Teaching Pages

A single house under a darkened sky looks isolated and alone. Exterior light reflects off plastic insulation sheeting covering a second story window in an otherwise bare white wall; interior light from another window suggests that someone is inside, but no one is visible.

Requiem/Let Them Rest by Joan Snyder is an arresting mix of color and text. If a person were to walk by this image tagged on a wall full of graffiti, the jarring hues and the blaring word Requiem might call for a closer look.

A tangerine colored tiger strides forward, its mouth open in a roar, baring its teeth. Its stripes and the body armor covering its legs and shoulders are turquoise, shaded with blue. Glitter highlights a tall headdress decorated with rhinestones, gold triangles, sliver studs, and a black crest.

Surrounded by a black margin, on what seems like a collaged sheet of paper painted with watercolors, is a colorful game board actually painted with thinned oils on canvas. Clues to the game are painted on the margin, including music notes and dancing couples, as well as little framed words naming dance steps—fox trot and tango.

Only three feet tall, untitled, C.H.F. is a bulbous little chair whose underlying metal frame is wrapped with thick skeins of tightly knotted brown paper twisted around encircling segments of chicken wire. The ropy paper skeins twine along the chair skeleton with organic energy, like vines enveloping a tree trunk, highlighting and distorting the geometry of the angular lawn chair.

Is this object made from real hair? Is it a hat? Is it part of a costume? Who might wear it? Since it is three-dimensional and is located in an art museum, is it a sculpture?

Some kind of trouble may have happened to someone named Jim. One of his eyes is black and larger than the other. His nose looks swollen. Questions arise. How did Jim get this black eye? Was Jim picked on, or has he picked on someone else and started a fight? Was the conflict really necessary or could it have been avoided?

Sergio Gonzalez-Tornero has created a haunting image of an extraordinary fish as it floats in the depths of the sea. The fish appears to glow from within, with its red eyes, pink mouth, and yellow- and white-tipped appendages.

Sarah Canright’s painting Shadow can be read as three layers of precise patterning in ghostlike tones of blue, pink, purple, white, and green. The tightly composed background features interlocking geometric prongs that fit together like puzzle pieces, a chain-link fence, or woven textile.

Radiating from a white center, four concentric squares of bright color glow from the surface of a large square sheet of white paper. Yellow, red, and blue puddles merge in hues of purple and orange.