Welcome to our Lesson Plans, a collection of teaching resources inspired by the Nasher Museum’s collection and created by the Academic Initiatives staff. We invite faculty and students to explore ideas intended to deepen engagement with our collection, inspire new research and complement instruction at Duke—and beyond. Here we have also assembled short, stand-alone activities pursuing varying themes. This library of lesson plans and activities will continue to grow with the collection, new exhibitions and trends and discoveries in faculty and student teaching and research.
Duke students, Elizabeth Brown, PhD Candidate in Art History, and James Budinich, PhD’22 in Music Composition, provided key support with this project.
Graphic Pull: Contemporary Prints from the Collection
This lesson plan will review the four primary techniques of printmaking with a particular focus on the linocut, a relief process. This lesson plan also concerns the relationship between printmaking and subject matter to think about the various reasons that artists turn to the medium of printmaking to convey a message.
Cultures of the Sea: Art of the Ancient Americas
This lesson focuses on how placing contemporary artworks within historical collection galleries creates new exchanges, specifically within the Nasher Museum’s exhibition Cultures of the Sea: Art of the Ancient Americas. Students will analyze objects from the ancient Americas, compare and contrast them with ones from the present day, and create their own contemporary intervention.