningful connections to the works of other artists through the process of artistic inquiry and research. Within the Connections Study, SL students will be asked to probe into cultural significance of artists. Meanwhile, within the Artist Project, HL students will be asked to investigate and articulate their own artistic context and draw connections to the contexts of other artists' works.
Pre-IB Teaching
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By exploring artists and art-world concepts before the start of IB, students can build the foundational language and skills needed to engage with content in the new syllabus. Here are some advantages of incorporating art viewing and art analysis strategies in the classroom, and helping students to identify connections and links, in advance of teaching IB Visual Arts:
- Gain confidence in analyzing and discussing art.
- Increase engagement by drawing meaningful parallels between their work and that of established artists.
- Reduce frustration when navigating complex artistic influences and concepts.
- Deepen knowledge of artistic practices, movements, and individual styles.
- Uncover inspiration by identifying which styles, themes, and artistic techniques are personally compelling.
Strategies
When you encourage students to explore connections in art, you're doing more than teaching techniques or content—you’re helping them build mental frameworks. By examining the relationships between their lives, other artists, and broader contexts, students learn to see art as part of an interconnected web of ideas, cultures, and influences. This approach nurtures critical thinking, fosters creativity, and enhances problem-solving skills as they analyze and synthesize artistic concepts.
Lenses
In this strategy, first, select a variety of well-known artworks relevant to a task or unit to share with your students. The Art Institute of Chicago has a brilliant tool where you can curate and create a self-guided museum tour with up to six artworks. After exposing students to the selected artworks, ask your students to construct an intuitive response, noting their first impressions. Next, engage your students in some light research to build an understanding of the artist's background and their artistic intent in the artworks you've shared. After students have completed their research, you'll ask them to try on some new lenses. By shifting their perspective when looking at an artwork, students can start to focus on and better understand their own perspectives, too.
Here are some questions and probes to shape art-viewing lenses:
Physical Perspective Shifting
- Imagine you're viewing the artwork from far away.
- Imagine you could only see the artwork in black and white.
- Imagine you could only see the top half/bottom half of the artwork.
- Imagine you were wearing sunglasses when viewing the artwork.
Contextual/Cultural Perspective Shifting
- Imagine you're viewing this artwork as someone who is 50 years older.
- Imagine you lived 100 years ago and saw this artwork.
- Imagine what you would have observed if you saw this artwork 10 years ago...
- Imagine this was your first time seeing an artwork.
- Imagine you didn't know any information about the artist's cultural background.
- Imagine you saw this artwork in the original context when it was made (place and time).
Follow-up Questions
- How did a change in perspective change or reshape the meaning of the artwork?
- What details might be enhanced based on your change in perspective?
- Which details are less important or noticeable?
- Now that you've viewed this artwork from these different lenses, what more can you say about your own perspective when viewing the artwork?
In their Thinking Routines Toolbox, Harvard Project Zero offers a similar strategy, a routine called "Lenses of Dialogue" (available as a pdf). This collaborative thinking routine encourages students to examine artwork through distinct "lenses" shaped by their identities, such as gender, race, culture, or occupation, influencing how they perceive and engage with the world. It prompts intentional looking, thinking, and dialogue to explore how different perspectives shape interpretations.
Personal Connections
Introduce students to an online gallery or museum and ask them to go on a scavenger hunt, looking for personal connections using the prompts in Part 1. While students navigate these vast online libraries, we suggest helping them to streamline their searches by keywords, medium, or context. Some of our favourite collections include:
- Google Arts & Culture (Explore) - search by art movement, medium, artists, historical events or figures, places, period, color, or themes.
- The Getty Museum (Art Collection) - preview artworks grouped by era and department (medium). Keyword searches can be filtered by artists, creation date, medium, culture, and object types.
- The Louvre (Collections) - explore artwork collections by medium and/or by themed albums, some of which are genre-oriented or based on the date of acquisition.
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History - browse by chronologies, works of art, or essays. A search can focus on geographical regions, thematic categories, or time periods.
Part 1: Selecting three artworks
Ask students to look for three artworks that address one or more of the following prompts based on personal experiences:
- Memory: Find one artwork that reminds you of a moment in your life.
- Place: Find an artwork from a place you've lived or visited.
