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 seminar focuses on North Carolina's rich textile heritage as told through the stories, songs, and images of the people who worked in the mills. Using the backdrop of the Louis Hine's National Child Labor Committee Photography, Gaston County, 1908, "Standing on a Box," seminar participants will explore the experiences of mill workers in communities across North Carolina with particular attention to the life and work of families and children. In addition, participants will learn about notable individuals in the North Carolina textile story, such as union songstress and mill worker Ella May Wiggins, who was murdered for her organizing efforts during the Gastonia mill strike of 1929.

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.