Using the information from established curriculum can give students invaluable background information to create art to remember the past. Using the following curriculum, have students explore these suggested sections of the In Pursuit of Freedom, Brooklyn Resists, and Muslims in Brooklyn curriculum, and create something to remember these parts of Brooklyn's diverse past.
In Pursuit of Freedom
In Pursuit of Freedom explores Brooklyn’s anti-slavery movement from the end of the American Revolution to the early days of Reconstruction through photographs, census records, anti-slavery and local newspapers, maps and more.
Using the short activities below,
- Have students think about untold stories from history that can reframe a story. Consider: What is not shown? What should we see? Which stories are not told? Whose stories are worth telling? Which stories are told out of context?
- Choose one of the topics from the curriculum.
- Then, conduct one or all of the suggested activities for students to see how they can fill in the gaps when studying history.
- First, have students watch the Clip #1 to understand how Mr. Wilson used history to tell stories.
We suggest using one of the following topics in Section VI: “The Half Has Never Been Told” Brooklyn’s Civil War (1861-1865)
- Brooklyn’s Tobacco Factory Riot
- New York City’s Draft Riots
- Black Brooklynites in the Union Army
ACTIVITY 1:
- Select 5 to 10 objects that represent your identity. Imagine that you are an archaeologist who has just unearthed these objects. Create a display that includes interpretive labels, illustrations, and related historical information.
- This can also be connected to the Early 1800s Identities Worksheet from Gradual vs. Immediate Emancipation
ACTIVITY 2:
- Imagine a conversation between two or more disparate or unrelated artifacts from a local museum or daily life. Illustrate this exchange using text and images combined.
ACTIVITY 3:
- Critically analyze your world history textbook. Discuss what information is included and what is left out, and then revise the text and images for a specific chapter, subject, or historical figure using research from diverse sources.
Muslims in Brooklyn
For well over a century, Muslims have lived, worked, and prayed in Brooklyn, making it a major center of Muslim life for New York City and the nation. Yet a gap in knowledge and understanding exists between many non-Muslim Americans and their fellow Muslim citizens and neighbors, a gap that has led to the marginalization and erasure of Muslim histories, diversity, and experiences from our national life.
Using the short activities below,
- Have students consider, How is our understanding of identity, history, and the world around us tied to language? Are there ideas or experiences that are impossible to articulate with words?
- First, have students watch the Watch the Clip#2 to understand how Mr. Wilson used identity and language to tell stories.
We suggest using one of the following lessons for MiB:
ACTIVITY 1:
- Describe yourself using 25 words. Consider: How do you know these things about yourself? How is your identity related to groups, communities, or other social structures? How is it related to personal experience?
ACTIVITY 2:
- Create a series of lists that represent your ideas about personal identity, family history, learning from school, and philosophies or belief systems with which you are familiar. Turn these lists into a visual web, collage, or short story that connects related words to tell a story about yourself or your family.
ACTIVITY 3:
- What are objects or images that might be taken for granted when seen daily?
- Imagine how you would tell the history of the community you live in now to someone 20 years in the future. How would you illustrate the intersecting and sometimes competing narratives and perspectives in your community? What objects would be important to this history and how would you display them? What objects would you exhibit together and why? What would be the best way to present these objects to a broad audience? What stories from your community will be important to tell in the future and why?
Brooklyn Resists
Brooklyn Resists tells the stories of Black Brooklynites and how they have responded to systemic racial injustice, revolted against those systems, and how the protest movement of the present ties to the generations of activists and leaders who came before.
Consider: Fred Wilson mimics museum practices like exhibition design and display, lighting, curator’s labels, and wall colors. He calls this process “a trompe l’oeil of curating,” in order to create unexpected and often startling artworks that question the museum’s complicity in perpetuating certain social inequalities.
Using the short activities below,
We suggest using one of the following lessons from Brooklyn Resists,
ACTIVITY 1:
- Create a collaborative classroom gallery compiled of images from the past and images from the current day based on one of the lesson from Brookyn Resists.
- Using these images or images of your own or from library archives, juxtapose them with historical images. The images can be similar or radically different but should be connected in some way so that they can have a conversation. Remember that the juxtaposition of the images should challenge the viewer to think deeper about the relationship between the photographs.
ACTIVITY 2:
- Visit your local art museum, historical society or public art display based on a similar topic. Take photographs of the objects you are drawn to and reflect on what you were drawn to.
- Think about: What would you add to these exhibitions? What would you take out? What would you alter? Why? What kind of narrative do the displays tell?
- How might you take these displays and remix them to tell a different story or to “mine” the collection in a new way? What objects would you place next to each other? How would your intervention speak differently or speak to a different audience?
- Create a digital collage using the images you photographed to show your remixed exhibit.
- Does this have a specific connection point, or is the connection point the whole curriculum?