- Relationships: Find an artwork that portrays a relationship between two or more people.
- Emotion: Find an artwork that expresses an emotion you've felt recently.
- Weather & Seasons: Find an artwork representing a season or weather you've experienced.
- Culture: Find an artwork that reflects a tradition or cultural aspect you've experienced or are familiar with.
- Spaces: Find an artwork depicting a space (interior or exterior) that feels familiar to you.
- Dreams: Find an artwork that reminds you of a dream or something you hope for.
- Symbols: Find an artwork with an object that feels meaningful to you (like a book, a tree, or a specific item).
Part 2: Connection Activity
After students have selected three artworks, engage them on a deeper level, asking them to use the elements and principles and other descriptive vocabulary to illustrate what they see in each artwork and how that connects to the statement(s) they chose. Here are some further questions connected to the categories listed above.
- Memory: What about the artwork—colors, setting, or mood—feels similar to your memory?
- Place: How does the artwork visually reflect the atmosphere, culture, or experiences you remember?
- Relationships: How do the interactions between people in the artwork feel familiar to your own experiences? Consider the compositional arrangement, lighting or stylistic choices made by the artist.
- Emotion: What in the artwork (stylistic expression, color choices, or compositional arrangement) connects to your feelings?
- Weather & Seasons: How does the artwork capture the atmosphere or mood of your past experiences?
- Culture: Which visual details in the artwork resonate with you?
- Spaces: Which specific aspects of the artwork remind you of a space in your life?
- Dreams: How does the artwork visually reflect the idea or feeling of a dream?
- Symbols: How has the artist represented or positioned the object in relation to the rest of the piece? What personal connection do you have to the object(s) seen in this artwork?
Relevant Resources
Here is a curated selection of current content that can also be used or adapted to support the learning experiences of your pre-IB students.
Incorporate art-viewing and art discussion activities into your classrooms as much as possible! Becoming literate in art requires seeing art.
Intuitive Response
When looking at art works for the first time we naturally have an intuitive response, we like or we don’t like or maybe we feel indifferent. We may have a strong aesthetic response or we may feel an...
Build in opportunities for students to write about art from an early age. The sooner they understand visual arts vocabulary and how to accurately apply it, the easier it will be for them to articulate their ideas about art.
Writing about Art
Yes, and both written and visual research are part of the curriculum. That doesn't mean polished essay writing but it does mean that students need to know how to use the subject language appropriately...
Offer students multiple opportunities to explore larger selections of artwork, either online or in person. You can provide student with scavenger hunts or other such activities to get them to look through a variety or rooms or galleries within a larger institution. Developing a sense of their personal preferences, tastes, and interests in art is a way to support students' creative development before they enter the Visuals Art classroom at the IB level.
Gallery Activities
Museum and gallery visits help generate meaningful work Field trips and exhibition visits can be a rich source of material for the Comparative Study, Critical Investigation for the Process Portfolio and...
Virtual Art Viewing
During a time when our ability to travel to see shows is limited, we can turn to the web for some high quality images, beautifully presented and complete with supporting texts and background information....
References
International Baccalaureate Organization (2024). IBDP Subject Brief for Visual Arts (first assessment 2027). Retrieved from https://teacher-sites-storage.inthinking.net/ib/visualarts/2024/dp_vis-arts_subjectbrief_en-1.pdf
Wiebe, Glen (2024). Your students have trouble making connections. Connections can help. Retrieved from https://historytech.wordpress.com/2024/08/13/your-students-have-trouble-making-connections-connections-can-help/
Harvard Project Zero (2020). Lenses Thinking Routine. Retrieved from https://pz.harvard.edu/resources/lenses
The Art Institute of Chicago. My Museum Tour. Retrieved from https://www.artic.edu/my-museum-tour
Image Credits
Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting by Artemisia Gentileschi - Google Cultural Institute, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=37146117
Untitled (Your gaze hits the side of my face) (1981) by Barbara Kruger. Retrieved from https://smarthistory.org/barbara-kruger-untitled-your-gaze-hits-side-face/
Solar Bell (2013) by Tomás Saraceno, installed in Rotterdam, Netherlands. https://studiotomassaraceno.org/solar-bell/