The Civil War destroyed the institution of slavery and transformed the U.S. socially, politically, and economically, all at great cost to human life: more Americans died in this war than in any other in the nation's history. The War's impact on art was almost as profound and long-lasting. Not only did the subject inspire some of the nation's best painters, sculptors, photographers, and illustrators, it also changed the face of town and countryside as monuments to soldiers and statesmen of the Civil War era spread across the landscape. This seminar will examine the far-reaching impact of the war on American art, both during the conflict and afterward, as it moved from current event into the realm of memory. The seminar will pay close attention not only to the imagery of battle but also to the social and political issues which shaped the image of the war and which in many respects continue to shape the U.S. today.

The seminar will consist of three sessions. The first two, featuring lecture and discussion, will focus on the close analysis of images and primary documents. The third will concentrate on the integration of seminar ideas and material into lesson plans using the Center's Seminar-to-Classroom Guide.

This workshop guides educators through a curriculum planning process—pre-, during, and post-visit—designed to maximize interdisciplinary learning experiences for students using the art museum/gallery field trip as a resource. Participants will discuss and develop effective motivational- and critical-thinking teaching techniques to prepare students for a unique learning experience with original works of art. The program seeks to provide a useful framework for designing interdisciplinary art lessons linked to viewing original works of art in a gallery/museum setting.

Participants celebrate Women's History Month at the National Museum of Women in the Arts by discovering ways its collection can be a resource for integrating the arts—and women artists—into the classroom. Through interactive gallery discussions and activities, participants will explore techniques for discussing and interpreting art with their students.

This institute provides the opportunity to analyze and investigate the material culture and decorative arts of the early South. Each summer the institute focuses on one region of the early South, rotating its concentration from the Chesapeake to the Carolina Low Country to the southern Backcountry.

The 2009 Institute emphasizes the material culture of the early southern Backcountry, including the piedmont and western regions of Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina and Georgia, as well as Tennessee and Kentucky. The program curriculum includes lectures, discussions, work­shops, artifact studies, research projects, and study trips.

Participants will spend a spring morning exploring how artists use size and scale to focus attention on the natural world. This hands-on session with Museum Educator Camille Tewell will combine gallery discovery with the experience of monumental art in the Museum Park.

Heroes, kings, popes, and saints are but a few of the roles mankind uses to depict figures possessing power. How have artists portrayed this power? Museum Educator Joseph Covington provides some answers as he leads you through the Museum's European and American collections.

Teachers of all levels and settings are invited to join Spertus Museum educators to tour the new exhibition "A Force for Change: African American Art and the Julius Rosenwald Fund" and participate in an interactive printmaking workshop with Master Printer Thomas Lucas.

From 1919 to 1929, Langston Hughes noted, "Harlem was in vogue." Black painters and sculptors joined writers and musicians in an artistic outpouring that established Harlem as the international capital of African American culture. Participants will study the evolution of the Harlem Renaissance through the music of Duke Ellington and Ethel Waters, the art of painter Archibald Motley and sculptor Augusta Savage, and the literary works of Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Toomer, among others.

Constructed around an online "toolbox" of texts and documents collected at the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, participants in this seminar will discuss four themes that are central to the Gilded Age: City and Country, focusing on Arcadian mythology, urban realism, and nostalgia; Citizens and Others, especially immigrants, African Americans, and children; Work and Leisure, especially craft, industrialization, and consumerism; and Politics and the State, including party culture, populism, and progressivism. Within each thematic unit, participants will be searching for characteristic sensibilities of the age, as manifest in public life, literature, and/or the arts. Across the discussions, they will try to identify those documents, questions, and exercises that might best enliven their own classrooms.

Scholarship on American art of the 18th and 19th centuries has proliferated dramatically in the last decade and yet very little has been written on the materials, methods, and settings of painting. This one-day event will delve into some of the workshops, studios, schoolrooms, and parlors where New Englanders of all kinds used a wide variety of materials, such as pencil and pigments on canvas, silk, glass, wood, and tin to create painted images and decorations for themselves, for sale, and for public display. Participants will learn about the daily lives of New England's diverse artists and artisans and the painted objects—from studio art to school girl art and painted decorative arts—that they produced and distributed between 1700 and 1850.