Resources to Create an Inclusive Curriculum:

• Anti-Racist Art Teachers offers a useful checklist for teachers working on creating an anti-racist curriculum.

• The Doodles Academy Diverse Artist List is a comprehensive, collaborative, ever-changing, list of diverse artists ready to be incorporated throughout your curriculum.
• Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) is a way to discuss artworks that encourages students to do the’ ‘heavy lifting’. They offer many PD opportunities on their website. We recommend using VTS as a way to launch conversations around historic and contemporary events, particularly those that might be difficult to discuss.
• Social Justice Books includes many well-curated booklists, including their selection of books on art.

Resources to Teach African American History through Art:

• The History Channel provides this timeline reviewing major milestones in Black American History.
• Look at and discuss artwork by artists who depicted the experience of enslaved people. Some examples are Faith Ringold (who, in addition to her art developed a brilliant series of award-winning picture books) and Clementine Hunter.
• Explore the Great Migration and the Harlem Renaissance through our art project, ‘Around the Neighborhood’. Through the end of February you can also download the corresponding downloadable lesson plans for free, here, by using code 3UY8C5WZ.
• Look at the artwork of Bernice Sims or the photographs of Gordon Parks to explore the civil rights movement.
• Virtually tour the show Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power. This was a traveling exhibition that explored the “broad spectrum of Black artistic practice from 1963 to 1983, one of the most politically, socially, and aesthetically revolutionary periods in American history.” These powerful resources can be accessed online through museums that hosted the exhibit. Alternatively, you can reference the show’s catalog.
• The Obama’s chose talented and contemporary Black artists to paint their Presidential portraits, either or both which could be used as an entry point for discussion and reflection. (Kehinde Wiley created Barack’s portrait, and Amy Sherald created Michelle’s).
• ‘For Freedoms’ is an artist-led organization that models and increases creative civic engagement, discourse and direct action. The Billboard Project, in particular the texts and messages introduced, could be discussed and connected to recent protests/protest signs. This is a great hands-on art lesson, called Tiny Protest Posters, to complement this conversation.

   

General Resources to Support Learning about the Black Experience:

• Black Lives Matter at School is a national coalition organizing for racial justice in education. They offer a curriculum for an annual week of action during the first week of February each year.​ They also have a Year of Purpose that helps educators reflect on their curriculum and school community.
• The National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Museum of the African Diaspora all offer a wealth of lesson plans and resources.