The March Phoenix Art Museum visit started with an icebreaker, where students paired up and did a blind contour drawing of each other. This created a lot of discussion and laughter as students shared their results.
Next, students explored the Guarding Your Art exhibit while doing a Token Response activity. Each student was given 8 different tokens to place in front of selected artwork. Tokens represented things like:
Positive Preference = I love this
Negative Preference = I do not like this at all
Clock = This artwork took a lot of time to make
House = I’d like to have this artwork in my home
Judgment = This is the best work of art in this exhibit.
Everyone put a token face down in front of a work of art in the gallery that they feel best represented that token. Once everyone had placed a token, the responses were unveiled and discussed.
It was interesting that most unanimity occurred with the originality token, but the positive preference and judgment tokens were the most varied. This indicates that we all have different preferences. Upon further discussion with the group, students compared their own responses with responses of others. Students identified personal connections to artworks. And through discussions with other students, they better understood and appreciated artworks and others’ perspectives.