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How do we spur, encourage and support creative thinking and learning?
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How can we engage our students in thinking deeply and broadly?
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How do we connect art to what students are learning in school and experiencing outside of school?
THEME: INHERITANCE
Telling stories about the past; using forms, styles and memes of the past to comment on culture and issues of today.





Claire Partington creates ceramic figures that address European colonialism and social hierarchies using 17th-century figurative traditions and materials. The heads are interchangeable. (clairepartington.co.uk).





Rose B. Simpson layers the much-loved style of Maria Martinez’ black on black pottery onto an icon of modern Chicano culture creating tension between popular culture and everyday life and the ethereal aesthetics of traditional forms. (rosebsimpson.com)



Marcel Duchamp’s Bottle Rack is an icon of modern Western art (Dada).
Huang Yong Ping puts the many arms of a Buddha (a common image in Buddhist art) on Duchamp’s readymade rack. In doing so, he builds on the notoriety of the rack to comment on the collision of East and West in our globalized world. Going deeper, Huang connects the spiritual images of faith and religion to the icons of Western secular art, suggesting both are objects of veneration that reflect the cultures (and mindsets) from which they came (nytimes.com).
Zhang Hongtu explores the collision of East and West by fusing styles, materials and images iconic to both.
“In Mai Dang Lao (McDonald’s)," a hamburger box, fries container, fork, and knife are cast in bronze and adorned with traditional Chinese motifs like the taotie mask, typically featured on ancient ritual bronze vessels used in worship of the ancestors. Here it is combined with the iconic logo of the fast-food giant, transforming the “Happy Meal” into a Shang-dynasty artifact. By juxtaposing ancient China with contemporary America, and ritual art with consumer culture, Zhang whimsically critiques systems of power.” (brooklynmuseum.org)
“Guo Xi–Van Gogh, 1998," depicts the mountainous ranges of Guo Xi’s shan shui scrolls rendered in Vincent van Gogh’s post-Impressionist brush strokes. (artforum.com) In both instances, the artist draws on history to shed light on the present.